Myth is the collective dream of a people: The Dream as a way to return to the Center. Lucubrations on "Dream Time" (Dreamtime) of the sacred tradition of Australian Aborigines and Native Americans, starting the speech from the film The last wave by Peter Weir.
di Antonio Bonifacio
cover: jeffrey shaw, dreamtime.
"Let us dream gentlemen"
(KekulΓ©, discoverer of the benzene ring)Β
"... Chris at the trial answers a question from the lawyer:" Chris, you told me this was your tribe's territory before the British arrived, did you? " "Yup!" "And how many were those of the tribe?" "Many ... thousands." "And now? "Few ... a hundred!". "Β
From "The Last Wave" by Peter Weir. The 1977 film deals with the theme of climate change in relation to the knowledge and expectations of a secret society of Australian natives that awaits the "end of time" and scrutinizes its signs
Premise (about the last times or the last times?)
Nothing, perhaps more than Trimalcione dinner, narrated in Satyricon, approaches the paradox of the last times or, postponing the noun with an adjective, "last times". What is described in this work, attributed to Petronius, and, in particular, the staging of the funeral of Trimalcione himself, a freedman enriched beyond all reasonable measure, an event inserted right at the end of the exaggerated convivial dinner, perfectly describes the spirit with which we live in this society of ours which, by now, presents itself as almost irremediably condemned to manifest its vitality with the sole means of exaggerated and, moreover, forced hedonism. In line with what is described as suggested in the Satyricon, contemporaneity appears incapable of any spiritual renewal and, consequently, it seems destined to "drown" in its bulimic hyperconsuming, this being the only model of life he has been able to propose. It would not be talked about here and in these terms if it were not really Hossein Nasr - and this has happened in unsuspected times - has placed in a causal relationship the spiritual crisis of contemporary man with the environmental disaster that surrounds him, the latter consequence, which has carefully induced governments to organize crowded summits in which we aims to resolve the crisis, first of all, spiritual, by means of tools materials.Β
While therefore some of the so-called "great of the earth", in the name of their peoples, make generic commitments for the world universe in "matters of development and the environment", almost at the same time, they affirm, albeit with difficulty, pressed by protest of headless and remote-controlled crowds, that all this, certainly not disinterested effort, in the end, probably, will not be of any use and that the life of man on Gaia, in the very near future, will be put to a very severe test. Remaining in the Roman world, all this chatter recalls a pertinent phrase of Tito Livio: While discussions are being held in Rome, Sagunto is conquered.Β
In line with some ancient and recent "prophecies" it will happen that, probably, life on earth (at least in part) will be wiped out by the double "rebellion of fire and water", as it is in the theme of film The last wave from 1977, by Australian director Peter Weir, who proves in his works to be an astute connoisseur of traditional symbolism. From his film a sentence has been extrapolated which is placed in exergue to this short writing and which serves as an introduction to cataclysmic theme, as it is narrated in the cosmovision of native Australians even if the event will obviously involve the whole globe.Β
The hypothetical "surrender" to the ineluctability of the imminent cataclysm, which "Rome" nevertheless promises in the absence of convincing remedies, is really an observation of such importance that, for once, the epochal adjective is all there. Perhaps, for the first time, he declares, open verb, is the arrogant West, understood as Western culture, exported and imposed on the four corners of the world, appears powerless to face the effects of the damage for which it attributes responsibility to itself and therefore to agree that it does not have the tools to patch up the hole which, by itself, is 'is produced, thereby implicitly admitting that his vision of the world, so stainlessly progressive, is based on erroneous assumptions and that pursuing the program, albeit by other means, can only lead to the disastrous results we have before our eyes and , in the future, to other, even worse, consequences. We are faced with the early confession of a crime of which, unfortunately, the possible victims will inevitably be future generations.Β Β
If today's society is unable to proceed with a spiritual renewal, which would lead, by homological repercussions, to a healing effect on the material level, perhaps it is to be expected that this revolution will not spring from the exhausted West. Contrary to what one might think, the spiritual capacity of native peoples, despite the immense pressures to which their cultures have been subjected to the impact with the hegemonic civilization of the "whites", considered in all its components (material and spiritual), is remained, where possible, almost intact, at least in its founding principles. For this reason these cultures have been, and are, capable of continually reworking the damage produced by the loss of identity, as it does in an organism solicited by external forces that adapts its resources to changed circumstances. A fundamental difference marks, albeit grossly, the native cultures from the "developed" ones, that is the ability to access one's own intact spiritual resources, thus relocating oneself, whenever circumstances require it, at the time of the origins, refounding so reality in a sort of healthy "return to the golden origins". A capacity that has been denied secularly in our shores, which instead made history their founding myth and the convinced followers of this philosophy proceed on the slope of history, with a script that is parallel to that narrated in the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
In this regard, and not for nothing, Mircea eliade concluded one of his disputed text with these very heavy words that perfectly stigmatize the "Western" minority towards the indigenous peoples, especially from the religious point of view, proposing precisely the theme of comparison between the fertile mythical conception and the sterile historical conception:
"Christianity is the religion of modern man e of the historical man, of those who have simultaneously discovered personal freedom and continuous time (instead of cyclical time) [...] Christianity reveals itself without the possibility of contesting the religion of the fallen man and this to the extent that history and progress are a fall that implies the definitive abandonment of the paradise of archetypes and repetition. "Β
Mircea Eliade, The myth of the eternal return, p. 164
The myth is another "type" of history and, in fact, constitutes the account of the exemplary acts of the Supernatural Beings and this Mythistory is considered Β«absolutely true [β¦] and sacred"; the myth always refers to a "creation &", That is, he tells how something"it came into existence"; knowing the myth means knowing the "origin"Of things and being able to master them, a knowledge that"you live rituallyΒ». When you live the myth "one is taken by the sacred, exalting power of the events that are remembered and reactivated. The myths therefore represent "the paradigms of every significant human act". It is therefore evident that "Living" the myths, reactivating them ritually, constitutes an exquisitely "religious" experience, and immersive in the totally unfolded "Consciousness", which reveals to us a reality that is profoundly different from the ordinary experience of everyday life.Β
This consideration, which seems to condemn in toto and without any possibility of appeal, the historicism of Hegel and his followers and successors, could really constitute the foundation for understanding the "crisis of the modern world". Accepting history and the more or less providential design that sustains its course implies denying the possibility of refreshing oneself or refounding oneself to the paradise of archetypes and repetition, means abandoning oneself to the idea of ββan almost indefinite progress, totally losing sight of the origin, exiling oneself from it by reckless truncation. For this reason, given the extreme topicality of the topic, we want to dedicate to "Dream time", "Alcheringa"In the southern lexicon, principal expression of the archaic ontology, some considerations.Β
The "dream", the "vision dream" must be understood as a regenerative moment, certifying the ability to renew itself in different and / or jointly adverse circumstances, lera of the dream is eternal and creative Elkin argued, outlining the essential features (AP Elkin 2018, 194) and proceeding along these two tracks, through two brief interventions, it will be shown how the dream has allowed two distant cultures "in crisis" to survive and regenerate. One of the ways of approaching this dimension is typical of the aborigines of the southern continent and expresses, also by means of the peculiar pictorial art proper to those shores, the efficiency of this real ability to recovery and reshaping of one's own reality. This is briefly described for first intervention; the other part of the writing is dedicated to a βpureβ millennial prophetic movement, whose myth of origins is re-born, in different guises as a reaction to an intrusion. We refer, in this second case, to some groups of Native North Americans who have significantly manifested, in "Dance of the dream", their uncompromising will to "be there" and therefore to redefine their world against the alienation produced by a hegemonic culture, completely foreign to their worldview.
The foundation of the use of this ability to transform, by means of the ritual, time into a phenomenon recursive it is due, as Eliade points out, to the innate antihistoricism of primeval cultures which, to our one-sided way of thinking about history as a linear process. that is, of history without archetypal regulation, they contrast their way of "Remake history", which takes the form of a rejection of profane time: "Time is recorded only biologically, without allowing it to turn into history,Β that is, without its corrosive action being exercised on the conscience, by means of the revelation of the irreversibility of events ..."(The myth of the eternal return, p. 80). Hence the further conclusion that archaic man places the clear refusal to accept himself as a historical being Β». In fact, this human type does not accord value to all those concrete events which do not possess an archetypal model, and which, therefore, constitute the concrete duration: "we grasp in all these rites and in all these attitudes the will of devaluation of time. [...] Like the mystic, like the religious man in general, the primitive lives in a continuous present [...] he repeats someone else's gestures and through this repetition he lives uninterruptedly in a timeless presentΒ».
One final necessary addition. The theme of the dream will be briefly focused, as just stated, in two very distant cultures, Australian and North American, in which it is the protagonist of the local religious fabric. In this second case, the reference is focused on a population occupying a small area that has introduced a particular nativist rite, known as the dream dance. Although the dream dance it was not an ephemeral phenomenon, it in any case had a temporally and geographically limited duration, and its mention assumes the character of a significant indication of the ever latent and always actualizable regenerative capacities of these distant peoples. From a broader and more widespread point of view, we should have talked about the New World peyotism, expression of the Native American church, a broad and widespread movement, certainly also characterized by the visionary trait, which however incorporates elements of the imported religion, and does not show that rigorously nativist character that distinguishes the dream dance. In summary, peyotism is undoubtedly a syncretism, but a syncretism which, however, appears vital and articulated, albeit spurious.
For the native australian culture, the dream is obviously an essential part of the integrity of the local culture since the beginning of time, an incipit that begins, in fact, from the "dream time", understood as "true" time and which is ritually reiterated. This happens in precise calendar circumstances, or when events require it. For the natives of North America it is, in some ways, a ritual experience of rejection, a refusal in toto of the "new" of the white occupying culture, culturally reworked in a spiritual way. Even the native Australians have had ritual attitudes comparable to this, which can be found, having made all possible distinctions, in the rituals of Distraction, but this is not the place to fully address this complex issue. In both circumstances, however, a common underlying reason remains, in spite of the underlying instances that preside over religious phenomenologies and that is an integrally spiritualized conception of nature that supports both the two spiritual constructions.
βA long time ago, in the time of the dream, the whole earth slept. None of the animals, birds and fish we know today existed. Everything lay asleep beneath the earth's crust. One day the Rainbow Serpent - the principle of creation - awoke from its slumber and emerged from the earth's crust. He traveled all over the Earth, and when he returned to the place where he appeared, he woke the frogs from their sleep. The Serpent tickled their bellies and the frogs laughed, so the water they had kept inside poured all over the earth, forming lakes and rivers. " Β
AustraliaFelix, Life is a dream, the dream of a dream.
The landscape as an initiatory journey
The Aborigines who arrived from Southeast Asia about sixty thousand years ago, (and not the six thousand as the ethnographer Adolphus Peter Elkin believed, who put this figure in the subtitle of his book The Australian aborigines) permanently populated Australia without significant recognizable changes that took place over time, until at the end of the eighteenth century there was a clash with European civilization [1].
The discovery and subsequent colonization of Australia by the British resulted in the crisis and destruction of one of the most ancient and millenary cultures on the planet, here, as elsewhere, colonization expressed itself in the cheeky figure of ethnocide. The aforementioned Elkin, an Anglican presbyter on a mission to Australia, after having frequented the natives and observed their culture for a long time, decided that it was his primary task to safeguard it, through a work of reshaping it, making it adhere, as far as possible, to the canons westerners and thus saving it from inevitable destruction. Although the religious initially moved from intentions of "pure and hard" evangelization and hasty assimilation, without any will of cultural mediation (as we say today), he subsequently worked in a different and more comprehensive sense of the reasons of the interlocutor, criticizing the brutal and brisk attitudes of his invading countrymen. For this Elkin ended up with a passion for aboriginal civilizations, their uses and customs, to the point of collecting and protecting their important cultural and religious heritage through his writings that earned him a prestigious university chair. on site.Β This passage shows it:
βOnce a good old native asked me why I wanted to know so much about their customs and beliefs. In answering I mentioned the lack of understanding of indigenous life on the part of those Whites (police officers, missionaries, employers) who are most in contact with the Aborigines. [β¦] I added that I wanted to reach an understanding of indigenous life to the extent that I could pass it on to those same individuals, in the hope that they would be able to adopt a wiser attitude towards indigenous customs. [...] The old man thought, then said: "That's good; but you came too lateΒ»."
Consequently, what we study today of the local native spirituality is often almost only a simulacrum of a culture, however strongly torn, despite its recognized ability to regenerate itself in single enclaves, or characterized by the dexterity of camouflaging itself, within the culture. occupant, producing itself in renewed forms of expression, strongly anchored in the "dream time", a total and all-inclusive expression of native spirituality.
The religion, which is improperly defined as "animist", of the Australian Aborigines is based on a complex mythology that has its fulcrum, as already mentioned, in the "Dream time " (Dreamtime), a mythical container that collects a universe of "spiritual substance" that can ideally approach, in its characteristic identifying traits, the Platonic world of ideas, or, further, to Corbinian mundus imaginalis. This mythical time-place represents the spatial and temporal dimension in which the creator gods, otherwise defined as ancestral spirits, gave rise to the "sound" arrangement of a shapeless cosmos. The modalities of their displacements, in the chaotic primordial world, also took place in the dream dimension.
The Australian Gods / Heroes, protagonists of the primordial era, traveled the country "dreaming" and, acting in this dream condition, created with their singing all things and all beings, gradually emptying themselves in the form of self-sacrifice of their sound essence, until they annihilate in those fixed forms that distinguish the territory. Regarding the primordial sound essence, see the βrehabilitatingβ ethnological work of Marius Schneider, which, in its text, Primitive music, demonstrates, in a truly admirable way, how, in the Universal Tradition, cosmogony is equivalent to singing, as a form of movement: the gods are songs, that is, movements permeated with symmetry, harmony, proportion and relationships of analogy between the quantities that make up the music or the figures that build the dance [2].
In the universe of the mythical conceptions of the aborigines "create" it is therefore equivalent to "to sing"And, in fact, it is through the uninterrupted singing of these primigens that the chaotic landscape of the origins was modeled until, these primordial beings, seized by fatigue and now unable to continue, due to a sort of necessary creative anoxia, having completed the company, petrified and, consequently, fixed themselves as βmetaphysical residuesβ, in what could be defined, in contemporary language, a fossil, βfrozenβ soundscape. It does not appear "blasphemous" to combine what has been said with a reflection by Ananda K. Coomaraswami, centered precisely on the power of creative sound and its corresponding material fixation, as is found in Vedic speculation:
"Established the identification of sound - Om or Nada - with the brahman, it can be said that it is the deepest essence of every creature, but also that the whole material universe, which is none other than the same vibration-sound which, in the motion of propagation, loses refinement and changes until it becomes matter. In the unfolding of this process, the same "sound" is doubled, on the one hand it remains identical to itself and on the other it transforms [...] acquiring the character of multiplicity. [...] one spreads where the other remains immobile."
An excellent reflection on the theme of "immanent transcendence", a conception specific to a multiplicity of native cultures that are anything but primitive but, rather, primeval and therefore worthy of the utmost attention because they are directly close to the Principle. However, it is still Schneider who offers a further contribution to the understanding of the βphoticβ relationship that binds the sound al dream, intended as an intermediary "Imaginale", as it seems to us that clearly transpires from these words of his:
"The role of enlightener attributed to the gods-musicians seems to imply, from the beginning of creation, the position that ancient civilizations also recognized music within human culture. Situated between the darkness and the light of the first day, on the human level music is between the darkness of the unconscious life and the clarity of the intellectual representations. It therefore belongs largely to the world of dreams. In the first stage of creation, during which sounds gradually take on light, music precedes intelligible language as dawn precedes day. It contains both darkness and light, waters and fires at the same time. Music is the humid sun that sings the dawn. But, as the sounds become more precise, this primary "language" is divided: one part is on the way to becoming music proper; another is embodied in language composed of clear and distinct sentences, subject to logical thinking; the third part gradually transforms into matter. "
Marius Schneider, Primitive music, Adelphi, Milan, 1992, pp. 20-21
The "musician" man thus becomes co-creator, this is his task. Through the song, through the sound, learned initiatically, through the ceremonially painful distribution of its blood that occurs during a bloody initiation, it supports the propagation of life, its maintenance and its balance, which is achieved by the harmonious repetition of a take and give, without holding back. In the aboriginal rite, superabundance, surplus, wealth is never asked (goes), because adherence to this bulimic horizon, in the indigenous conception, would constitute a sort of hubris. Rather, he wondered through the indefinite and calendarally fixed repetition of the immutable rite, taught at the origins, the maintenance of status quo, considered a perfect expression of balance between the invisible and the visible world. The concept of accumulation was totally unknown in these, as in other latitudes. Β
In βholisticβ vision of the world of indigenous peoples Australians, like the Amerindians,Β the "natural landscape" is therefore always a "cultural" or rather mythical landscape and, consequently, given the fundamentally acoustic nature of reality, a soundscape. It is a whole, shaped and made significant by the presence of a spiritual power behind it illo tempore he conformed it as it is now you can see it and that it must immutably remain so by supernatural disposition, so that it does not lose its gnoseological meaning.Β
The coordinates of this thinking are supported by a mythology with a strongly hierophanic content, which makes it possible to identify the action of the "Primordials" in the geological components of the orography of the aforementioned "cultural" or, better, spiritual landscapes. It is precisely from the careful orographic observation that the local "culture" finds its references and its indispensable ritual "anchors". Physical matter is therefore anything but inanimate and it is experienced and perceived on a plane and in a totally cosmological meaning and therefore fully pulsating and "vital". The toponymy thus summarizes the cosmogony, that is, indicates those physical places, in myths of creation, in which they are found frozen the past act-chants, performed acoustically by supernatural beings, which brought into being the βrealityβ, a reality which is, however, a specular manifestation of another reality which is on another plane.Β
This cosmological and spiritual meaning of "matter", imbued with the supernatural, found social expression in the physical possession and ritual use of particles of geological matter of very varied extraction. There is talk of materials recognized particularly hierophanic also in other shores, such as quartz crystals, flint, green stones, turquoise, ocher and obsidian, the use of which is testified above all in the shamanic rituality, in which their powerful "metaphysical residuality" is constantly and variously and widely attested. These raw materials, of particular spiritual efficiency, demonstrate a marked ability to restore the lacerations that are produced in the framework of the known world, especially in relation to the many diseases that afflict man and, with it, the environment. The consistency of the theme of the importance of the beginnings is once again emphasized. Each healing is a mystical birth, a regeneration that brings back to the onset of "things". This corresponds to the well-known theorem according to which the myth would be what one "believes", while the rite would be what it is necessary to "do", however, all of this understood as factually participated and experientially lived. He writes about it Elkin"From what has been said above, it will also be evident that if a custom is not consecrated by a rite, it is considered as a simple human creation and therefore of secondary importance. (AP Elkin: 2018, 203)Β
Each Australian group had its "own" landscape assigned to the origins and this is linked to the mythical origin of the group associated with a peculiar totem. The paths included in it must be ritually updated, retracing the traces of the ancestor / primordial hero, so that the individual can be considered an effective member of the group. This is the initiatory journey (WalkAbout) which founds a real "metaphysics of nomadism" and is that "pilgrimage" that each individual must make in his or her existence to reach the original center, the first gush of creative accommodation, or the source of being. These streets are called song lines (Vie dei Canti) or even dreamtracks (Dream slopes) and, iIn reality they are both together. Constituting an essential part of the mythical heritage these paths are handed down with all sacred means available to that given group: stories, songs, dances and painting. An Australian indigenous, with sufficient knowledge of these myths, repeating the words of the interminable "Sung narratives", which describe the places, can practically travel hundreds of kilometers and thus resurrect in an orderly way the entire hierhistory that has drawn the place as it is and which, and which also makes the personal story of the viator to the place, to "his" full "being" in the world. However, because of the big the enchanting power of music, even listen to one songline (a "song" of the earth) translates into the visionary capacity and puts the initiate in a position to see, in a dreamy way, the landscape "narrated" in it.Β
"Nature" reveals itself to the native sight in its spiritual transparency, an effect that can recall, by mythological assonance with the West, the episode of Diana and Actaeon who is "divinely" mauled by the dogs of the goddess, in order to free the inner man prevented by the senses from participating experientially in the sacred. The inner man possesses the spiritual sight beyond the sensitive one and therefore sees things "behind", this in parallel with Marsyas, the cantor rival of Apollo who, of his limbs, made vagina, thus generating this occult man, hidden and darkened behind the leather tunic. This reality hides from the eyes of the flesh, thus frees itself from the inner gaze of its material superimposition, and is thus de-reified and re-interpreted according to the βtotemβ of belonging to that given group or person in charge of the place. In this way a spiritual pole is established to which the native, grasped in his individual and social dimension, joined together, is indissolubly anchored, because his social and individual being is a continuum of the landscape that surrounds it and from which it is by no means separated.
This "center" brings together every single man in a single, great spiritual collective, indissolubly tying him to the environment in which he lives. Consequently, if the reactivation of ancient mythological events fails, it is inevitable the arrival of a complete decay, of a great spiritual disorientation that manifests itself immediately in all aspects of individual and community life. It is for this reason that the aborigines in tracing the tjurna djugurba (the footsteps of mythical beings) that is the ancient Paths of Songs, visible only to their eyes, repeat the words and sounds of the ancestors who, in the long and endless journeys across an empty and lifeless continent, made the world exist by "singing it". Each rock, each spring, a water point, a patch of eucalyptus, represents a concrete manifestation of a sacred event, which is repeated incessantly on every periodic occasion to reconfirm the goodness of reality inaugurated at the origins.Β
It can therefore be said that the continent of Australia it is legible in the eyes of the aboriginal like a musical score: it is truly frozen music. Even today, every newborn inherits a section of "his" totemic song by birthright. The stanzas are the inalienable private property of the new being and delimit "his" territory of him. Once an adult, and therefore "initiated" to the revelation of creation, a mythical geography is revealed to him to learn the places where supernatural beings have celebrated rites, danced or otherwise accomplished important things. He also has the right to lend his stanzas along a song track and buy the right of way from his neighbors, receiving help and hospitality. The man who goes in walkabouts (ritual journey) he sings the stanzas of his ancestor without changing a word or a note and, in doing so, it is as if he recreated the World, starting each time from a "center".Β
The shaman and the dream time
Australian culture is aware of the erosion caused byencounter with the "totally other", as emerged from the words of Elkin's interlocutor, previously reproduced, and for this reason today he entrusts the safeguarding of his own identity, to the adaptive conservation capacity of the local shamans who perform their res gesture in favor of the community to which he belongs. The tribes of north-western Australia of the Kinberley Division, for example, in speaking of dreams, refer, as everyone does, to mythical origins of the world, to the primeval time or negligent. However, and this is the further salient aspect that affects these notes, it is essential to highlight that negligent in the circumstance it does not refer only to the state of things or to the heroes of the primordial era, considering them as a time concluded and irreversible and, ultimately, "historical". This primordial dimension can be reiterated precisely by Shamans, are they i deputies to reach the negligent.Β This ability to return to the origin unfolds in their activities of support and care of the community and, in fact, in this dream state, they draw a source of power to heal the sick, fly to distant lands, or go to the afterlife for interrogations. . They are thus able to relocate to the sacred age in which things came into being, restoring their original functions. The shaman returns to the origins, to the same creation just completed, the source of all intact power, thus traveling in "time" and "space", and the dream is the only means able to act as a "spiritual bridge" between the present and primeval time (see H. Kalweit: 1996, 15).Β
Of course, what is briefly described here, with βWesternβ approach words, is only a fragment of a much more complex and articulated mythology / rhytology, which varies according to the individual ethnic groups. In fact, what is referred to constitutes only a common denominator of what could be defined as the shamanic culture of Australia, which is used, to help understand, as far as possible, a principle that could thus be expressed: it is not the story "teacher of life" but on the contrary it is the myth that it is "teacher", as the source of all healing and regenerating powers. Β
Man and his "double"
Taking up what has been said above in relation to the perceptive capacity of a double reality, we face a final aspect of the native conception. According to this mythology, the souls of plants, animals and people are eternal and immortal: before existing on Earth, they exist in the dimension of Dream Time, as they likewise exist in the world of ideas o in the mundus imaginalis. The spirits send these souls to populate the sacred land elman becomes its responsible custodian, because mythical history has drawn order from chaos, thus transforming the chaotic earth into a sacred universe of which man is not at all its master and not even the inactive guardian, as it is his main taskΒ in feeding the sacredness of the environment with the rites that were given to him by the mythical ancestors. It is activities that really "recreate the world", pouring life into it, whenever this appears "tired" or "damaged".
The "men", in fact, assume the responsibility of preserving the "world", as done by the supernatural Beings, regenerating it periodically through the rites, among them, in particular, the multiplication ceremonies stand out (Mircea Eliade, The creativity of the spirit, page 63), All this, so briefly explained, is linked to the beginning of this work and justifies the presence of our introductory βpistolottoβ, overturning the dominated position that man has attributed to himself; the latter, to be who "uses" the world at will, in this context is conceived in an inverse role, that is, as a servant to it. The human being, having reached his sacral maturity after the initiatory apprenticeship, βserves the worldβ, nourishes it, nourishes it, makes it vigorous: this is its goal. This happens because he is the privileged recipient of the rites assigned to him ab origin.Β Man is also naturally a product of creation and therefore also possesses a "celestial double". After each death he returns, in order to perform the same sacred gestures performed at the origin and, in this regard, this passage by TCH Strehow is illuminating:
"The whole country is its living and centuries-old family tree. The story of his totemic ancestor is a tale for the indigenous of its own activities at the beginning of time, at the rising dawn of life, when the world he knows today was formed and molded by omnipotent hands. He himself had a role in that glorious adventure, a more or less large part a according to the rank occupied at that time by the Ancestor of which he is the reincarnation".
The native who repeats the primordial gestures in the rite does not only update the original founding gestures but carries out a real "platonic" anamnesis about himself, rediscovering through the education of the elderly that he, now a novice, has "already" been. Thus, in a paradox that is unacceptable to us, he relearns the same rites that he himself had originally instituted. In other words, to put it in the Western way, he is initiatedly detoxified by the letic water that he has taken as a disincarnate, and by "remembering" himself, making his metempsychosic "return", he reconstitutes himself according to the Platonic principle that "knowing is remembering". Thus, after such initiation, it "becomes" again what it always was ab origine and rediscovers its complete identity which is both contingent and archetypal. He himself, in this mnemosic operation, is the very archetype of repetition that abolishes history and, in any case, relegates "becoming" to the profane dimension: thereby denying himself roots,Β the presence of a "spirit of history" or, otherwise, of one "Providential history", because it has already been there, and it has been there once and for all, once the creation was completed. Β
The "movement of dreamers"
βWhat is man without animals? If there were no more Indians they would die of loneliness. Because whatever happens to animals will soon happen to humans. All things are connected (Dwamish) "Β
Beyond what will be explained in the following pages on the theme of the dream-vision and then determine what function the revelation contained by it conveyed in relation to the reaction requests of the nativist groups, which resorted to it to escape oppression, is to be determined. acculturation, it is necessary to pretend how much, however, the dimension of the dream experience is central in the speculation and practice of Native North Americans. This is proposed on the basis of some very valuable information offered by Henry Comba, a notable scholar of the cultures of these ethnic groups.Β
The tool that allows us to overcome the limits of ordinary perception, to go beyond the external physical aspect with which the world presents itself to the senses and how it is perceived by them and gnoseologically translated into images and sensations, is constituted by the dream and vision. of the ontological understanding of reality. This in fact strongly impressed the Jesuit missionaries who had to comment on the circumstance, in the usual contemptuous way that characterizes the genΓ¬a, with these words:Β
"Their superstitions are endless, their parties, their medicines, peaches and hunts, war, in short their life revolves around this pivot, their dreams, above all have great credit here"
The gateway opened by the dream to invisible realities is not, among the North American natives, the prerogative of single individuals, far from it. It is a door that can be opened to all and it shows the reality of the world imagine them which lies behind sensible appearances. In fact, during these suspensions of the activity of ordinary consciousness, animals and spirits present themselves in human form showing their inner aspect, their nature as people, people other than humans and for this they are extraordinarily condescending to their ecstatic visitors. There "Way of dreams and vision" it is open to all, indeed, it is necessary to all, as the visionary experience is recognized as a "teacher of life" and in fact only in those circumstances that one can be aware of the presence of that "helping spirit", in charge of caring for the 'individual (parallel to the guardian angel) (4).Β
Having said that, the fact remains that the shamans present themselves as the "specialists" of dreams and vision in a collective function, as they act for a multiplicity of individuals. These elected ecstasy specialists they are the only ones who know how to perfectly master the conversation with the members of this parallel world and derive from these ritual interlocutions a possible benefit for the group to which they belong (see on the topic Enrico Comba: 2019, page 237). This premise will allow us to better understand the absolute credit that shamanic visions received in certain native cultures of North America and at a certain historical moment.
This relatively recent movement has a "Myth" of foundation whose essential characteristics are however found rather ubiquitous in the nativist movements, movements that were born as a response to the pressure of colonization. This myth is embodied in the death and subsequent rebirth of a new "cultural hero" who will re-establish and redeem from the present the human team that adheres to this millennialist perspective. The story is this. During a persecution perpetrated by the "whites", against a group of Sioux, a young woman, to escape certain death, threw herself into the waters of a lake and stood immersed in the reeds and without any help, because the soldiers of the other side had camped nearby. It happened that the young woman, now at the end of her strength, was reached by a vision and a voice that was that of the "Great Mysterious", which taught her the forms of a new form of religious expression, based on the inscrutable contents of the dream, which are communicated plastically in a new "dance", which therefore takes on the function of a real liturgy. For this this rite was called DreamDance e the elected girl was also ordered to divulge this new rite to all Indian tribes, in first place to those with which the Sioux were in a relationship of ancestral rivalry.
The protagonist of this myth-story is emblematic of the state of an entire society placed under pressure by an intransigent acculturation and therefore in indirect and compulsory transformation, and justifies the reactive repulsive rejection of any mixture with an "other" culture, such as that of "White", because objectively the bearer of oppression. We find a way to react to it by proposing a renewed foundation myth that establishes a new rite, this time free from tribal but not ethnic particularisms, a pan-Indian rite that retraces the same modalities of initiation. If we follow the narration of the myth, this becomes evident. The Sioux plunges into the lake, almost a baptismal font, and faces the extreme crisis of death. This individual crisis, overcome by direct divine intervention, finds its precise parallel in those instances of renewal of the entire native community which, from tribal, becomes, so to speak, national, overcoming the now restricted limit of ethnicity.. In order to "be there" the old way of "being in the world" still has to die. When the girl re-emerges, after this individual "cataclysm", not only is she very much alive, but she is also totally "renewed", back to the "beginnings", having taken on the task of re-founding the world with the recovery of the contents of its origins, lived, this time, in a frame of Pan-Indian brotherhood sanctioned by the sharing of the new rite of dream dance truly primary expression of the creativity of the Spirit.Β
The old culture, certainly not died of natural death, but "drowned" due to the oppression of the occupants and now rendered unusable, gives way to a new form of religious expression in which the "dream dance" occupies a central place. The "world" is thus "rearranged" according to the new needs arising from the powerful modification of the context. It announces itself like this a new possibility of "salvation" (The dream dance is intrinsically an expression of "salvation") proposed by a religion that is completely autonomous and absolutely not mixed with that proposed / imposed by the occupier, whose soteriology it is experienced locally as completely foreign to local ethnic parameters. Ultimately we are talking about a movement that set out to build, beyond tribal particularism, a sort of unprecedented strong national identity, in hostile contrast with the new way of life that is imposed by outsiders. The old rivalries with other native ethnic groups are abolished in relation to a new pan-Indian brotherhood, in which the prophecy of some of its prominent members, heralds an era of definitive redemption from foreign domination (and this is a peculiar aspect of the "salvation").Β Β Β Β
Smohalla the visionary prophet (dreamer prophet)
Born between 1815 and 1820 in the Wallula area of ββpresent-day Washington state, Smohalla belonged to the Shahaptian Wanapum (or wanapam); At his birth he was called Wak-wei o Kuk-kia , which means "to rise from the dust of mother earth". After reaching prominence as a spiritual leader, he became known as Smohalla (o Smo-halla, Shmoqula, smux them, Smowalla, also called "preacher". Still other names associated with him include Yuyunipitqana, "the mountain screaming"And Waipshwa , "Bearer of rocks".
Smohalla, along with Skolaskin, another powerful seer, was one of several figures of dreamer-prophet charismatic, which characterized the religious events of the highland region of Colombia in a certain stoiric moment. Like any native, he underwent the traditional in adolescence "Pursuit of vision", fasting and meditating on the sacred mountain, in a particularly sacred place, near the town of Wallula, concentrated in search of his wot, or guardian spirit. Even then the "legend" of his predestination as head and founder circulated, in fact, according to the story - myth of events, he died on that mountain, but his spirit was refused entry into the "land of the dead" and ordered to return to his people as a shaman, acting as an intermediary between the tangible world and the spirit world.Β
Episodes of prophecy marked his life as a shaman, until, in an encounter-clash with another shaman, his rival, he "almost" lost his life and, when "resurrected" almost miraculously, he returned with new powers and especially with a strong identity message destined for its people who suffered from the cultural estrangement imposed by the newcomers. In that historical moment, in fact, the maximum coercive pressure of the "whites" was revealed, who unfolded their colonial will in all its aspects, including religious ones. With his apparition, truly messianic for the natives, a proud return to the purest indigenous tradition could be opposed to cultural ingestion, rejecting any flattery brought by the newcomers. Therefore, the same death-rebirth pattern is repeated for Smohalla as we saw earlier with regard to the Sioux girl, the recipient of a message of renewal, but all contained in a creative re-elaboration of the old tradition.
In the course of these revelations the prophet-dreamer also learned from the Supreme Being how much he deplored the apostasy of the Indians from their own original culture and religion and the natives, having known his extraordinary story, accepted his preaching with a strongly prophetic content- millennial, which was aimed at reconstituting the Indian nation according to pure original ways. He himself decided in 1850 to take the name of Smohalla, from a word of the local language with which the "dreamer" is indicated and it is evident, once again, how the dream, among these populations, was not only an integral part of reality but, even, it founded its legitimacy and therefore enjoyed a very high consideration. Specifically once again it is the shamanic dream that is considered the privileged vehicle of communication between Heaven and Earth, as it derives from it the revelatory character that its contents assume and which is destined to sanction the reality of divine communication.
The message of the prophet-dreamer consisted in a substantial and decisive attitude of rejection of the white culture, which could be substantial in the expression "Exasperated nativism", a term justified by the total recklessness with which every extraneous element proposed by the intruders was judged. Rejecting any form of contaminating syncretism, even if it is a facade, as happens in peyotism which later established itself as the "mass" religion of the natives - and even though it was fought with every means at the solicitation, indeed instigation of the religious authorities who came over the complacent civil authorities -, Smohalla, albeit in a peaceful way, since the Indian wars had now tragically been lost throughout the continent, aimed to constitute native enclaves (as the movement of the Hamish) totally independent and, consequently, totally extraneous to the "white" culture. This religion of his was absolutely centered on the motifs of traditional nativism, with particular emphasis on the sacredness of the earth. Own the Earth, at the end of the cycle, would return, in a form of ethnic resurrection, the dead, finally back alive. They would then be reborn into a world that was finally purified. The expected return of the dead is a hallmark of most nativist movements (if not all) but, in reality, on closer inspection, it is not their primary concern, as it is a topic that can be part of the general theme of the periodic repetition of cosmogony that Mircea Eliade treated in his book The myth of the Eternal Return and which substantiates that aspect of temporal abrogation or temporal disavowal mentioned in the Australian case. It can find found in some kind of sentence koan"don't tell me I have to leave because I'm still on my way". (3)
The religious component that makes the earth "mother" - or "grandmother" - an entity in its own right, compared to the celestial Supreme Being is the essential fracture point between the "message" brought by the whites and that of the Indians. Precisely on this point Smohalla was particularly contemptuous of the prolonged efforts by the occupier to transform Indians into farmers, because he saw, in this proposed forced transformation, the attachment to an alien and destructive culture of the indigenous values ββthat they have an indispensable point of reference in the "female" and "maternal" component. This well-known statement of him concludes this work.
"You ask me to plow the land! Should I take a knife and tear out my mother's breasts? Then when she dies she won't take me to her breast to rest. You ask me to dig for the stone! Do I have to dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be reborn. You ask me to cut the grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich as white people, but how dare I cut my mother's hair? " ... "Those who cut the land or sign documents for the land will be robbed of their rights and will be punished by the wrath of God. "
Note:
[1] The mention of Elkin in the text should not be considered an uncritical tribute to the author who held the chair of anthropology at the University of Sydney and therefore recognized authority on the subject. Certainly in his text he wrote empathic pages on the aborigines, as for example you can read in this excerpt: "I know of no more suggestive spectacle than that offered by a group of aborigines sitting on the secret ground in contemplation of their sacred symbols and in the act of singing the musical versions of the myths connected to them."(AP Elkin: 2018, page 181). The fact remains that his anthropological model of inclusion had a disastrous outcome for those populations, as can be read in the sheet below:
βThe first phase, of protection and segregation, was characterized by the ideology that the culture was in danger of extinction and that it should be protected. Society classified the indigenous as primitive and found them unable to evolve by passing through the states set by the development of civilization. For this reason many populations were locked up inside government settlements (which looked more like refugee camps) with strict laws and rules, with the aim of introducing the rhythms of European life. The idea of ββbiological assimilation became a reality and semi-official in 1937. To ensure that this idea had a scientific basis, anthropologists were mobilized who used the concept of "cultural assimilation" in their speeches. Adolphus Peter Elkin, an anthropologist, in 1939 launched a New Deal for Aborigines and assimilation becomes the official policy of the government. To carry out the assimilation, the children were removed from their parents, in an attempt to create a generation educated in the fidelity and cultural values ββof the West. Read how theAborigines Protection Act and related structures such as theAborigines Protection Board furon at the origin of a real social tragedy recognized today as a genocide scientifically accomplished to rescue children from those conditions that they believed to be primitive. This policy only served to justify the removal of children from their families, in reality, once removed they were used as small slaves. "Β
[2] Every creation the founding event is acoustic and to underline the ubiquitous nature of this concept we just have to take a passage from M. Schneider in it: the Meaning of Music:
"The biblical phrase" in the beginning was the Word "[...] belongs to the most archaic conceptual patrimony of humanity. [...] The concept of" Word ", however, only partially renders the original meaning, because here we are dealing with something that genetically precedes any given word and any logically founded concept [β¦] something primary and supra-conceptual. [β¦] The Egyptians called this primary element "laughter" or "cry" of the god Thot. The Vedic tradition speaks of being still immaterial that suddenly resounds from the stillness of not being, gradually becoming matter, and thus becomes a created world. [...] Perhaps we get closer to the original conception if instead of the expression [...] "word" we use the less circumscribed, more ingenious concepts of "cry", "sound", or "resounding syllable", which contain the primary musical substance. Only in the course of creation [β¦] do sounds acquire a precise meaning and represent, by aligning themselves with each other, words and phrases of clear and distinct content, and finally, in the course of their concretization, tangible things."
[3]
The creation of the world therefore reproduces itself every year. This eternal repetition of the cosmogonic act, which transforms each new year into the inauguration of an era, allows the dead to return to life and maintains the hope of believers in the resurrection of the body. We will soon return to the relationship between New Year ceremonies and the cult of the dead. S.we ignore as of now that the almost universally widespread beliefs, according to which the dead return to their family (and often return as "dead-alive") in the period of the new year (in the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany), they denote the hope that the abolition of time is possible in that mythical moment when the world is canceled and recreated. Then the dead will be able to return, since all the barriers between the dead and the living are broken (the primordial chaos is reactivated) and they will return, since in that paradoxical instant time will be suspended and therefore they can again be contemporaries of the living. On the other hand, since a new creation is then in preparation, they can hope for a lasting and concrete return to life β.
Mircea Eliade, The myth of the eternal return, page 87, ed. Borla
[4] The emergence of an inner guide into consciousness is a constant phenomenon when "other" states of consciousness (or "forgotten states of consciousness") are reached which can be reached by various means. Here is presented a combined experience of life and study on the topic:Β
"In the experiences with ayahuasca another factor contributes to make sense of what was previously said. I am referring to the fact that in the most advanced stages of the psychedelic experience we happen to perceive next to us the presence of a guide that is sometimes visible, other times not. I remember that it focused on my conflicts and, with extreme calm and patience, showed me the way to resolve their impact on my psyche. And this not just once for each problem, but over and over again in a row and for a very long time. From a certain point on in the sessions with ayahuasca the presence of this guide, invisible to me, was a constant. There was no verbal exchange between the two of us, no words were spoken. For me it was enough to think of a concept for this to come to the guide. I, on the other hand, perceived his teachings and advice not in the form of words, but in the form of a very strange language made up of an intertwining of memories, associations, images and intuitions that miraculously merged together to form an accomplished thought. To all intents and purposes, I experienced this silent dialogue with my guide as a real wide-ranging psychotherapeutic session as it touched on aspects that were unusual for me that had to do with my latent conflicts, with spirituality or with new realities and dimensions that we cannot frame it otherwise than in the context of transpersonal psychology.
Bruno Severi, Ayahuasca: in search of meaning, in Β«ElsewhereΒ» n. 18
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