Third Death in James Ray Sweat Lodge Case

Yet another of the sixty-plus people crammed into James Arthur Ray's Sedona sweat lodge has died. She evidently was one of his true believers:

The Rev. Meredith Ann Murray of Bellingham, Wash., who has completed all of Ray's retreats, said [Liz] Neuman was among Ray's earliest followers and had attended dozens of his events.

According to Ray's Web site, Neuman was the leader of the Minneapolis-area "Journey Expansion Team." The teams, developed by Ray's friends and followers around the country, meet to exchange ideas on his principles. The next Minneapolis-area meeting is scheduled for Oct. 23.

But here is the delicious part. Ray, facing homicide charges, is evidently bobbing and weaving:

In his first public appearance Tuesday in Los Angeles, Ray told a crowd of about 200 that he has hired his own investigative team to determine what went wrong.

Sheesh, Veronica Mars could tell him what went wrong. He was greedy and heedless of the safety of his followers.

Sweat lodges have been around for a long time in many places. I see them as part of the old Stone Age circumpolar religion, along with flat-headed drums and a special relationship with bears.

Whether used for physical health, for contacting the spirits, or both together, they are a small-scale magical technology. It sounds as though Ray tried the "megachurch" approach to sweat lodges--at $9,000-plus per person.

Aside from all the issues that this case raises, it speaks as well to the difficulty of turning small-scale mysteries into congregation-size events.

UPDATE: Tim Giago, a veteran American Indian journalist in South Dakota, asks why, if traditional sweat-lodge ceremonies are so special and good, are they not doing more good for the Lakota:

Arvol [Looking Horse], why are the sacred rites you represent not being used to bring our own people back from the brink? Why aren't they being used to bring back the good health our people once enjoyed? Why is there an unemployment rate of 80 percent on the lands you call home? Why is there such a high rate of STD's and teen pregnancies in Lakota country?

What good does it do to speak out and criticize an event that happened in Sedona, Arizona, when it had no lasting impact upon the Sioux people? Aren't there terrible things happening in our own homelands, right under our noses, to worry about and try to change?

Who Cares about 'Cultural Appropriation'?

Some of the reaction in the Pagan blogosphere to the "shamanic" casualties in Sedona have trotted out that old horse named Cultural Appropriation.

A couple of months ago, one of the Pagan lists in which I participate had a whole discussion of "cultural appropriation." Cultural Appropriation was led by the halter and trotted around the ring, and all the usual arguments were made:

• All our ancestors were tribal once.
• I can understand Native Americans being upset.
• All the spiritual leaders I know and who have been teaching their spiritual truths for decades welcome students, and their interest is what is important, not what their culture is, nor what they do with the teachings.
• Now, I follow Celtic dieties because THEY came to me. I didn't go seeking after them. They spoke to me in English and have never demanded that I learn a different language to speak with them.
• And of course someone brought up the new Pagan book on the topic, Talking About the Elephant.

Eventually that discussion thread wore itself out. Not two weeks later, someone posted an announcement for a Sun Dance:

The Sun Dance is a ritual of community and praise for the sun and the great spirit that the natives of this continent felt drew them together. Regardless of our faith, everyone can appreciate the sun's power and importance to all life on Earth. So this will be an upbeat celebration of the sun, the summer we have just had and community. It is also a ritual praising the sun and saying farewell for another year.

Since there is no one ritual for the Sun Dance, and so many tribes viewed and practiced this event differently, we will have a blending of many traditions in our Sun Dance. Please bring drums, bells, noise makers, whistles, rain sticks, musical instruments, or anything else you'd like to celebrate and make a joyful sound with. This event will be outdoors so please wear appropriate clothing as the weather dictates. Also, as part of the ritual involves body and face painting, if possible please wear something that gives you access to your collarbones.

And ol' Cultural Appropriation stayed in his stall. No one said a word online.

Why?

In the long run, religious creativity will always trump the kind of finger-pointing accusations that you hear about "cultural appropriation" — even before you come to the theological argument that "the gods choose whom they will."

We have freedom of religion. You cannot stop someone from holding a Sun Dance and calling it such unless you show up and threaten bodily harm. You can threaten other sorts of consequences—that it will offend the spirits or the Grandfathers and someone will suffer—but you cannot guarantee such threats. What if the spirits like the other person better?

As Shawn Spencer, the fake psychic detective, says in the TV series Psych, séances—or in this case, Sun Dances—are like garage sales and plastic surgery: Anyone can have them.

Pagans are well-placed to realize that religion is a creative activity. Writers incorporate the influence of other writers, musicians "steal" from other musicians, actors learn from other actors—why should religious practitioners be any different.

I have complained about some "plastic shamans" in my time too, but to what effect? Just do it. See what happens.

Shamanic Images of the Altai

I found this video on PaganSpace -- evidently it is supposed to evoke the shamanic spirit of Kazahkstan (since the poster lives in Almaty). The Altai are a range of mountains in Central Asia.

Shamanism and PTSD

A recent article in the weekly Colorado Springs Independent discusses using Michael Harner-style (I assume) shamanic techniques for veterans with PTSD.

Haggins says alternative practices heal what regular therapy cannot. Through shamanic ritual, he says, he can literally return a part of a soul shed on the battlefield. This is the procedure that Unverzagt, hesitantly, agreed to undergo in January.

The Cinematic Otherworld

About three weeks ago, I dreamt I was sitting with a group of people around a table in some sort of parapsychology lab. It was sort of like a séance, only instead of contacting spirits, we were trying to "make something happen."

After one session, I went into an adjacent room full of computer equipment, etc., and found a a group of electronic cables had all fused into a big ball. Somehow this was significant -- and somehow the affect of the dream was such that my unconscious dream controller pressed the "Abort!" button, and I woke up suddenly.

On some level, the dream reminded me of the 1990 movie Flatliners, in which a group of medical students try to create their own near-death experiences. There is Kieffer Sutherland as the bold leader ("Philosophy failed. Religion failed. Now it's time for medical science to try."), Oliver Platt as the over-intellectualizing Jew ("I did not come to medical school to murder my class mates no matter how deranged they might be."), Kevin Bacon as the angry but good-hearted skeptic, and Julia Roberts as the girl who is one of the guys.

Sutherland's character is actually expressing a very 19th-century notion, but let's set that aside. Set aside too why some demented set designer felt that Bacon's character should drive an Army surplus M751 truck -- in Chicago.

All of the medical students who "flatline" find themselves in an Otherworld where they must confront people whom they wronged. On some intuitive level, I always felt that the movie might have captured a sliver of the after-death experience, just as The Cuckoo has an interesting shamanic sequence.

Or am I kidding myself? Is it possible to portray the Otherworld realistically on film? And what does "realistically" mean in such a context?

Sex in World Religions & Other Updates

¶ First, here is a better version of the Pagan rosary story, "'Hail Persephone:' Pagans Retool the Rosary," which has a photo and also some of the rosary invocations.

Kimberly Winston's article was also mentioned at the GetReligion blog on religion and journalism.

¶ My recent post on Carlos Castaneda must have reflected the zeitgeist. "The Dark Legacy of Carlos Castaneda" by Robert Marshall treats him as "the 20th century's most successful literary trickster."

Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time called them "beautifully lucid" and remarked on a "narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies." They were widely accepted as factual, and this contributed to their success. (Thanks, Jason.)

¶ Those mysterious Etruscans . . . seem to have led lives filled with varied sex. (Site probably NSFW, unless you are a classicist.) These images and texts reflect the upper rungs of Etruscan society, I suspect. (Thanks: 2blowhards.)

¶ In case you forgot, "all acts of love and pleasure" are definitely not Allah's rituals. In fact, nudity during sex invalidates marriage, says a high-ranking Islamic cleric. Some of his colleagues disagree, saying that nudity is permissible as long as you don't look at your partner.

The most controversial anthropologist

One episode of a BBC series called Tales from the Jungle on famous anthropologists examines the "shamanthropologist" Carlos Castaneda (d. 1998), appropriately described as the most controversial anthropologist ever.

For those of us who can't watch the Beeb, it is available in segments from YouTube.

There are also episodes on Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead.

Without Castaneda, there would probably have been no "neo-shamanism." Without Mead appealing to Western notions of the noble--and sexy--savage, the "sexual liberation" of the 1960s would have lost one of its ideological underpinnings. And Malinowski, of course, largely shaped 20th-century ideas of ethnography.

The videos are a little hoked-up--and I wish that the BBC would consistently identify the talking heads on the screen. They do include Castaneda's son and ex-wife, who in the video defend much of his research (although not his actions), and Jay Fikes, an anthropologist known for his work with the Peyote Way in Mexico and the USA, who is more critical.

The video focuses on the cultish last years of Castaneda's life in particular.

For more on Castaneda, read Richard DeMille's two books on him, as well as Dan Noel's The Soul of Shamanism. Also the Sustained Action website.

Via Savage Minds.

Shaman's Drum's new fundraising

Timothy White started Shaman's Drum: A Journal of Experiential Shamanism & Spiritual Healing in the mid-1980s, at the same time that Jay Kinney started Gnosis: Journal of the Western Inner Traditions.

In fact, I met both publishers on the same evening in San Francisco, at a publishing gathering where they introduced their new journals. As a graduate student in religious studies, I ended up writing frequently for Gnosis, but I always subscribed to Shaman's Drum as well.

Both suffered a big hit in the late 1990s when a major distributor went under, owing them both significant sums of money. Jay Kinney closed Gnosis in about 2000 and went on to other projects; Timothy White and his wife, Judy, struggle on in Oregon.

Their latest plan is to organize a series of benefit auctions on eBay, offering such items as "traditional shamanistic craft items (drums, medicine bags and other items), original shamanistic paintings, collector's prints and photos . . . . back issues and/or discount certificatesfor workshops and tours advertised in the magazine."

They are also soliciting donated items to sell.

News of upcoming auctions is supposed to be posted on the Web site. It's not there yet, but check back later.

Wicca: trendy, phony, and Constitutionally protected

If I were not teaching rhetoric, I would not have found Michael Medved's column on Sgt. Patrick Stewart's pentacle memorial while looking for a good political column for my students to analyze.

After insulting the religion--"it’s a trendy, phony potpourri of druidical, primitive and New Age elements that’s more a pagan cult than an organized faith"--Medved grudgingly admits that "the Constitution leaves no room for the government to discriminate against its adherents."

Uh, OK, thanks, I guess. And we are a Pagan cult, in fact, if you want to be technical about it.

Meanwhile, his fellow Townhall.com columnist Dennis Praeger, who has been bent out of shape over a Muslim Congressman wanting to take his oath of office on the Koran, responds to his critics and adds,

I am a Jew (a non-denominational religious Jew, for the record), and I would vote for any Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Mormon, atheist, Jew, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Wiccan, Confucian, Taoist or combination thereof whose social values I share.

A couple of nights ago I guest-lectured via telephone to Jeffrey Kaplan's class in new religious movements at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

I said that I thought that Paganism--Wicca in particular--was becoming the new designated Other on the American religious scene--and these columnists bear me out. Get used to "What about Wicca?"

However, I expect that it will be a long time before the first Wiccan elected to the House of Representatives has to worry about on which book to swear an oath. For the record, no holy book is required anyway.

Amtrak Heaven, Amtrak Hell--and all for Pagan Studies

Regular readers know that M. and I like train travel. We saw both sides of it on our just-completed trip to Washington, DC.

The Southwest Chief was on time to La Junta, Colorado, where we meet it, but the ticket agent was muttering about possible stoppage due to high winds.

Somewhere in western Kansas, we ended up parked for five hours. Apparently there is an Amtrak regulation against prairie travel when winds exceed 50 mph, and according to a crew member, winds at the Dodge City airport were 63 mph. Can those double-decker Superliner cars blow over?

Late to Chicago, we missed our connection on Capitol Limited to Washington, but did make it onto the Lakeshore Limited, which had been held in the station. Thus began the great Rust Belt tour: northern Indiana and Ohio, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and down the Hudson River to New York City. This time, our sleeper was one of the one-level Viewliner cars, designed to fit into Penn Station.

I could never keep count of all the old brick warehouses, piles of scrap metal, and empty factories. What is the quarter-mile long three-story white brick building in Utica, New York, that looks empty? There is just so much stuff in this country.

We arrived in New York about 8 p.m. and an Amtrak representative promised us seats on a regional train down to Washington, DC, which would have gotten us there by midnight--eight hours late, but we could live with it.

But what she did not tell us was that a freight train had derailed south of Baltimore, interrupting the "catenary" electrical system and stopping commuter trains in that sector. We got this sad news from the conductor somewhere around Trenton: our train would stop at Philadelphia.

It was too late for a Greyhound bus--the last one had left at 10:15 p.m. The rental car counters were all closed. Amtrak's Philadelphia agents were flailing around, first promising buses and then saying that there were none, and that Baltimore was worse, anyway.

Eventually, like some other passengers, we partnered with a third traveler and rented a cab. Yes, from Phillie to Washington by taxi, driven by an immigrant Indian driver who knew how to get onto Interstate 95 south, but after that had no idea where he was going.

Neither M. nor I knew our way around either. Fortunately the other guy knew the main roads--and somewhere in the south part of downtown, the brotherhood of cabdrivers was invoked: our driver pulled alongside a DC cab, rolled down his window, and shouted [assume melodious Indian accent]: “Where is Hotel Washington?” And soon we were there, heads hitting the pillow about 3 a.m.

And so I slept until about 10:30 a.m. and then trudged off to the Convention Center, arriving late for the all-day Pagan studies conference, but delighted to be there and able to say that I had paid all that money out of my devotion to Pagan studies.

It was totally worth it.

On the return trip, we were only slightly late into Chicago and right on time in La Junta. Boarding the Southwest Chief in Chicago, we looked around and realized that we were in the same "roomette" in the same sleeping car that we had just vacated six hours earlier. That never happened before. Perhaps it was . . . a sign.

Thursday, Nov. 16, apparently was no picnic for air travelers either. I spoke to one attendee who had been dropped in Pittsburgh and sent by bus to Baltimore. Others had similar stories. The travel system is complex and fragile. One thunderstorm at an airport can back up air travel all around the country, so I cannot be too hard on Amtrak for its high-wind policy.

On the other hand, I have been talking with Customer Relations and will be seeking some sort of refund, having bought Chicago-Washington sleeper tickets but having been dumped in Philadelphia.

Tag: Amtrak

We have a Pagan Studies series!

With Barb Davy's Introduction to Pagan Studies, we now have three books in Rowman & Littlefield's Pagan Studies series.

And three of something truly is a "series," right?

Tag: Pagan Studies

A fall from a height

I am in Colorado Springs today, where famous evangelical pastor Ted Haggard's fall dominates the news.

Frankly, to borrow the name of a better-known blog, I just don't "get" his kind of religion. A 14,000-member megachurch? Why? So you can sit on your butt and be preached at and sung at among a huge crowd of strangers?

My dislike for Haggard's approach is more than theological. It is partly aesthetic--the whole megamall megachurch entertainment thing. And it's partly because of the way that New Lifers regarded the most interesting parts of Colorado Springs (such as the Old North End and Tejon Street) as controlled by Satan or something. I wrote elsewhere that they do not understand the gods of the city, only the gods of the suburban shopping mall.

One excerpt: "[Jeff] Sharlet makes a good case for New Lifers as exurban parasites, taking the services that the city provides but being unwilling to pay for them, either financially or psychically."

Anyway, he is toast now, although there will probably be some sort of public-repentence-as-career move. From a Christian perspective, LaShawn Barber's coverage is about the best.

And that's the news from "Fort God."

Ojo de dios

The new issue, no. 65, of Shaman's Drum reprints a portion of Visions of a Huichol Shaman by the anthropologist Peter Furst.

Furst has spent much time among the Huicholes, who live in Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental and who are sometimes considered one of the least-Christianized tribes. Their religious use of peyote gives us an idea of how it might have been used in pre-Conquest times. You can see historic film footage of Huichol peyoteros in Phil Cousineau's documentary on the Native American Church, The Peyote Road (Kifaru Productions, 1994).

An exhibit of Huichol yarn paintings with shamanic themes is now touring. If you live near Charlotte, North Carolina, go see it while you can.

Huichol people had been making art for a long time by pressing colored yarn onto a beeswax backing, usually on gourds. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Mexican curators and anthropologists encouraged the making of rectangular yarn paintings on wooden panels that could be framed and sold. Some artists developed narrative pictures based on shamanic journeys.

Another Huichol artifact was the yarn-wrapped cross, called a "god's eye" by the early anthropologist Carl Lumholtz--Peter Furst considers that to be a misnomer and calls it a "four-directional protective prayer object." A fancy example is shown here.

Separated from the Huichol context, god's-eyes became an icon of Southwestern-hippie decor in the mid-1960s. As I was starting high school, my stepfather was offered a high-level job in the New Mexico state education department, and I was all set to move to Santa Fe and decorate my white-walled bedroom with god's-eyes. But he took a job in Jamaica instead, and we went there. Later, for many years a small god's-eye, matchsticks wrapped with thread, hung from the rearview mirror of my faithful Ford F-100 pickup truck. I called it my "spiritual compass."

Felicitas Goodman

Word comes of the passing of Felicitas Goodman on 31 March. She was in her early nineties.

Born to ethnic German parents in Hungary, she attended the University of Heidelburg. She came to the United States after World War II and worked as a scientific translator before entering graduate school as a "nontraditional" student and earning a PhD in anthropology. She taught linguistics and anthropology at Denison University until retiring in 1979.

And then she began to devote herself full time to some very interesting research in the anthropological reconstruction of shamanism, culminating in the publication of her book Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences (Indiana University Press, 1990). Get it if you can, perhaps through some service like Advanced Book Exchange.

I was fortunate enough to persuade her to write the lead chapter of my 1994 anthology Witchcraft and Shamanism.

She purchased some land between Santa Fe and Española, New Mexico, and founded the "Cuyamonge Institute" for the study of shamanism. It never became as large as Michael Harner's Foundation for Shamanic Studies, but I tend to think of Goodman and Harner as somewhat parallel: anthropologists who "went native." Goodman, however, taught shamanic techniques perhaps more in Europe than in the United States, particularly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Nikki Bado-Fralick, one of her former academic students, wrote of her today, "I learned from Felicitas that we need to be brave adventurers in what she called the 'alternate realities.' There seemed to be no aspect of the alternate reality that we should not investigate, no spiritual territory that we should not explore. Felicitas warmly and generously gave to others, supporting them in their adventures without pause."

Daniel C. Noel

I was shocked two days ago to learn of the death in late 2002 of Dan Noel, a friend and sometime mentor. I had the privilege of reviewing his book The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities (Continuum, 1997) for Gnosis. He taught me the difference between "imaginary" and "imaginal."

Here is an interview with Dan about the ideas in that book, including the "lure of the archaic" and the "democritization of the sacred."