Tag: christianity

Does spiritual growth require hard work?

 

A recurring theme in pretty well every spiritual tradition is the arduous nature of the practices needing to be undertaken in order to achieve spiritual growth. Indeed, this tendency is so pervasive that it is even often to be encountered in the ranks of those whose fundamental philosophy would seem incompatible with such a hypothesis. On the face of it, it seems, however, a very self-limiting belief. If I believe that only after long and arduous effort will I achieve my goals, then I am blind to grace in the here and now and necessarily consider myself unworthy of what the universe is gifting me. Perhaps I even downright refuse it.

The path of suffering is conceived of as redemptive in many traditions, even when it is inimical to the basic economy of salvation which that tradition puts forward. For those of us familiar with biblical Christianity, it is pretty clear in both the original Jesus tradition (i.e. Q) and in the later layers of the New Testament that salvation is an unmerited grace. This has nevertheless remained as shocking a view in the course of church history as it doubtless was when first expounded; and very many moralists and theologians have shied away from it or reinterpreted it to fit their moral a priori. How can it be that I belong to the community of the elect if there is no lower limit on the infamity of my behavior here on earth?

I do not wish to expound scripture here (not something I am given to doing), or solve the problem of evil, but I should of course point out that the notion that there is, after all, something to be done in order to secure salvation is a very convenient one for ecclesiastical hierarchies, without which their whole raison d’être would at the very least need to be radically reconsidered. The cui bono then is clear, especially when it fundamentally contradicts the supposed sacred texts.

It seems to me that the whole notion that salvation or enlightenment can be earned is patent ontological nonsense and should be mercilessly put to rest. Enlightenment is, or can be, as easy as breathing. But is our reluctance to give up the idea of spiritual practice as necessary to, or at least somehow facilitating, spiritual growth solely due to the fact that we have been brainwashed into following orders? Very largely, but not I think entirely. Spiritual growth does not require work, but it requires choice; and choice is hard. Not because it encounters resistance – true choice does not – but because we are not free to choose. We have limited our ability to choose in so many ways that we need to unlearn, and surely there are spiritual practices that can help us in this unlearning. This, however, does not turn them into prerequisites or even make them efficacious. The contrary belief, it seems to me, is more of an obstacle than anything these practices may be designed to overcome.

I think spiritual growth is super-easy, and the easier we make it the easier it will be. At the same time, that easiness itself may, for many of us, be very difficult. But spiritual growth is a process, it is not an end point. What you need to learn now is easy for you to learn now. Stop repeating the mantra of difficulty and it will stop being difficult.

It is very fortunate for the human race that spiritual growth is easy because, if it were not, few would venture onto the path and fewer still be successful. That tiny elite would never suffice to heal the massive wounds of the planet and cataclysm would be the only possible outcome.

You may object that this very state of the world we now live in gives the lie to what I am saying. But I think the fact of its easiness has to be revealed and has to be accepted. This has to date too rarely been the case. As I said, even spiritual authors whose work I value are often guilty of giving at least passive sustenance to the myth of difficulty. It seems almost inevitable: what else would they write about and how would they earn a living? But I do not criticize them: it may well be that many people need difficulty before they can discover that they do not need it. I do, though, want to emphasize that we need to be alert to this bias in spiritual literature and practices because it is one we are also very attached to in our hearts. Spiritual teacher X may not really be saying that you need to follow the Y-fold path of whatever in order to attain enlightenment, but even if (s)he isn’t, we are very likely to interpret their words in that sense. That is because in fact we do not want enlightenment or at least not too much of it; all we want is comfort. And a true guru knows this. I have absolutely no problem with that if it is your choice; really, it is totally legitimate, there is no blame attached. No-one is saying that you have to release your entire karmic burden in this lifetime. This may not be possible for you. All I am saying is that you can. It is no more difficult than you make it.

If you have a practice, let it be something that gives you joy.

Love and blessings,

Shamanic residues in medieval Europe: a review of Ginzburg’s Ecstasies

 

In Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1989, tr. Raymond Rosenthal 1991, University of Chicago Press), Carlo Ginzburg argues that the practices of medieval witches in Europe, as testified to in the documentary evidence compiled by their persecutors, can best be understood in the light of shamanistic belief systems inherited or borrowed in ancient times from the central Asian steppe.

The work is certainly a tour de force, with an extraordinary breadth of reference, and it brings many interesting elements to light which on the whole support the author’s thesis. Nevertheless, there seem to me to be a number of problems of methodology and certainly a great deal of material (some of it, admittedly, unavailable to him) which Ginzburg does not employ and which deserve further consideration in a more complete reconstruction of the historical links between the phenomena in question. In this review I will therefore try to summarize Ginsburg’s argument as I see it, whilst attempting at the same time to suggest further avenues of research or alternative understandings.

The principal difficulty Ginzburg encounters, it seems to me, is a failure properly to delimit what he sees as the “shamanic” elements from other pagan traditions. The book lacks a framework interpreting the place of properly shamanic elements in ancient religion, whether it be Greek or Celtic. That Celtic religion and certain Greek and Roman ecstatic cults may owe a lot to shamanic precursors is easy to acknowledge, but these cults and others then took on a life of their own which is certainly more directly relevant to the phenomena we encounter in medieval Europe. This layer is absent or assumed away in Ginzburg’s account, making to my mind for a considerable amount of speculation and confusion.

This is evident for example in his account of the reconstructed prototype of the shamanic journey to the “world of the dead”. This concept is indeed reminiscent of the somewhat sinister reinterpretation of the underworld in Greek religion and may represent an Indo-European type (borrowed into Christianity in medieval times only as the notion of purgatory); but it is certainly far removed from the understanding which would have characterized, and still characterizes to this day, nomadic shamanism in central Asia. The same is true of blood sacrifices, which cross-culturally characterize organized religion, but not shamanic practice. The same is true of sexual specialization in the ritual context. Many elements present in the strata uncovered by Ginzburg are therefore more suggestive of survivals of Indo-European religion (that is, of the religion of settled agricultural societies) than of shamanism as such. This would have benefited from clarification and greater rigor.

Ginzburg’s treatment of the role of psychoactive substances in medieval witchcraft appears as much of an afterthought, as a result of which he forgoes a number of interesting lines of enquiry. Drawing substantially on Eliade, he certainly sees the witches’ flight as a phenomenon experienced in a state of shamanic ecstasy, but there is little on how this state might have been induced and what there is draws heavily on Wasson’s identification of the soma with Amanita muscaria and on the disputed theory that the Eleusinian mysteries were fuelled by consumption of ergot. There is plenty else which may seem more persuasive, from the likely use of anticholinergic plants such as Atropa belladonna to the well-known affinity of witches for toads, snakes, serpents and spiders, all of which are known to have psychoactive components in their venoms and were gaily thrown into the cauldron as part of the witches’ brew. In Slovenia, it appears, live salamanders are used to this day in the process of fabricating a psychoactive eau de vie. This rather obvious connection is inexplicably neglected, even as Ginzburg himself furnishes important evidence in support such as the likely derivation of Italian rospo, toad, from Lat. haruspex, a type of sorcerer.

The picture Ginzburg paints implies a great deal of accommodation of traditional practices by the church up until the threshold of the Renaissance. These were of course, at times, given a superficial Christian dress; but it seems that they also often remained anchored within a pre-Christian (or para-Christian) worldview. The Celtic cult of Epona therefore persisted in various guises, as did Greco-Roman cults of Diana/Artemis and Hera, fused by the Inquisitors into the figure of “Herodias”. The cult of Isis, absorbed into that of the Madonna, might also be mentioned. The reasons for the apparent change in attitude on the part of the church at the time of the persecutions are not evoked; doubtless one should interpret these developments, however, as a reaction to the threat of loss of temporal power by the church due to the same encroachments of modernity – the Italian renaissance in particular – which later led to the protestant reformation. Ginzburg does not make the point, but the reasons why the traditional beliefs would have remained vibrant are not hard to identify: Christianity was unconcerned with worldly health and well-being, leaving many popular needs unsatisfied. Small wonder that mediums, soothsayers and healers occupied a fundamental spiritual niche in society (they have never ceased to do so to this day). The challenges of uncertain harvests and the ravages of the plague also necessitated intermediation with cosmic forces which the organized church could not offer. It is highly unlikely that this was ever even conceived of as a problem until the church sought to leverage its spiritual power behind the consolidation of its temporal influence and the enterprise of the crusades.

Ginzburg sets considerable store by the widespread mythological theme of lameness or loss of one shoe on the part of figures considered to occupy a shamanic vocation. This part of his reasoning is convincing, but surprisingly he has no interpretation of its actual meaning. It is, however, difficult to resist the hypothesis that the wearing of a single shoe symbolized the position of the shaman-priest as a walker or intercessor between worlds.

Certain elements which presumably survived into Greco-Roman, Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic religion nevertheless do seem specifically to evoke themes found in central Asian and Siberian shamanism but which are not, according to current understanding, thought of as shamanic universals. The use of animal mounts or the metamorphosis into animal form in order to undertake the shamanic journey is the most persuasive of these, as it is distinct from the more auxiliary role of spirit animals in the New World traditions. A further interesting commonality is the widespread notion identified by Ginzburg in Eurasian traditions that the spirits can resurrect animals and people from their bones, which recalls Harner’s account of ecstatic dismemberment as characterizing the shamanic vocation (and may offer a bridge to animal or even human sacrifice). Other themes found in the European witch cults and in shamanism more generally are shamanic election with the concomitant inability to refuse the vocation and the ministry of depossession as well as intervention in climatic phenomena and psychopomp activity. The Scythians, according to Herodotus, practised a form of sweat lodge in which hemp seeds were thrown on the hot rocks; certain archeological discoveries seem to support this account. Lastly, the use of the drum to induce ecstasy seems to be attested in Ginzburg’s sources, though it is far from clear how material an element it was.

Ginzburg, then, has done enough to convince us that elements of nomadic shamanistic beliefs persisted into the folk traditions of medieval Europe, although it is not entirely clear how the thinks that this has happened (in the book, the notion that there may actually exist a parallel reality the substance of which explains structural convergences cross-culturally is not even entertained; at best he allows that this may be explained by the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious). That we may be less historically estranged from these traditions than we thought we were may be an abiding legacy of his work. It nevertheless is at best suggestive, leaving much unsaid. Despite his impressive scholarship, it seems certain that there is ample evidence yet to be considered in order to give a more complete account of medieval European folk religion and its immediate and more distant antecedents.

Calvaire

Returning from my trip to Burgundy, I have been struck by the omnipresence, at the summit of perfectly pleasant hills, of crosses, incorporating or otherwise the crucified representation of the first century Jewish reformer whose cult went on, by a series of disparate embellishments, to become the major religion of the Western world. Indeed, these depictions are so ubiquitous that I was unsure whether “le calvaire” had not become, in French, whether by semantic extension or more innocent semantic regression, simply a term for the unwooded top of a hill (apparently that is not so).

When I was a kid, taken to Catholic services, I always – probably like any other kid – experienced a vivid distaste for this representation. I guess I could buy into the notion of self-sacrifice, the cruelty of the fate imposed to a good man, and even, admittedly in my wildest imagination, the ancient Near Eastern cosmic mythology of the dying and rising god, but it was never evident to me (though it is now) why this lifeless figure impaled on a cross needed to be paraded eternally before my nose.

Certain theological acrobatics endeavor to portray this scene as a moment of victory. Indeed, the success of this exegesis invited its later, equally successful emulation by Napoleon III, in search of a secular messiah in the person of the defeated and ultimately executed Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix, who conveniently (but, it later transpired, inaccurately) declared, according to the account in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, that “La Gaule unie, formant une seule nation, animée d’un même esprit, peut défier l’Univers.”

Statue of Vercingetorix in Alise-Sainte-Reine
Statue of Vercingetorix in Alise-Sainte-Reine

Whilst Vercingetorix at least, in Viollet-Le-Duc’s representation, appears proud and almost as a victor, Jesus, on the other hand, appears broken and lifeless, anything but an inspirational figure. This aspect of its postulated deity has presumably been a major weakness in uniting Christendom against the much better organized Muslim conquerors, and indeed one wonders whether Caesar would have triumphed over Vercingetorix if he had been laden down with such a handicap.

The emphasis on suffering and redemption so characteristic of Christianity both historically and culturally appears as surprisingly singular, though Shiism seems to have preserved some similar ideas from its related Zoroastrian substrate, and Judaism has applied the notion to the people in both the Deuteronomic and Zionist traditions, but not to its deity.

That suffering has a redemptive character appears almost axiomatic to many Westerners, even those who would portray themselves as emancipated from the intellectual heritage of Christianity. But we worship our suffering because we have been taught, by the most unnatural of ruses, to do so. To bear suffering without protest, convinced one is thereby serving some higher goal, is, obviously, a desirable attribute, but from one standpoint only: that of those who benefit from our quiescence.

That there is plenty of suffering in the world I do not doubt, but many cultures endure it without losing, and certainly not forever, an underlying gaiety and celebration of life. Christianity is presented to us as a solution to the problem of the existence of suffering (and even more metaphysically of evil) in the world. Yet this “problem” is entirely of its own making. That suffering is a fact does not make it a problem – unless you have devised an abstraction of God as both creator and redeemer in the first place. Our natural instinct is to flee suffering where possible and to heal it through mourning and empathy where not. To dwell on it deliberately, to find it where it does not exist, to elevate it to ubiquitous supremacy, seems a biological aberration.

And yet it is to this counterintuitive quest that the calvaires incite us: to be in the midst of the vibrant, teeming beauty of life and yet not only to find unsuspected morosity in its midst, but to prefer this morosity to celebration. Even the best in Catholic spirituality is rarely more than a lyrical accommodation to this underlying tragic conception of the world. Never does it burst free.

During all of human history and most of its present extent, the natural rhythm of life has been and is satisfactorily mirrored in rituals and cultures which have not needed any such artifice. To crown innocent hilltops with such disfigurations is, I would argue, not to honor any spirit of sacrifice: it is to stand in Pilate’s shoes, not those of his victim, institutionalizing and thereby perpetuating the cycle of persecution.