First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, Jun. 2002.
In the 17th Century, women were publicly weighed to assess if they were lighter than they looked. Those who failed this diabolic weight-watching test were, obviously, witches.
The rationale behind this judgement was based on assessing the woman’s ability to fly. A woman whose physical density was low (they weighed less that they looked like they should), it was argued, could jump on a broomstick and take to the skies. Other methods involved ‘ducking’ women into water on a giant swing-seat to see if, once submerged, they weighed less than a feather (the ubiquitous symbol of flight). In either case the method was madness, a way of adding credibility – through pomp and ceremony – to paranoid religious power mongering.
The outcome was the violent death, through burning, of thousands of women, especially those who practiced midwifery or healing arts. Such women had social influence beyond the remit of the contemporary dominant male institutions and were, therefore, threats to the balance of power.
In the nomadic tribes of Northern Asia the stars are believed to be puncture marks in the flysheet of some huge cosmic tent, beads of light prickling through a fabric sky. The Pole Star marks the centre of this canopy, the axis around which the cosmos organises it’s unifying order, the supporting “pole” of the great tent.
Each traditional Yurt dwelling has at the centre of its roof a hole for the fire’s smoke to escape. This hole is aligned with the axis of the Earth, an axis that runs from the Pole Star, through the universe, directly into the centre of every home, and on through the hearth where the fire’s burning heart provides each family with its life-giving energy.
Every tribal group has, living alone on the outskirts of the village, a Shaman. It is the Shaman’s job to keep open the tribe’s lines of communication with the cosmic powers of the universe. The Shaman is the mediator, the diplomat – the human partner in a complex dance. Fasting, dancing, drumming or sleep deprivation can all provide passage into another transcendent dimension. Sometimes, and famously, ‘trances’ are induced using naturally occurring hallucinogenic drugs like mushrooms or tree bark. When a journey is undertaken from the everyday physical plane, the Shaman is said to take “flight”. In some tribes these flights are up through seven consecutive layers of consciousness into the final ecstatic spiritual home of the gods – the source of the term “seventh heaven”.
Our industrial cultures and religions are littered with fragments of Shamanism – of communicating directly with forests and lakes, oceans, rivers, animals and rocks, with the spirits of these things. Our modern gods still live “up there” in the sky, the place accessible only to those who can fly. All the modern religious systems, East and West, are stuffed with the ceremony of our ancient Shamanic ancestry. But our hearths have been replaced with the flickering hypnosis of television, our daily lives no longer revolve around our homes and the rhythms of the places where we dwell. We spin instead around the Production/Consumption cycle of market economics, the chameleon prescriptions of institutionalised religion and the mindless mores of the advertising industry.
Over the millennia we have taken our Shamans and ‘witches’ and demeaned their flights as fanciful lies or else persecuted them for flying at all. With this violent diminishing of the traditions that connected us with the Earth, we stopped being in awe of the complexity and mysteries of nature and instead simplified them into ‘single servings’ of logical, digestible fact. We shifted our thinking to binary – on/off, black/white, good/evil… “with us or against us”.
This oversimplification of the world brings a huge loss of richness and meaning (and justice). Instead of being happy to engage with the sensible world through rituals and ceremonies and a cosmology of humility and reverential respect, we sought (and seek) instead to explain its mysteries with “laws”, to control it, to own it, to dominate it.
We simply cut the wings off the bird to make it easier to catch. Now we find ourselves flightless too, surrounded by the mutilated remains of our own seventh heaven. It’s time to reconsider flight.
While much of our lives are defined by the biological realism of ecology, a point I have been at pains to make in this column over the months, the meaning in our lives once the biology has been secured is largely built from our beliefs – and these beliefs in turn can either enhance or undermine our ecological reality.
I believe I can fly. Indeed, lifted on a cushion of powder snow through the silence of a Nordic forest, I have flown. The trick is this: the more open you are to the possibilities offered by free-nature, the more possibilities will open to you. Imagine wings and wings you shall have!
The Shamans have known this for thousands of years. On the one hand their flights are symbolic, to the wingless logic of Western philosophy, but on the other they add meaning to an existence that is a model of ecologically sustainable living. A 40,000 year-old model… one that works. Obviously, reducing the world to hard fact, as we have done with our science and technology, with our logic and materialism, leaves you in a shallow world of alienation and anomie – a shallow grave. The more we look to our high technology for a way out, the deeper we dig ourselves in. Technology uses resources, creates pollution, shifts wealth to those who already have plenty.
We need to revive our ancient Shamanism, revive what environmental philosopher Delores LaChapelle calls our “Spiritual Technologies”. This technology lives in the cycles and wisdom of the wild Earth, it’s there for the sharing to those who visit or inhabit wild places. But just like Peter Pan learning to fly, it will only be available to those who believe.