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Blog
entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and
reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer
have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent
essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them
with all who are interested.
If
you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a
note: sam@macspeno.com
Post
#126 offers thoughts about what we can know of primordial religion by way of
Navajo stories connected with the sweat lodge.
===
The Navajo Hunter Tradition, by Karl W. Luckert. U of AZ Press,
1975. [Reviewed, November 1992.]
I've seen this book mentioned numerous times, but I was prejudiced
against “agricultural” Native American cultures, so never pursued it
previously.
It turns out to be a very exciting book. Extraordinarily
confirming of a number of insights I’ve arrived at over the last few years. And
it was written 20 years ago. [And here in 2012 it's been 20 years since I wrote
those words.]
Navajos were hunters until quite recently. They are related to
other northern Native Americans (such as the Tlinglit of British Columbia) who
migrated from Asia only about three thousand years ago.
The Navajo somehow ended up in the Southwest US and took up the
farming practices of pueblo peoples only since around 1500 AD. So a strong
strain of their earlier hunting culture mythology still survives, if tenuously.
The author is passionate about preserving the hunting culture
values he has been able to uncover. His is a History of Religions perspective,
with a great respect for mythology. He studied with M. Eliade in Chicago.
-
Some main ideas. Hunter religion is the historical “mother” of all
religions. It is the oldest religion of mankind, it has been developing for
perhaps three million years.
One of the author’s informants [individuals who supply
anthropologists with data] has passed on all he knew specifically to preserve
it “for the young people from all over the world.” The two informants were
living, of course, when the author did his research; but two extensive texts,
recorded in the early 1990s by the Franciscan friar, Berard Haile (one of the
foremost authorities on Navajo anthropology) were also used.
The earliest layers of the mythology reveals what the author calls
the primal stage of “pre-human flux.” Out of this stage developed the hunter
gods, some of whom later still were “defamed” (labeled “evil” in agricultural
times). Of special interest may be the development which the author calls
“geographization” of the hunter mythology.
The collection of texts is hard to read. But their interpretation
is fascinating. (And more than just that!)
The “pre-human flux” is a kind of uroboric unity (although the
author doesn’t use that term), when all things were considered related and
their external forms inter-changeable.
The creation of the world came after this stage, and more or less
fixed the external forms of the various “peoples” as we know them today.
Human awareness of the prehuman flux is “the oldest still
discernible coherent view of the world,” the “most basic in the history of
man’s religious consciousness.” [In contemporary terms, it is the very oldest,
the
"proto-cosmology."]
And this archaic-hunter view of the world has been preserved in
vivid formations among Native American groups. Examples from non-Navajo
groups-- Plains Arikara, the Tlinglit and Eskimos-- are offered.
In that primordial era prior to humanity, the game animals were
pets of certain divine owners who hoarded them. There were also divine
predatory hunters. A divine hunter, by trickery (he changed himself into a
puppy!) was able to free the “pets” to make them available for hunting.
In the process, the game which had been tame pets became wild game
animals-- with especially good hearing and sense of smell, by which they can
escape the hunters.
It’s important to remember that all this happened “in illo
temporare,” before humans, and has the value for human hunters of being “man’s
Wholly Other.” The creative event resulted in an abyss between human hunters
and that utterly other world of the pre-human flux. It can be overcome only by
“powerful and sacred people.”
Not surprisingly, sex is at the heart of it all. A female--
sister, sometimes wife, of the divine hunters, who are axiomatically male-- goes
off with the divine game animals, to mate and produce more of them, as well as
to attract male game to her male hunter brothers/husband.
She tries to avoid having them kill her fawns, but one of the
hunters does, of course; usually the youngest, causing her eventually to go off
permanently with the animals.
It is well worth reading the stories provided by the author’s
informants about all this. This story is apparently is nothing less than the
origin-myth of the Great Mother!
---
Now comes the really fun stuff! Guess what the means of access to
the pre-human flux is, for contemporary human hunters? The sweat lodge!
The author says it is known to nearly all North American native
peoples, and distributed over a vast triangle from Alaska and Labrador to
Guatemala. But it “has not yet been thoroughly studied.”
The best information the author can find comes from W. W. Hill
(1938), that Navajo hunters sweated both before and after hunting. It caused a
“complete reversal of the psychology of the participants.” They became wolves,
”human wolves,” skilled predators, they became like the game animals they
hunted. Only after the hunt, in the post-hunt sweat loge, could the Blessingway
songs be sung again.
Blessingway is the foundational way of hozo, life-giving balance,
beauty, etc. Huntingway, with its killing and death, is to be kept quite
distinct from it.
The main point is that “the ceremonial sweating of the Navajo
hunters meant participation in the pre-human flux, transformation into the
divine predator animal.” One informant says, “Out hunting you have no fear of
other hunter animals... you are one of them.”
In the hunting myths recounted in the book, the act of the freeing
of the game animals being held captive as pets of divine hoarders itself begins
in the sweat lodge. The pre-human divine hunters-- in need, since the game was
being hoarded-- got the divine hoarder to come to their sweat lodge and so
“found him out.”
In the sweat lodge, the mystery of pre-human flux is reduced to a
level of stability, to the lowest common denominator between gods and men,
where the gods can be dealt with.” (p 146) (For me personally, this is probably
the most significant line in the book. I hope eventually to be able to write
something about it.)
Even today, the goal of sweating is the same: to draw the gods
close, where they “commune with man as kindred people” and become “obligated to
help the earth-surface people.”
---
Two non-Navajo examples of the sweat lodge as return to
relatedness and the equality of humans and divine-animals are given.
in the Midewiwin, the candidates are totally identified with Bear
(singing “I am the bear spirit” at the beginning of the sweat lodge initiation
ceremony). In the Ghost Dance, the archaic sweat lodge was retained “as a kind
of Wailing Wall,” a place of lament, symbolizing “transformation and
re-creation of life.” (Amazing stuff!)
---
One more big idea: The author says, “A simple description of a
shaman might be ‘the intellectual leader of a group of archaic hunters.’ Every
hunter shamanizes to a degree... and every hunter is a trickster.”
“All shamanic trance journeys are only natural extensions of
ordinary hunter trickery into the dimension of pre-human flux, the realm of the
spirits.”
---
Some odds and ends [quotes by the author]: “Information on how to
kill deer correctly was given to the hunters by the victims themselves.”
“Pre-human flux as a reality can still be experienced in the sweat
lodge. My informants all prefer to talk about their hunting ways in the sweat
lodge.”
“Pre-human flux remains a coherent worldview clear into our time,
implying all the while a monistc or wholistic theory of man.” [Today we would
say "non-dualistic."]
“The ever present possibility of pre-human flux transformation by
changing clothes has eliminated the need for a well-developed body/soul
dualism.” ["Changing clothes" seems to be a way of saying
"changing skins." I.e., becoming the human-divine creatures we can
become-- via the sweat lodge rites.]
---
One final idea. There is an extensive discussion on the
development of the hunter gods into what we know on one hand as Owners of the
Animals, Lord of the Hunt, etc. and on the other as Horned God, Satan, Evil
One, etc. [But] No simple summary is possible. What a book!
===
There is a highly specialized followup to the author’s Navajo
Hunting Tradition about an exorcism ceremony.
The book is A Navajo Bring-Home Ceremony, The Claus Chee Sonny
Version of the Deerway Ajilee, by Karl W Luckert. (Museum of Northern AZ
Pr. 1978.)
An ajilee ceremony is a kind of exorcism of craziness. The term
can include everything from being sex-crazed to “driving around in a pickup
truck.”
I was able to follow very little of this book; the author presumes
a great deal of familiarity with the various “chantways” or "sand painting
ceremonies." This one (the ajilee) lasts five nights. What's preserved
today represents only half of the original ceremony, since somehow the other
half got associated in people’s minds with witchcraft and was dropped by respectable
shamans.
Of interest: the ceremony ends with the one who is being healed
stripping and washing first his hair then his whole body in a sacred suds
solution.
There is a final private ceremony where he and the shaman go
“behind the hill” for a pipe ceremony where again he strips and this time has
sacred smoke blown all over his body. (If the ceremony is to exorcise sex
craziness, smoke it blown on the patient’s genitals, a rite which has become
known in popular language as “roasting it.” )
This book really doesn’t add anything to the wonderful ideas of
the previous book, although it is another example of “geographization,” which
might be of interest.
===
There is also a third and much later book by the same author: Egyptian
Light and Hebrew Fire, Karl W. Luckert (SUNY Press, 1991).
This book’s subtitle is “Theological and Philosophical Roots of
Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective.”
The point is that specifically Christian thought not only has its
well known Hebrew father but also a much, much less well known Egyptian mother.
The author-- yes, the same Karl W. Luckert!-- makes his case well.
But to even attempt a summary is foolish.
This book is exciting. It is nearly unbelievable that the author
of Navajo Hunting Traditions and A Navajo Bring-Home Ceremony also has such an
excellent grasp of Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek and Neo-platonic thought. He talks
about the homoousian controversy and the Monophysites, for example, with no
less confidence than he talks about the early shamans as hunting band leaders.
Nowhere else, ever, have I encountered an author so well informed
and interested in the kinds of things I’ve been pursuing in recent years. His
field is History of Religions; he was a student of Eliade at U of Chicago.
If only some Jungian would tune in to Karl Luckert. What a wonder
the results of that match would be!
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