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For a proper understanding
of the spiritual life and the nature of, and possibilities for, women’s
spirituality, we need a broader language of the spiritual than monotheism
can provide. The very term “transcendence” illustrates this
because in the Christian tradition it tends to have meaning in binary
opposition to “immanence” and refers to characteristics of
“God,” whereas in Eastern traditions—to the extent that
translation can succeed in finding corresponding concepts—it means
something closer to the “nondual” or “unitive.”
The “God”-language of the West has created a limitation of
understanding, both within religious and within secular communities, the
latter inheriting the equation “religion = God” and therefore
remaining ignorant of non-monotheistic religions. “God” is
a construct peculiar to Abrahamic text-oriented monotheism, and it needs
to be cut down to size, allowing other religious frameworks space. This
means that questions of spirituality and religion need additional, equally
powerful, terms to fill the gap. For women’s spirituality, the issue
is partly that “God” is an inevitably gendered term: monotheism
constructs a male “God,” served historically by a male priesthood.
Within the tradition of transpersonal psychology and its discourse of
spirituality, “transcendence” is now also a term under attack,
particularly by Jorge Ferrer. He suggests that the implicit adherence
to Perennialism—a term coined by Leibniz, popularized by Aldous
Huxley, and meaning a universal spirituality—within the transpersonal
tradition, creates a single conception of the goal of the spiritual life:
the transcendent (in the Eastern sense of the word). In a typically postmodernist
move, he argues that the spiritual life not only has a multitude of starting
points—not so controversial—but that it has a multitude of
goals: a radical proposition (Ferrer 144). In true postmodernist style,
he leaves open what these goals might be, which is to some extent a welcome
opening up of possibility. However, this actually leaves little more than
a flatland of potential with no landmarks, signs, or, even worse, any
powerful language that can stand its ground against the patriarchal language
of the “God” traditions. Instead, if “God” is
brought down from its dominant conceptual position, not to wander through
a relativist flatland as one among millions, it could take its place at
the table with just four other significant spiritualities. The
equal partners proposed here are shamanism, goddess polytheism, warrior
polytheism, and the unitive (transcendent).
Luce Irigaray, in her extraordinary little book Between
East and West, says, “There exists [in India] a cohabitation
between at least two epochs of History: the one in which women are goddesses,
the other in which men exercise a blind power over them” (65). It
is suggested here, instead, the sequence comprises five epochs:
shamanism, goddess polytheism, warrior polytheism, monotheism, and the
unitive. These will be presented as having a historical basis, but beyond
that, they are also archetypes of powerfully different spiritual impulses,
recapitulated within all people at all times. Like the Jungian archetypes,
they are conceived of as universals, which may come into play more in
one individual than another and more in one culture than another. In other
words, these five “epochs” of religious manifestation are
also five personal spiritual impulses, or five modalities of the spirit.
This articulation of spiritual difference through five historical modalities
is not to be read as a development from a lesser, more primitive early
modality to a higher, more sophisticated later modality. In other words,
it is neither Hegelian, which would imply an inevitable historical vector
privileging later periods or peoples, nor is it Wilberian, which would
imply a developmental psychology, which is assumed in the work of Ken
Wilber. This discussion of the earlier modalities of the spirit is informed
by anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, and the ancient literatures,
all of which disciplines are subject to new findings, methodologies, or
better translations. Simone de Beauvoir, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung,
to take some examples from the first half of the twentieth century, were
profoundly influenced by the anthropology of their day, making many assumptions
that would now be discredited by later developments in the discipline.
Voltaire, writing in the eighteenth century, was even more constrained
by anthropology at its birth. Similarly, some of the approximate dates
given here, or even possibly some of the major transitions alluded to,
may well have to be revised in the future. However, the modalities of
spirit that we are exploring in this historical fashion are not so dependent
on the detail of history, but rather their relevance hinges on whether
these modalities are archetypally present in our psyches today. We know
that contemporary Western city-dwellers actively take up ancient religious
practices (neoshamanism or neopaganism, for example) or adopt Eastern
unitive traditions (Yoga, neo-Advaita, or Zen, for example). The flourishing
nature of these adoptions illustrates the ability of people to respond
at a very deep level to modalities of the spirit that are remote in time
or place from their contemporary setting.
The Five Stages of Religion
Here five stages in religion are introduced as an idealized “photofit”
composite of world spiritual history, though the complete sequence does
not in fact exactly take place anywhere in the world: It is more a psychogeography
of the spiritual. These religious stages are can be shown diagrammatically:
Fig. 7.1. Five religious stages
The diagram has been drawn with curved lines to suggest that the boundaries
between the five modalities are fluid, even where, in the case of monotheism,
it strenuously resists other modalities of the spirit. Arrows have been
drawn to indicate the historic progression, with one exception: the arrow
from the unitive/transcendent to the shamanic/animist, which appears to
point backward in time, and will be discussed later.
Shamanism/Animism
The shamanic/animistic category represents a modality of the spirit that
seems to have emerged with humankind itself. No early hominid traces seem
to have been found without evidence of shamanistic practices, which include
artifacts—such as fetishes and totems—for rites that revolve
around Nature and “spirits.” The shamanic worldview is predicated
on a perception of Nature as imbued with spirit, wherein the elements
of Nature, such as rocks, mountains, trees, rivers, animals, and skies,
are inhabited by spirits and daily life is also filled with the presence
of the spirits of the ancestors. This “spirit world” is both
beyond the so-called material world and, at the same time, intimately
entwined within it: They are not separable in shamanism. Some scholars
believe that there is a meaningful distinction between animism and shamanism
in that the latter is served by a functionary or specialist called a shaman,
whereas the former is not. For our purposes, this distinction is of little
use. This is because both animism and shamanism, as they are generally
understood, are grounded in the same spiritual interiority of the spirit
world. In an animistic culture, there would surely exist individuals whose
gift for entering into the spirit world was more developed than others
and who would naturally take on roles of intercession and healing, though
perhaps not culturally formalized in the way that shamans are. Conversely,
in a shamanic culture it is inconceivable that the rest of the group would
not mostly share the worldview and spiritual abilities of the shaman,
at least in a nascent form. Hence, we will from here on use the term “shamanic”
to cover both animist and shamanic spiritualities, though we are referring
more to an inner orientation or sensibility than to outward ritual or
practice.
The shaman, who can equally be male or female (as shown in traditions
as far apart as in Siberia and South America), is required to mediate
between the group and the spirits as the functionary of this religion;
conversely, he or she makes the world sacred through the practice of ritual.
Shamanism is associated with hunter-gatherer cultures, and though it is
understood as the universal ur-religion of mankind (proposed, for example,
by Mircia Eliade in his seminal work Shamanism: Archaic Techniques
of Ecstasy), the word “shaman” itself comes via Russian
from the Tungus people of Siberia (or it may have its root in Sanskrit).
We are fortunate that shamanism has survived at the margins since the
earliest of times, generally driven to unfertile or inhospitable territories
by later agricultural societies. Hence, in mountains, deserts, or polar
regions, shamanic cultures persist to this day (though increasingly ravaged
by their contact with the industrial world) whose practices and beliefs
can be studied.
A form of neoshamanism has recently emerged, particularly in the United
States, as people with little previous interest in religion take up shamanic
practices under modern teachers or guides. The writings of anthropologist
and cult author Carlos Castaneda and the work of transpersonal psychologist
Stansilav Grof have been significant in this revival. Michael Harner,
author of the classical work The Way of the Shaman, comments
in the tenth-anniversary edition on a “shamanic renaissance”:
“During the last decade, however, shamanism has returned to human
life with startling strength, even to urban strongholds of Western ‘civilisation’,
such as New York and Vienna.… There is another public, however,
rapidly-growing and now numbering in the thousands in the United States
and abroad, that has taken up shamanism and made it part of personal daily
life” (xi). Shamanic peoples often display a certain gender fluidity
and gender balance, despite the roles of men as predominantly hunters
and women as predominantly gatherers. Males of shamanic cultures often
look feminine by modern Western standards, while females may not have
our contemporary exaggerated femininity. Neither do these men and women
have the individualistic or egotistic natures of Western people; perhaps
this has led to the widespread but absurd notion that shamanic peoples
have a less developed personal consciousness. A better way to understand
a defining characteristic of shamanic peoples is as self-effacing.
Good portrayals in contemporary culture are to be found in the character
played by Chief Dan George in Clint Eastwood’s film The Outlaw
Josie Wales (1976), Old Lodge Skins in the film Little Big Man
(1970), or in the character of Dersu Uzula in the film of the same name
by Ikuru Kurusawa (1975). Well-known Native American actor Gary Farmer
plays “Nobody” in Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man
(1995), vividly conveying the humility at the heart of the Native American
way of life and what is arrogant in that of the white man.
Goddess Polytheism
If “shamanism” is a contested term, then anything to do with
“goddess” is doubly so. There is in fact a genuine difficulty
in the discussion ahead: Shamanism has survived in the margins, has been
extensively studied, and so is at least in principle recoverable as an
ancient practice. But goddess religions—to the extent that we now
posit their existence—were systematically eradicated by later modalities
of the spirit and had nowhere to go. There is growing evidence
from archaeology that Goddess cultures replaced shamanic hunter-gatherer
cultures in all parts of the world bar the marginal lands around the period
of the late Neolithic and early Bronze Ages (Shlain 35). But the interiority
of this modality of the spirit is more problematic and less recoverable
than the shamanic because there is no surviving unbroken tradition. Instead,
there is a modern revival, led by radical scholars, such as Starhawk,
along with women from all walks of life, who seek to imaginatively reconstruct
this spirituality. It is the archaeological evidence and the modern revival
taken together that make the case for Goddess Polytheism as a
major modality of the spirit.
In spiritual terms, we can identify two stages in the transition from
hunter-gatherer cultures to agrarian ones: first, to “goddess polytheism”
and then to “warrior polytheism.” Both involve an increasing
process of abstraction in the conception of spirits or deities. The hunter-gatherer
way of life existed for possibly some three million years, and, as a first
approximation at least, we can associate the shamanic modality of spirit
with that way of life. The implication is clear: shamanism must be deeply
rooted in the human psyche if it were present over such huge timescales.
Hunter-gatherer societies in general seem to have been nonsexist and relatively
nonviolent, comprising family groups of about eighty to a hundred individuals,
all well known to each other. Some seven thousand years ago, two new skills
emerged: that of animal husbandry and that of agriculture. Whether as
horticulture (small-scale agriculture) or as agriculture proper, the new
way of life spread rapidly and pushed the older hunter-gatherer lifestyle
to the margins, along with its central spiritual form: shamanism. Baring
and Cashford suggest that we can broadly associate goddess polytheism
with small-scale horticultural communities of the late Neolithic and early
Bronze Age, and warrior polytheism with large-scale agriculture and societies
of the later Bronze and Iron Age (416).
The growing scholarship on goddess religions is led by feminist archaeologists
and thinkers, whose role as feminists in this is to uncover the layers
of patriarchal prejudice that have clouded the disciplines of archaeology,
anthropology, and history up to very recently. For example, the huge quantities
of goddess figures unearthed in archaeological sites all round the world
were routinely dismissed as products of “fertility cults”
by male (Christian) academics. Merlin Stone’s When God Was a
Woman is an early but superb account of the endemic and often subtly
propagated male prejudice in these matters. Once the same data are looked
at from the recognition that goddess religions were not marginal cults,
but central to thousands of years of human history, a radically different
picture emerges. We can say that the word “cult” is a quick
way to dismiss anything non-Christian and the word “fertility”
a quick way to dismiss anything nonmasculine; hence, “fertility
cult” conveys total contempt in the mind of the male (white) Christian.
The work of Marija Gimbutas, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, and Starhawk
(born Miriam Simos) are seminal in this field, while author Leonard Shlain
contributes radical proposals about the marginalization of goddess spiritualities
because of writing.
In the period of goddess polytheism, the discrete, specific, and localized
spirits of the shamanic world took their first steps into abstraction
as gods and goddesses of early horticultural life. These deities were
propitiated perhaps in a different way than in shamanic culture. As less
specific spirits and more abstracted deities, the spiritual response to
them would have changed, perhaps quite dramatically (Hillman xxi). The
shamanic mode of “storytelling” becomes a polytheistic mode
of “myth”: a transition from an animistic engagement with
living spirits to a mythic engagement with psychic entities. It may also
be the case that goddess spiritualities were more centered on human-human
relationships than human-animal relationships. We have emphasized the
polytheism in goddess spirituality: This is to counter the Western
cultural impetus to merely transpose a male monotheism into a female monotheism,
a single “God” into a single “Goddess.”
Scholars such as Leonard Schlain and Marija Gimbutas now believe that
the entire Greek mythology can be understood as arising from the transition
from a goddess culture to a patriarchal polytheism, undertaken at the
time when oral traditions were first transcribed in the new Semitic alphabet
(Shlain 120). Possibly the best illustration of this transition in contemporary
culture is to be found in the film Medea (1969) loosely adapted
by Pier Paolo Pasolini from the play by Euripides, featuring the opera
singer Maria Callas in the lead role (her only film appearance). Medea
represents for Pasolini the transition from matrilineal, goddess cultures
to patrilineal male warrior cultures as she returns with Jason, whose
mission it was to steal her golden fleece. Pasolini captures the moment
of transition as the Argonauts land in Corinth on a simple raft. Medea
cannot understand how the men treat the land of their birth: They do not
call to the ancient deities, propitiate the nature spirits of earth and
stone; they merely tread on the land as property. She is overcome
and then rants at them, full of passion and foreboding: “This place
will sink because it has no foundations. You do not call god’s blessings
on your tents. You speak not to god. You do not seek the centre; you do
not mark the centre. Look for a tree, a post, a stone.”
Once on the soil, which is now to be her new homeland, she runs in despair
through the grasses, wailing: “Speak to me Earth, let me hear your
voice, I have forgotten your voice. Speak to me Sun. Where must I stand
to hear your voice? Speak to me Earth. Speak to me Sun. Are you losing
your way, never to return again? Grass, speak to me. Stone, speak to me.
Earth, where is your meaning? Where can I find you again?”
To monotheists, steeped in the Old Testament proscription against idolatry,
and the wider and endemic scorn within the Old Testament toward the older
Nature religions, Medea is merely a pagan among pagans: What is her objection
to the paganism of the warriors who take her home? But to those whose
spiritual antennae are attuned to the differences between shamanism, goddess
polytheism, and warrior polytheism, her anguish has a clear and obvious
source: the new, patriarchal polytheism is abandoning Nature and substituting
instead more abstract “gods”—those whose interest is
only in the narrowly human and the warlike at that. Later in the film,
Pasolini makes clear the extent of Medea’s spiritual tragedy:
Centaur: Despite all your schemes and interpretations,
his influence causes you to love Medea.
Jason: Love Medea?
Centaur: Yes. Also you pity her. You understand
her spiritual catastrophe. A woman of an ancient world, confused
in a world which ignores her beliefs. She experienced the opposite of
a conversion and has never recovered.
Jason: What use is this knowledge to me?
Centaur: None. It is a reality.
Pasolini both understands Medea’s “spiritual catastrophe”—and
it stands for the spiritual catastrophe of all women as they came under
the subjugation of patriarchal tradition—and makes it clear that
Jason is utterly uninterested. It is a reality of Medea’s life,
not his.
In this context, then, it is of interest to turn to Irigaray’s
concept of the “aboriginal feminine,” as discussed in Between
East and West. This is a most useful term, though it needs a little
elaboration in the context of the epochal spiritualities proposed here.
Irigaray had found in India, at the time of her 1984 trip, signs indicating
that an ancient feminine spirituality survived alongside later patriarchal
religion, particularly in the south (this is the remnant of the original
Dravidian culture driven southward by the invading Aryans of the north).
Effectively, India allows us to see today a palimpsest of the historical
transition that took place in ancient Greece and so effectively dramatized
for us in Pasolini’s Medea. But what Irigaray practiced
in India and brought back with her to the West was Yoga, a spiritual tradition
as ancient in epochal terms as Medea but exclusively located within the
unitive/transcendent modality of the spirit. Hence, she is quite right
to question the apparent genderlessness of Yoga as a discipline and a
teaching of transcendence.
Warrior Polytheism
As large-scale agriculture developed out of small-scale horticulture,
methods of creating surplus came into being through the cultivation, drying,
and storage of grain: This became the first form of wealth and wages.
Eventually, this led to the emergence of the city-state and created a
radically new way of life over the small-scale horticultural community.
Complex social and economic patterns emerged that allowed a class of society
to live removed from the immediate production of food. At the same time,
there had evolved a new sphere of male human activity: warfare. Leonard
Schlain believes that the Neolithic and early Bronze Age period from approximately
ten thousand to five thousand years ago seems to have been dominated by
women, with little militarism or central authority, but the male hunting
instinct seems to have been transforming itself during this time into
the instinct for war (Shlain 33). Perhaps as crops required defending,
not just from wild animals but also from other tribes, defensive and then
offensive patterns of aggression developed. With economic surplus and
the development of settlements into cities, a military caste came into
being, and with it what we are calling “warrior polytheism.”
Society became stratified in a way that was impossible during the epochs
of hunter-gatherer and Goddess societies, leading also to a new priestly
caste. The shaman might be called the “priest” or “priestess”
of the shamanic way of life, but his or her powers were in healing and
in shamanic flight: The new priesthood became guardians instead of great
temples and therefore also of wealth and power.
Warrior polytheism continues the proliferation of deities, along with
the tendency to anthropomorphism (as opposed to the taking on of animal
characteristics within Shamism: zoomorphism), but in the patriarchal pantheon,
the female deities were demoted or forgotten in favor of new male ones.
(They were literally “written out” of history.) Ancient Greece
provides us with a good example of how the new deities were considered
to be as quarrelsome as the war ridden human city-states. The key issue
here however is the shift from a female-dominated culture and religion
to a male-dominated culture and religion: from matriarchy to patriarchy.
The flowering of goddess cultures between seven thousand and five thousand
years ago was brought to an abrupt end in the Mediterranean world at least,
and historians and anthropologists have argued over the causes for more
than a century. (In India, as Irigaray saw, there are still vivid traces
of the earlier modalities of the spirit.) What brought patriarchy into
being is of interest generally, but in terms of religion, the shift was
nothing short of a revolution. Shamanic spirituality was equally male
and female; Goddess Polytheism was female dominated; but all later religion
became male dominated. Shlain considers Engels’s theory that the
growing concept of property favored patriarchy but refutes it on the basis
of many property-based goddess cultures. Shlain suggests instead that
patriarchy arose with writing and in its most radical form with
the linked inventions of the alphabet and monotheism. He bases this on
his understanding of the brain (he is a neurosurgeon by profession) and,
in particular, on the division of functions between the left and right
hemispheres (Shlain 23).
Agriculture led to the stratification of society and to the division between
those who worked on the land (and who probably retained their shamanistic
practices) and the city-dwellers, who began to live at one remove from
nature. The city-dwellers needed more symbolic thinking to deal with the
increased social, technical, and political complexities of their lives,
and, hence, the process of increased abstraction was necessary. One of
the qualities of polytheism is the tendency, possibly inherited from its
shamanic roots, to be localized; that is, for gods to belong to regions.
Hence, the Romans, in administrating their conquests, acknowledged the
local gods and allowed their worship as long as the gods of Rome, particularly
the Emperor, were included. (The Jews were a notable exception in the
Empire, refusing to cooperate with this.) In fact, the gods in different
cultures were rarely so different as to be unrecognizable. Caesar, for
example, had no difficulty in finding the Roman equivalents to the deities
he discovered in conquered Gaul. (This is a process referred to by an
early meaning of the word syncretism.)
To contemplate what a warrior polytheistic modality of the spirit might
feel like, we can turn to the early Roman, Greek, Mayan, or Hindu cultures
and enter imaginatively into the life of those early city-states. It is
a world of myth making, a mythology that holds within it a great departure
from shamanic storytelling: It is heroic and, in its Greek form,
also Oedipal. The shaman is amorphous and self-effacing (also
androgyne), whereas the polytheism of the city-state serves its principal
activity: warfare. Of course, when the heroic emerges onto the world stage,
so does the hubristic: success and failure enter the vocabulary in a way
unknown to shamanic and goddess cultures. Tragedy is born with “civilization,”
articulated in the Greek myth of Oedipus, as the inevitable competitiveness
of the son with the father. When Freud took this story to be a universal
of the human mind, he was operating only within the Western inheritance
of Greek warrior polytheism. The Far East arrived at its patriarchy in
a rather different way: The Chinese mind would not have made a drama out
of Oedipus’s killing of his father and marriage to his mother, both
unintended. “Such things happen in the realm between heaven and
earth,” is a more likely response. (Interestingly, Pasolini also
chose to make a film out of the story of Oedipus: Perhaps, as a homosexual,
he was much interested in the origins of Western masculinities.)
Although much of the modern mind is born out the polytheistic context,
including its rejection of the shamanic, our Western cultural heritage
of monotheism makes polytheism seem like a distant form of consciousness
for us. Psychologist James Hillman has recognized this and the psychological
need for an essential component of polytheism: its pluralism. He suggests
that the psyche, instead of striving to some imaginary unity in the image
of the single “God,” should celebrate its multiplicity of
impulse in terms of the “gods,” plural, as a better reflection
of the polyvalence of the human mind (Hillman 30).
Monotheism
When considering Abrahamic monotheism as a modality of spirit, among other
equal epochal forms, it is perhaps useful to point out the following:
It is geographically unique, arising in the Middle East and nowhere else
in the world (it is hence an anomaly on the world stage of religions);
it evolved from warrior polytheism, not goddess polytheism; it is associated
with a horrifically violent rejection of earlier epochal forms; it is
patriarchal; it is associated with the invention of the (Semitic) alphabet;
its “God” is not localized, and it becomes a religion uniquely
associated with the written word (giving rise to “language mysticism”).
Monotheism retains the idea of “God” as a being, a supreme
being, analogous with just one of the previous gods but somehow incorporating
the separate characteristics of all of them. Anthropomorphism, that is,
the tendency to project human qualities onto the polytheistic gods, is
fiercely resisted in Judaic monotheism, with its prohibition on speaking
the name of “God,” and the denial of attributes to him. However,
it is not surprising that a single “God” becomes anthropomorphized
in the popular mind, however much this tendency is resisted, and this
problem is central to the history of monotheism. Judaic, Christian, and
Islamic monotheisms are intolerant of other gods, but in other cultures,
a pseudomonotheism has not excluded polytheism. Brahman, for example,
the “God” of the Hindus, is worshiped through a plethora of
other deities who are understood to represent one or more of his divine
aspects. Hence, we cannot say that Hinduism is exclusively monotheistic
or exclusively polytheistic. In fact, Westerners have read their Judeo-Christian
“God” into Brahman in a quite inappropriate way. Similarly,
Jesuit missionaries in China persuaded themselves that the Chinese “heaven”
was the equivalent to the Christian “God,” though their fellow-missionaries,
the Franciscans, thought otherwise and finally convinced the Pope to come
down against the Jesuits (Paper 5).
The idea of monotheism seems to have emerged in four possible locations:
in fourteenth century BCE Egypt with Akhenaton; in Northern Africa (Barnet);
in Persia (modern-day Iran) as Zoroastrianism in the sixth century BCE;
and in Israel, as an ongoing process of change that may have been influenced
by the Egyptian and Persian examples. Although Egyptian monotheism was
rapidly overturned, and Zoroastrianism became a tiny religion on the world
stage, it was Judaic monotheism that has had the most impact on the world,
through its influence on Christianity and Islam.
The Transcendent/Unitive
In the final development of the religious life, monotheism becomes a transcendent
or unitive religion, represented for example by Buddhism and the concept
of nirvana. However, there is no simple example of a monotheistic
religion developing into a transcendent one; for example, in the case
of Christianity and Islam, the mystics who entered into this form of the
spiritual life were generally persecuted. Meister Eckhart is an example
in Christianity who was condemned by the Inquisition, though he died before
any punishment could be inflicted, while Mansur (Al-Hallaj) is an example
in Islam who suffered a horrible martyrdom. In both cases, the problem
for their mainstream religions was that their understanding of “God”
had gone beyond the notion of a separate being: their unitive experiences
calling for a language of personal transcendence foreign to monotheism.
The position of the mystics in the Judaic tradition is more complex, in
that they tended to avoid personal declarations of union, and in any case,
any popular anthropomorphism of “God” was balanced by its
continual denial in the writings of Judaic scholars (Scholem 63). As a
result, the “transcendent” is generally the most difficult
component of the spiritual life to describe, particularly in the West.
The term “unitive” is equally good but not as familiar. The
East has the well-known concept of “enlightenment” (or nirvana,
moksha, or liberation), which describes the goal of the transcendent
religionist and a transcendent religion. It is “unitive” in
the sense of “not-two” (as in Zen and Advaita formulations)
but not conceived as union with “God.”
If read in a literal developmental sense, these five stages do not map
onto the religious history of the world in any simple way. It is clear
that by at least 2,600 BCE all five stages had already emerged onto the
religious world scene, though our historical knowledge of this, and earlier
periods, is rather sketchy. In both the Mediterranean and Indian cultures
of that period, we find evidence that all five strands—shamanism,
goddess polytheism, warrior polytheism, monotheism, and the unitive/transcendent—were
present and to one degree or another available. This means that
individuals, depending on their circumstances and mobility, were able
to draw on the support for different types of spiritual life. The extraordinary
richness of the spiritual life around the Mediterranean at the time of
Christ, for example, shows how all five types were present among the different
cultures and social strata. This is well documented in The Jesus Mysteries
by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. In India, too, by the time of the Buddha,
there was a similar spread of religious practice, and in the ancient Vedas
and Upanishads, we find a recognition that is central to the discussion
here: Each individual tends to gravitate toward the spiritual life that
suits them. More than this, each individual has a spiritual impulse and
temperament that aligns itself within these categories and has a right
to adhere to them without interference. Such a right was never part of
the Christian history of the West.
That an individual has a right to pursue the spiritual life appropriate
to them was of course never enshrined in the ancient world either in law
(human rights are a recent development), or very often in opportunity
(economic and geographical mobility was limited). Nevertheless, those
who devoted themselves to the spiritual life in the ancient world often
traveled large distances to seek out the teachings they could not find
locally, and a large part of ancient discourse resulted from such travelers
bringing back new teachings (Pythagoras being a good example, or Solon
in Plato’s Timaeus). This is of course quite obscured from
the secular Western mind so shaped by Christianity. By denigrating all
the spiritual traditions previous to Christianity as “pagan,”
a monolithic and exclusive understanding of early religion held sway.
The hostility toward shamanic and goddess spiritualities also came from
the Greek inheritance, though, in this case, it is more a question of
a prejudice against those people living in the countryside and working
the land and against women. The legacy of this prejudice is still highly
visible in the United States and the United Kingdom and in the productions
of mainstream Western culture.
The transcendent needs a little more explanation at this point. We have
implied that it would develop out of monotheism, and in fact, we see many
examples of the transcendent impulse in Christian and Sufi mystics. In
the transcendent spiritual experience, “God” as “other”
gives way to a state of union or identity and, hence, ceases to be thought
of as a “being,” even as a “supreme being,” rather
as simply the “being” at the core of the mystic’s identity
(Eckhart is a good example of this). In Buddhism, there is no concept
of “God” to start with, just the extinguishing of the separate
sense of self (“not two” in the formulation of some Zen traditions).
It is not possible in a brief overview to develop this very difficult
idea fully, but we leave it for now with two remaining comments. First,
that the Christian mainstream did not easily tolerate the transcendent,
any more than it did signs of “paganism.” Second, to counter
the simplistic notion that there is a linear spiritual trajectory through
the five types of spiritual life, we might look at the example of Tibetan
Buddhism. It is the result of the integration of a shamanic religion (the
Bon tradition of Tibet) and the incoming Buddhist teachings of transcendence.
The two live side by side and create a spectrum of spiritual teachings
that support a wide range of spiritual temperaments, an example again
of spiritual pluralism within a single tradition. We have characterized
Christianity as monolithic, but it is not completely homogeneous, rather
the permitted range of spiritual expression is narrow compared with Tibetan
Buddhism, for example, and even narrower when laid side by side with Hinduism.
The arrows drawn in our diagram from shamanism to goddess polytheism and
so on can be read as implying a developmental sequence or even an inevitable
sequence. This is not the intention: it just so happens that elements
of this sequence can be found everywhere in history. But we have drawn
a final arrow from the transcendent back to the shamanic, partly to counter
any sense of inevitable historical development and partly to highlight
how the shamanic and the transcendent so easily coexist in the East. Tibetan
Buddhism is one example, while the coexistence of Zen and Shinto in Japan
is another. The arrow linking the unitive or transcendent with shamanism
also suggests an engaged enlightenment: a Buddha who turns again
to the world.
Conclusions
To recapitulate: while the five religious modalities can be seen to form
a historical development, this sequence tends to privilege one form over
another. A better use of the distinctions between these forms is to understand
them as expressions of five different types of spiritual impulse, as archetypes
that are universally present. These impulses may arise in individuals
with no regard to history or the prevailing religious form, often leading
to a spiritual dislocation between individual and culture.
This fivefold schematic allows us to place monotheism in a global and
epochal perspective. Although monotheism is a significant modality of
the spirit and can be understood as an experiment in spirituality that
has created much of value, it has actively denied the other four modalities:
In particular, it denies the feminine. However, when the monotheistic
“God” is cut down to one-fifth of its claim and takes its
seat at the table with the other modalities, it can be a good partner.
For the survival of the planet, we need to actively explore those modalities
of the spirit that are nonpatriarchal, nonheroic, and that actively elevate
the feminine and a profound relationship with the natural world.
We can illustrate these points by considering Irigaray’s call, both
in her chapter in this volume, and in her book Between East and West,
to identify a “culture of two subjects”—male and female.
She says, “Each subject requires a different manner of becoming
divine,” perhaps corresponding to the two epochal spiritualities
that she detected in India (Irigaray 65). This idea in itself represents
a complete revolution, particularly for the West: It represents a spiritual
pluralism denied for millennia. But the scheme presented here cuts the
corpus in a different way by suggesting five different epochal
spiritualities, not in the first instance distinguished through gender
difference. Irigaray suggests two, Jorge Ferrer suggests an infinity,
and this chapter suggests five. Let us see how this works in an issue
raised by Irigaray in the specific context of the Yoga tradition. She
found herself acknowledging its apparent openness to women but quickly
discovered: “Because of this lack of cultivation of sexual identity,
the most irreducible site of reciprocity, reciprocity often seems absent
to me in the milieus of yoga” (66). Rather than just understanding
Yoga as a patriarchal spirituality, the fivefold scheme presented here
quickly locates it in the unitive/transcendent epochal form. Its core
text is the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which, as Irigaray has
picked up on, is disinterested in the question of sexual identity. It
also has as its core directive the “cessation of the mind”—a
very difficult concept for the West—which can be translated as a
“restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness” (Feuerstein
26). For Irigaray, this manifested itself in the instruction from her
Indian male Yoga teacher “not to think.” Such a teacher is
rather unlikely to understand the Western feminist tradition, which leaps
on such an exhortation as a patriarchal move to suppress the female. Irigaray
muses on this exhortation: “This [Yoga] tradition seems to me to
possess a subtlety that demands, on the contrary, a real aptitude for
thought” (Irigaray 67). Certainly, the Yoga tradition contains this
contradiction, but ultimately, it is a discipline of transcendence that
requires cessation of modifications of the mind (or fluctuations of consciousness).
These modifications ultimately include all discursive thought and gender.
Hence, the Yoga tradition, however modified for the West, cannot meet
Irigaray’s need for a “manner of becoming divine” for
the feminine, particularly because of her emphasis on the relational.
The unitive/transcendent is precisely an epochal or archetypal spirituality
in which the relational ceases. So, in our scheme, Irigaray would need
to turn to the other four principal modalities of the spirit to discover
where the appropriate relational spirituality might lie. In shamanism,
this relationality is mediated through the spirit world, and is ancestor
and Nature centered. In goddess polytheism, this relationality is propitionary
but locates relationship more within the human world. In warrior polytheism,
relations are mostly between men and male gods; divinization is in the
context of conquest. And in monotheism, the core relationship is between
self and the “wholly other”: “God” (Otto 25).
To be restricted to only one modality of spirit by the accident of birth
was a specific tragedy of the West. This is now overcome in the multivalency
of our postmodern world. Irigaray’s search for spiritualities that
serve a “culture of two subjects” is one expression of this
spiritual pluralism, Ferrer’s infinity of goals another. The scheme
presented here cuts down the “God” religion of the West to
take its place along four other major epochal or archetypal forms: Each
represents a major clustering of spiritual wisdom, of means of divinization,
of modalities of the spirit. The “accomplished interiority,”
which Irigaray elsewhere suggests should be the goal of the spiritual
life (37), may well even be achieved by a systematic exploration of all
five. Perhaps even in a single day, the human spirit needs to move between
these different spiritualities, as it does between different relationalities.
One does not live in the pocket of one’s sexual partner; one does
not spend all day with the ancestors, or in Nature; one does not devote
all one’s energies to conquest or horticulture; one does not even
need “God” all day long: a time for the cessation of all
mentation is also needed. Eckhart showed that most vividly (159).
But such an easy pluralism may be a long way off for a society still struggling
to shake off the habits of thought formed by patriarchal monotheism. When
the centaur told Jason that Medea had undergone a spiritual catastrophe
and the “opposite of a conversion,” he is perhaps speaking
to a majority of women today: Women are still to some degree traumatized
by the indifference of the world of Jason to their spiritual needs. The
very different kind of work pursued by Luce Irigaray—emerging from
postmodernist thought—and that of Starhawk—often dismissed
as “New Age”—both require that the patriarchal “God”
sit down at the table and hear the voices of other spiritualities, other
relationalities. The establishment of the “aboriginal feminine”
or goddess modality of spirit is an essential first step, but a more ambitious
goal is to see women reclaim all modalities of the spirit. The shamanic
anyway belongs equally to men and women, while warrior polytheism represents
a conquestial mode of divinization that women may need to draw on as much
as men. (All great art, reform, construction, and exploration need a spirituality
of courage and risk taking.) Monotheism as a relationship with a “wholly
other” is likewise a relational spirituality as potentially cornucopian
to the female spirit as the male. Finally, the transcendent modality of
the spirit requires that gender as a “modification of the mind”
is suspended altogether in ecstatic absorption (or enstatic as Feuerstein
prefers it). Why should women (or men, for that matter) be deprived of
any of these modalities of the spirit?
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