TOWARDS A MYTHOLOGY FOR OUR TIMES

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.

MASS EXTINCTION - A SHAMANIC PERSPECTIVE

As we know, this world - this universe - is dreamed into being. It is unknowable. That is why 86% of it has recently revealed itself to be dark energy - it is the dream saying the more you try to know me by your puny rational means, the more I will elude you. Evolution is the same: as a theory, it provides a tiny slice of explanation in a vast and unknowable creation.

These dream universes, they come and they go. In the deepest sense, they are illusion. The mass extinction we are seeing on this planet is painful. Life has such beauty and mystery to it. And it is unbearable if this is the only planet and when you die that is it.

Shamanism offers not just a deeper connection to life, but perspective. The eagle who sees a much bigger picture from way above. The therapy rooms are full of people grieving at what is happening to the planet. That grief is not something to be 'cured', because it is a necessary first step for anything to happen. But the planetary situation is something that the individual can do very little about. It is one of things that, to all intents and purposes, you cannot change. And cannot fully know about - who knows the full spirit reason behind the mass extinction, why these species are, in a sense, choosing to leave, and what is the longer-term process that humans are going through? 

Species have been coming and going by the trillion in different dream universes since forever, and it is all illusion - yet it is a dream we are passionately embedded in, incarnated in, we rightly care enormously about it. What we do know is that prayer works. A constant, heartfelt connection to the dreaming, a wish for its health and flourishing. A traditionally trained Native American once told me that some elders, all they do is pray. By prayer I do not mean supplicating a god, but a heartfelt and ongoing conversation with the natural world.

Perspective and prayer - these are 2 things that can, I think, make what is happening to the planet bearable.

THE CO-OPERATIVENESS OF LIFE

I'm reading a graphic book on epigenetics, which describes the complex chemical dance that goes on around DNA, that ensures that certain genes are activated, and certain ones are switched off. It's a hugely complex, delicate balance that is barely understood. And I'm left awed by it. It just seems impossible to me that there isn't a phenomenal intelligence behind this, even though there is no scientific description for such an idea. All biological complexity has this effect on me. This complexity is supposed to have come about largely through chance changes that happen to work. Impossible. 

The human body is 1 trillion cells co-operating. That is surely the basis for life itself, one giant co-operation, one Great Spirit behind it all, beyond rational comprehension. This is why, when they kill an animal, the Native Americans thank that animal for giving its life. It's maybe best not taken too literally, but there is also a deep truth in it, and a gratitude that goes with it: that life is essentially co-operative, life loves all other forms of life. Maybe we are the first society ever to see life as essentially competitive, and to have a Creation Story based around that.

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Evolution vs The Perennial Philosophy

I don't believe that consciousness 'evolves'. Evolution is a 19th century abstraction that we impose on our experience. And I'm suspicious, because the primary mechanism for evolution is 'survival of the fittest', a harsh and unforgiving ethos that merely reflects the capitalism of the day. A Creation Myth (for that is what it is) that justifies the worst in human nature.

A few months ago I had a dream in which I saw a speckled moth, beautifully part of and belonging to its surroundings, and at the same time I understood that evolution as we know it told us virtually nothing about how this moth came to be.

I'm not a creationist. You could say I'm a metaphysical agnostic: I just don't know how these things come to be, and I don't think they can be understood in any simple 'rational' way.

I think that Evolution is generally understood mythologically rather than scientifically. This is because most of us haven't seriously studied the evidence, yet so many accept it as a fact that you don't seriously question. It is therefore mostly a belief. We accept it because it tells a story about how we came to be, that is more acceptable nowadays than the Biblical creation myth. We accept it more for emotional than intellectual reasons.

There is nothing wrong with this. We need stories about the world that are emotionally appealing. It has always been this way. These stories contain truths about existence, and ideally you need some of them to contradict each other, just so we don't think we are in possession of the 'one truth'.

The problem with evolution as a story is that it twists life into a brutal struggle, and reduces the scope of existence to the visible, material world. (As quantum physicists have asserted, it is consciousness, not matter, that is primary.) Evolution is a story posing as an unassailable fact, that continues in an inverted form the brutal creation myth of the Old Testament.

It is this resonance with what came before that contributes to the emotional appeal of evolution. Intellectually we are satisfied because evolution opposes the religion we have left, emotionally we are satisfied because it resembles that religion, with the added bonus that humans are now at the top of the Great Chain of Being instead of somewhere in the middle.

It is because of this emotional appeal that Evolution is firmly accepted as a theory on the basis of evidence that would be laughed out of court in most other scientific disciplines. There is more direct evidence, for example, of homeopathy working, but again for emotional reasons, that evidence is frequently rejected.

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No-one has seen evolution occur, the most we have directly seen is a bit of adaption to circumstances, which is not the same thing. The evidence is partial and circumstantial. Something has gone on, we know that from the fossil record. And DNA studies show that all forms of life on earth are closely related to one another, which is a wonderful result.

But how a whole new species arises is not understood. Assuming it is consciousness, not matter, that is primary (though that statement itself suggests a divide between matter and consciousness that I don't think exists), I think new species are dreamed into being by consciousness, as much as they are generated by physical processes.

Though to what purpose they are dreamed into being is a mystery, part of the Great Mystery, the unknowability of existence.

This piece was prompted by an article by astrologer Glenn Perry, in which he sets the development of astrology in the context of a purported 'evolution' of human consciousness, in which he (wrong-headedly) declares "It must be emphasized that human awareness at this stage (4000 B.C.-1500 B.C.) was still quite dim, more like a toddler’s consciousness than a modern adult human."

Evolution has become central to the way we think about life, and it is natural to take the step of thinking of evolution as not just a physical process but as a mental/emotional process.

Evolution implies progress from an inferior stage to a superior stage of life. It is not just saying that change occurs - which would be fair enough - but that there is a value to it that makes the later stage in some way 'better' than the earlier stage.

It is one way of making sense of human history, but I think it is hard to get away from the implication that we are more 'advanced' than our forebears. I don't think this is justified, and if you junk that idea, then I think you have to junk the whole idea that human consciousness 'evolves'.

I used to have a Canadian Indian friend visit (yes, they call themselves Indians, not native this or that) and he was brought up speaking the language of the Chippewa Cree and immersed in their stories and philosophy. One thing that impressed me was their subtle understanding, through the stories of Wisahitsa, of the human ego and the tricks it gets up to: one of those tricks would surely be the self-important idea that we are 'superior' to our ancestors! Philosophically the tradition is keenly aware of how unknowable the universe is, refusing, for example, to take a position on what happens after death. And their philosophy and psychology is set in the richly imaginative context of the traditional stories, which my friend was able not just to tell but to expound on their meanings.

The usual patronising evolutionary story is that early people had their wonderful participation mystique with nature, which we have lost, but that is the price we have had to pay for the development of self-awareness, individuality, a strong ego and rationality.

In "The Passion of the Western Mind", astrologer Richard Tarnas says that it has been the task of masculine consciousness to forge its own autonomy and then come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, and thus recover its connection with the whole. This will constitute "the fulfillment of the underlying goal of Western intellectual and spiritual evolution." (p442)

In "The Philosopher's Secret Fire" (pp 263-6), Patrick Harpur takes issue with this position: "Evolution is a spirit notion which soul does not recognise. Traditional societies do not evolve. They live within a mythology which contains all imaginative possibilities, Earth Goddesses no less than Heraclean egos... Because we are changing, we think of ourselves as evolving. We are not. We are literalising the old myths...  If the rational ego is to disappear it is more likely to be destroyed by the ricochets of ideologies made in its own image."

My experience with my Indian friend suggested to me that early peoples are NOT lacking in rational egos - if you think about it, they needed to be a lot more creative and thoughtful than we need to be just to survive, apart from any philosophical sophistication they may have had - but rather, that ego has not become divorced from a sense of participation in nature.

As the poet Ted Hughes said: "The story of mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western Man."

I think that is the real story.

I think there are perennial truths about existence that have always been available to people from the earliest times, along with elements in our nature that can take us away from those truths. And the big truth we have lost is a felt sense of our participation in nature. What has gradually developed over the last few thousand years - ever since Plato and his separation of 'ideal forms' from nature - has been a massive loss of soul.

For a great exposition of this theme, see Anne Baring's book The Dream of the Cosmos. She explores this idea in the context of a well-researched account of the shift from lunar to solar mythologies.

There has been dazzling technological progress, and in a way it is natural to assume that makes us more 'advanced' than people who do not have that technology - as if we personally invented it! But I don't think it has made us more whole as humans.

What has developed has not been the rational ego - that has always been there - but the rational ego divorced from nature. Nature as something we can separate ourselves from and look on dispassionately, out of which has come at least as much harm as good, as the environmental crisis testifies to.


I think it is possible to view much of the technological progress of recent times as a mad dream created by an out-of-control rational ego. We didn't need all this technology for tens of thousands of years. It has been produced by a crazed mind, crazed because it has lost its roots in who it is.

The world we live in needs re-dreaming. We need to recover the perennial truths of existence, in which we are participants in, rather than observers of, the cosmos, and use that as a point of balance.
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