I find
Celtic and Norse mythologies inspiring. Years ago I read Brian Bates’ speculative
Wisdom of the Wyrd, an unpacking of the Elder Edda, and it had me by the
whatsits. More recently I was studying the Mabinogion with Gwilym Morus Baird,
and there is so much in it, study these texts if you get a chance.
However, I
am not so convinced when these texts are used as the foundation for a neo-
Norse or Celtic Shamanism. These people lived a long time ago – from our lands,
yes, but they are not who we are
anymore, they belong to a foreign culture from which we can learn. Their
mythology is not our mythology. Because we have lost our traditions, we have
forgotten who we are, and we are vulnerable to imposing something on ourselves,
and trying to make it our own, in a way that is not authentic.
Nowadays we
are globalised, we have access to stories from across the world – and they too
can speak deeply to us. Are the coyote tales from the US, sometimes told by
people from a living tradition, less ‘ours’ than tales about the old Irish god Lugh?
We have to
find our way in this thing, and I am a believer in whatever works, and I don’t
have much time for the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’: it is narrow-minded
and goes against the tide of how humanity has always worked.
What I have
in mind particularly in this piece is Creation Myths. They don’t work, they are
not real, unless you really believe that the world came about in that way.
While at the same time knowing that we haven’t a clue how the world came into
being, and never will.
With this in
mind, I think it is hard for us moderns to avoid the Scientific creation
stories, namely the Big Bang (the Universe) and Evolution (Life). I might even
speculate that it is a bit false not to have them in our creation mythologies,
because they are deeply embedded in our culture, we have grown up with these
stories, and what is our Shamanism if it doesn’t grow out of the actual culture
we live in (as opposed to trying to revive something that is long gone)?
The Scientific
creation stories are unprecedented, in that they are probably the first
mythologies ever not to attribute magical or miraculous origins to Life and to
the Universe. And that, in my view, is because we have become fragmented and
reduced, rather than because we are the first people to climb out of the superstitious
past and see how things ‘really’ are for the first time.
So I think
these stories need a bit of re-working in order to take the whole human psyche
into account. It would mean they are no longer strictly scientific, but they
cannot be, for science is a partial form of knowledge, though it sometimes likes
to masquerade as the whole.
I have 3
main points that I think need to be worked in to enable the Scientific Creation
Myths to become adequate.
1/ They need
to be understood as stories rather than facts. They need to be believed in
while not being taken too literally.
This attitude is a consequence of the Shamanic understanding that the
world is dreamed into being. For some scientists, the idea of consciousness
being primary is a consequence of quantum physics. And it is helpful to have at
least one other creation story that contradicts the scientific story, whose
truth rests on its imaginative appeal.
2/ The
scientific universe does have a miraculous origin, but it is not acknowledged.
Science brings us back to an infinitesimal moment after the Big Bang, but not
to the Big Bang itself. What the Big Bang amounts to is everything suddenly
coming out of nothing. If that is not a miracle, then what is? As Terence
McKenna said, the scientific attitude to the Big Bang amounts to ‘Give us one
free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest’. The Big Bang was Spirit dreaming the
universe into being.
3/ Evolution
is a great story, a beautiful story. But it has as its mechanism ‘natural
selection’, in which new species and adaptations arise out of a combination of
blind chance and brute competition. There is nothing elegant about this
mechanism, which simply reflects the Victorian capitalism of the time in which
it arose. My argument against it is aesthetic – beauty is truth, truth beauty –
and for me that is sufficient. The scientific reasoning that is used to account
for the arising of the most complex and beautiful life forms is so dismally reductionist
as to be hardly worth arguing with. Like everything arose because it meant the
life-form concerned left more offspring. Yeah right, like people started
writing poetry because it meant they would leave more offspring. Or are we not
part of nature?
Which leads
into the other adjustment necessary to Evolution, the implication, often
unspoken, that we are somehow above nature, or at the top of the evolutionary tree,
as evolution has moved from ‘primitive’ life forms to modern advanced forms,
and indeed as humanity has moved from its ‘primitive’ forms to modern. This
egotistical attitude has its origins in Christianity, and its ‘Great Chain of
Being’, which put man above the animals (and above women!), but at least we
were below God. In ditching God, our hubristic creation mythology has reached
its apogee. It gives us license to treat the earth as we are doing. The
environmental crisis is at bottom a problem of mythology.
Another
consideration is that Science divides the universe into living forms and dead
matter, so the false question arises of when did life arise? For us Shamans,
and for anyone who has sensitivity, this division does not exist. The earth is
alive, matter is alive, so life has always been there.
So I think Evolution
needs to be seen as an unfoldment of beauty over time, by means that are fundamentally
beyond our understanding, the contemplation of which reminds us of the Great Mystery;
and when we see its beauty, it does not occur to us to rank one life-form as ‘better’
than another. Nor to divide the universe into living forms and inanimate
matter, for all is infused with Spirit.
