Yaarel
He Mage
Ancestor Reverence
"
The shamans role as an intermediary between human society and the land is not always obvious. We see the sorcerer called upon to cure an ailing tribesman or locate some missing goods. We witness entering trance and sending awareness [outofbody] into other ‘dimensions’ in search of insight and aid.
We should not interpret these ‘dimensions’ as ‘supernatural’. Nor view them as realms ‘internal’ to the personal psyche of the practitioner.
The ‘inner world’ of our Western psycholog[y], like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates from the LOSS of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth. When the animate [minds] that surround us are construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then [our perception] of a wild multiplicitous otherness (which human existence has always oriented itself) must migrate into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or into the human skull itself. The only allowable refuge for [the] unfathomable.
In oral indigenous cultures, it is not by sending awareness beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact. Rather, it is by propelling awareness [outofbody] into [the] landscape, the living dream that [one] shares with the soaring hawk [or] the stone silently sprouting lichens on its course surface.
The magicians intimate relationship with nonhuman nature becomes evident when we attend to the content of the ritual gestures when alone, the daily propitiations and praise toward the land and its many voices.
While the notion of ‘spirit’ has come to have, for us in the West, a primarily anthropomorphic association, my encounter with the ants [that were called ‘household spirits’ and given gifts of food to negotiate that they stay out of the house], was the first of many experiences that the ‘spirits’ of an indigenous culture are PRIMARILY those modes of intelligence and awareness that dont possess a human form.
It is not only entities acknowledged by Western civilization as ‘alive’, not only animals and plants that speak as ‘spirits’ to an oral culture, but also the river, the monsoon rain [storms], the stone that fits neatly into the hand. The mountain too has thoughts. Birds. Sun. Forest.
Ritual reverence to ones long-dead human ancestors [is a reverence to] ‘spirits’ that are ultimately nonhuman.
Most indigenous tribal peoples have NO IMMATERIAL REALM. [In the West], our strictly human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from the sensuous world that surrounds us. For almost all oral cultures, the earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead. The ‘body’ − whether human or otherwise − is a magical entity, the MINDs own sensuous aspect. At death, the bodys decomposition into dust, can only signify the reintegration of [the minds of] ones ancestors and elders into the landscape from which all are born.
Often [the literal wind of] the atmosphere that animates the visible world − the subtle presence that circulates both within us and between all things − retains within itself the [literal] ‘breath’ of the dead person. [Thus, the mind of a once human body becomes the mind of dust and of wind.]
Death, in tribal cultures, initiates a metamorphosis wherein the persons [mental] presence does not vanish from the sensible world (where would it go?) but rather remains as an animating force within the landscape, whether subtly in the wind, or more visibly in animal form, or even of the volcano.
[Socalled] ‘ancestor worship’ is ultimately another mode of attentiveness to nonhuman nature. It signifies not so much an awe of human powers, but rather a reverence for those forms that [an] awareness takes when NOT in human form. The familiar human embodiment decays to become part of the encompassing cosmos.
This cycling of the human back into the world ensures that [nonhuman] experience − whether ants, willow trees, or clouds − are never alien to ourselves. Despite the obvious differences in shape and ability, they remain familiar, even familial. It is paradoxically this kinship that renders the otherness [of the dead, the animals, and the other nonhumans] so eerily potent.
"
Abram, David (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World.
"
The shamans role as an intermediary between human society and the land is not always obvious. We see the sorcerer called upon to cure an ailing tribesman or locate some missing goods. We witness entering trance and sending awareness [outofbody] into other ‘dimensions’ in search of insight and aid.
We should not interpret these ‘dimensions’ as ‘supernatural’. Nor view them as realms ‘internal’ to the personal psyche of the practitioner.
The ‘inner world’ of our Western psycholog[y], like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates from the LOSS of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth. When the animate [minds] that surround us are construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then [our perception] of a wild multiplicitous otherness (which human existence has always oriented itself) must migrate into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or into the human skull itself. The only allowable refuge for [the] unfathomable.
In oral indigenous cultures, it is not by sending awareness beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact. Rather, it is by propelling awareness [outofbody] into [the] landscape, the living dream that [one] shares with the soaring hawk [or] the stone silently sprouting lichens on its course surface.
The magicians intimate relationship with nonhuman nature becomes evident when we attend to the content of the ritual gestures when alone, the daily propitiations and praise toward the land and its many voices.
While the notion of ‘spirit’ has come to have, for us in the West, a primarily anthropomorphic association, my encounter with the ants [that were called ‘household spirits’ and given gifts of food to negotiate that they stay out of the house], was the first of many experiences that the ‘spirits’ of an indigenous culture are PRIMARILY those modes of intelligence and awareness that dont possess a human form.
It is not only entities acknowledged by Western civilization as ‘alive’, not only animals and plants that speak as ‘spirits’ to an oral culture, but also the river, the monsoon rain [storms], the stone that fits neatly into the hand. The mountain too has thoughts. Birds. Sun. Forest.
Ritual reverence to ones long-dead human ancestors [is a reverence to] ‘spirits’ that are ultimately nonhuman.
Most indigenous tribal peoples have NO IMMATERIAL REALM. [In the West], our strictly human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from the sensuous world that surrounds us. For almost all oral cultures, the earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead. The ‘body’ − whether human or otherwise − is a magical entity, the MINDs own sensuous aspect. At death, the bodys decomposition into dust, can only signify the reintegration of [the minds of] ones ancestors and elders into the landscape from which all are born.
Often [the literal wind of] the atmosphere that animates the visible world − the subtle presence that circulates both within us and between all things − retains within itself the [literal] ‘breath’ of the dead person. [Thus, the mind of a once human body becomes the mind of dust and of wind.]
Death, in tribal cultures, initiates a metamorphosis wherein the persons [mental] presence does not vanish from the sensible world (where would it go?) but rather remains as an animating force within the landscape, whether subtly in the wind, or more visibly in animal form, or even of the volcano.
[Socalled] ‘ancestor worship’ is ultimately another mode of attentiveness to nonhuman nature. It signifies not so much an awe of human powers, but rather a reverence for those forms that [an] awareness takes when NOT in human form. The familiar human embodiment decays to become part of the encompassing cosmos.
This cycling of the human back into the world ensures that [nonhuman] experience − whether ants, willow trees, or clouds − are never alien to ourselves. Despite the obvious differences in shape and ability, they remain familiar, even familial. It is paradoxically this kinship that renders the otherness [of the dead, the animals, and the other nonhumans] so eerily potent.
"
Abram, David (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World.
The thorn rune, so prevalent in modern English as the "th" in words like "the", is to us simply a T or D sound. Oden and Tor is how we spell and pronounce the names today - but then our "o" sound is unlike that in English so it doesn't really clarify anything.
