12.26.2007
Review: "A Short History of Myth"
In her brief but compelling book, "A Short History of Myth," the historian of religion Karen Armstrong presents a succinct introduction to mythology. She traces its function and development for human society from the dawn of history up to the modern scientific view of myth as false, and the absolute need for a return to mythic thinking in the post-modern world. While her introductory definition of mythology draws heavily on the work of Mircea Eliade and his notions of hierophanies and the "eternal return," as well as the ever-popular monomythologizing of Joseph Campbell, it does not however fall pray to the faults of either a rabid comparative mythology that refuses to acknowledge the importance of distinct cultural contexts in the development of myth, or the even more insidious notion that mythology represents a primitive mentality and un-rational explanation of natural phenomena. Instead, Armstrong describes myth as an art form or "counter-narrative," which allows man to "cope with the problematic human predicament" and "live more intensely" in the world (1-6). As such, her definition of myth harks more towards the idea that myth describes not history, but a symbolic or metaphoric relationship that orients mankind in reality. Looking at the earliest examples of religious expression in Neanderthal graves, Armstrong posits five important aspects or functions of myth: they are rooted in the experience and fear of death, are inseparable from ritual actions and re-creations, force their participants to go beyond the extremes of their experience, prescribe how humans ought to behave, and speak of a transcendent reality that mankind is always seeking for in order to affirm their existence (4-5). Starting from the earliest religious myths of hunter-gathering societies, replete with shamanistic behavior and supreme sky gods, Armstrong takes us through the violent mother deities and dying consort gods that accompanied the discovery of agriculture, the cyclic wars and floods that described the conquest of the gods of order over chaos during the rise of the city-states, the blossoming of the ethical sages and religions around the axial turn of the first millennium, the immanent descent into the historical doctrines and mysticisms of the big three monotheistic religions, and the inevitable death of myth at the hands of Western rationalism and science in the modern age. While her discussion of this history of mythology once again relies on Eliade's own theories in his "Patterns In Comparative Religion" and "Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries," Armstrong's glance at the modern uses of mythology strikes home, critiquing fundamentalists who would interpret the Bible literally, the lack of stories that help us understand the nihilistic despair of modern warfare and terrorism, and the misplaced worship of pop-culture icons, suggesting that "myth must lead to imitation or participation, no passive contemplation" (135), or worse, sterile rationalization. In order to offer some sense of hope, and to suggest a place where myth may indeed be thriving, Armstrong wraps up with a discussion of the use of mythic themes in modern literature and art, from T.S. Elliot to Malcolm Lowry. While she laments that the modern novel is at best profane and far removed from the spiritual and ritual context that engendered mythology, she suggests that reading can still be highly transformative and orienting, and that "if it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another..." and that if "professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, [then] our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world" (148-9). Despite this pronouncement that myth is primarily dead it may however be possible that we still live under the thrall of mythological tropes even today, in the guise of movie action heroes, the need for an edenic eternal youth, the desire to demonize our strangers and enemies, even in the scientific quest itself to know all that there is to know and build all that there is to build. But nonetheless, mankind seems to want to remain blissfully (or brutally) unawares of this eternal return to the mythic condition, and it may indeed be as of yet unwritten works of literature, and art, that could allow us to once again understand our selves in this world.
12.23.2007
Active Dreaming
Among other fantastic images like last night's flying fish, I have been dreaming for the past week about climbing up the endless stairwells of an enormous tower, traveling to space, and trying to find a way to unlock a solitary window at the end of a long hallway. Certainly these symbols, and the often comic ways they are framed, have some relation to things I have been paying attention to in my waking life recently, and if not, could be considered dream signs akin to attempting to turn on a light. However, I am not trying to psychoanalyze myself, or have a lucid dream, but to have an active dream (or as I might jokingly put it, to go on a dream quest), dreaming of symbols and narratives of ascension in order to dream myself to the heaven of my mythological dream world, much the way that last year I used descension narratives to dream myself "to hell and back." This original idea had come after years of studying techniques of dreaming and symbolizing, Campbell's hero's journey monomyth, Géza Róheim's "The Gates of the Dream," James Hillman's "Dream and the Underworld," and some of the classics of epic and mythology wherein a character journey's to the underworld in order to bring back some family member, lost idea, etc... Having dreamt myself to my own personal hell, to face my deepest unconscious fears head on before getting back into school and moving on with my life, I figured it was time to continue the journey in the other direction, especially since the question of gods and spirituality has been a much larger, imminent unknown for so much of my life.
In order to do this, I have been giving my focus to symbolisms that surround such mystical or shamanic ascents (cf. Eliade's writings on the topic in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries and Images and Symbols): climbing ropes, stairs, towers, the cosmic tree, birds (and angels), the spheres of the heavens, rainbows, etc... visualizing these kinds of scenes each night before going to bed, and attending to such images as they might turn up in my waking life. So far I have had a rather stunning success finding myself working my way up through the tower of sleep (always a potent symbol in my dreaming), but I also know that I could get stuck here, that some other image is needed, like a puzzle that needs its key in order to move on. During the early stages of my descension dreaming I found myself similarly confronted with and stuck in scenes reminiscent of the accompanying narrative symbols I was trying to evoke until I finally realized that one of the dream characters was asking me for three coins, much like those given to the ferryman by the dead. Consequently I took three coins with me into the next dream (under my pillow, with other similar dream tools), and was finally able to descend to the depths I had sought. Of course, I'm not quite sure what sort of similar symbol or tool accompanies ascension narratives, perhaps being much less familiar with the literature, but my dreams keep suggesting that music might unlock the window so that I can leap out and fly.
In order to do this, I have been giving my focus to symbolisms that surround such mystical or shamanic ascents (cf. Eliade's writings on the topic in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries and Images and Symbols): climbing ropes, stairs, towers, the cosmic tree, birds (and angels), the spheres of the heavens, rainbows, etc... visualizing these kinds of scenes each night before going to bed, and attending to such images as they might turn up in my waking life. So far I have had a rather stunning success finding myself working my way up through the tower of sleep (always a potent symbol in my dreaming), but I also know that I could get stuck here, that some other image is needed, like a puzzle that needs its key in order to move on. During the early stages of my descension dreaming I found myself similarly confronted with and stuck in scenes reminiscent of the accompanying narrative symbols I was trying to evoke until I finally realized that one of the dream characters was asking me for three coins, much like those given to the ferryman by the dead. Consequently I took three coins with me into the next dream (under my pillow, with other similar dream tools), and was finally able to descend to the depths I had sought. Of course, I'm not quite sure what sort of similar symbol or tool accompanies ascension narratives, perhaps being much less familiar with the literature, but my dreams keep suggesting that music might unlock the window so that I can leap out and fly.
12.20.2007
The End of the States as We Know them
Writing my research paper on the failure of the 1890 Ghost Dance of the Lakota Sioux, it seemed that though the Lakota had been unable to bring about a millenarian destruction of the invading European-Americans, their fierce sense of independence and traditional religious practices still held strong, and has carried their culture through Western dominance till today. In this light it is fairly amazing, but not at all surprising to see that the Lakota People have declared independence from the U.S. government, finally able to overcome 150 years worth of broken treaties, and are inviting anyone who lives in the five surrounding states to join them in their new Nation. Furthermore, the Navajo are also seeking support for their own tribal Constitution, and it seems that there is a broad push across the country for American Indian tribes to take up the mantel of self-governance. I think this is splendid, and it's about time that peoples who have been oppressed for the last century and a half are finally able to take a stand for their autonomy. We can only wonder if states like Vermont will now make their own pushes to secede.
Over the summer I had a chance to check out the new National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian Institute in D.C., and was informed of the some of the difficult problems faced with trying to establish representation for a people who are not one central body-politic, but countless tribes, each with their own distinct culture and mytho-historical milieu. While the museum is run by a tribal council, it turns out that only the richest tribes responded to the open call for artifacts, leading to claims of unfairness by the unrepresented tribes. Consequently, the museum exhibits suffered from trying to give the broadest view to the most distinct of tribes across the Americas, often loosing any sense of context that didn't seem to do any justice to the wealth of cultures, or the influence of Western European ideas and practices on traditional patterns of behavior, such as this ritual prayer circle marked with quotes from the Book of Revelations:
Such apocalyptic fantasizing may not always have a place in American Indian mythologies (the Mayans aside, but when you believe time is cyclical, would you predict that the world will end in 2012?), but the icy climes of Norway certainly lend themselves to their Ragnaroks, which might be why the Norwegians have built a 'doomsday vault' to house a collection of all the world's seeds. When Lif and Lifthrasir inherit the earth after the doom of the Aesir at the jaws of the Fenrir wolf and the Jormungand serpent, the surviving humans will surely want something to eat, and the means necessary to continue culture.
Personally I am in support of such "7th Generation" contingency plans, and while I'd like to believe I have a more enlightened (and less terrified) view these days of what the future holds, there's never any telling if crazy idiots with itching fingers wouldn't just release a nuclear apocalypse. Perhaps more likely, in my opinion, would be an immanent break down of technology. It frightens me that the world is moving all of its media onto digital, and that if one day the parts for computers are no longer available, or the tools to repair them, or any combination of technological failures, then what will become of culture? While storing seeds is a valiant idea, I would also like to see a "time-proof" vault created to store paper copies of the world's greatest literature, philosophies, scientific manuscripts, dictionaries, a true hermetic(ally sealed) library, so that in some distant age people can still maintain an idea of the history of culture, without having to figure out what to play these shiny little discs on.
Over the summer I had a chance to check out the new National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian Institute in D.C., and was informed of the some of the difficult problems faced with trying to establish representation for a people who are not one central body-politic, but countless tribes, each with their own distinct culture and mytho-historical milieu. While the museum is run by a tribal council, it turns out that only the richest tribes responded to the open call for artifacts, leading to claims of unfairness by the unrepresented tribes. Consequently, the museum exhibits suffered from trying to give the broadest view to the most distinct of tribes across the Americas, often loosing any sense of context that didn't seem to do any justice to the wealth of cultures, or the influence of Western European ideas and practices on traditional patterns of behavior, such as this ritual prayer circle marked with quotes from the Book of Revelations:
Such apocalyptic fantasizing may not always have a place in American Indian mythologies (the Mayans aside, but when you believe time is cyclical, would you predict that the world will end in 2012?), but the icy climes of Norway certainly lend themselves to their Ragnaroks, which might be why the Norwegians have built a 'doomsday vault' to house a collection of all the world's seeds. When Lif and Lifthrasir inherit the earth after the doom of the Aesir at the jaws of the Fenrir wolf and the Jormungand serpent, the surviving humans will surely want something to eat, and the means necessary to continue culture.
Personally I am in support of such "7th Generation" contingency plans, and while I'd like to believe I have a more enlightened (and less terrified) view these days of what the future holds, there's never any telling if crazy idiots with itching fingers wouldn't just release a nuclear apocalypse. Perhaps more likely, in my opinion, would be an immanent break down of technology. It frightens me that the world is moving all of its media onto digital, and that if one day the parts for computers are no longer available, or the tools to repair them, or any combination of technological failures, then what will become of culture? While storing seeds is a valiant idea, I would also like to see a "time-proof" vault created to store paper copies of the world's greatest literature, philosophies, scientific manuscripts, dictionaries, a true hermetic(ally sealed) library, so that in some distant age people can still maintain an idea of the history of culture, without having to figure out what to play these shiny little discs on.
12.18.2007
Magic Chords
Taking a break from working on my dream novel, I was trying to catch up on the internet, and decided that I haven't written much under the topics of magic, music, and ritual. These three modalities often go hand in hand, and Dr. Clothey even suggested that it would be interesting for someone to look closer at the intersection of music and religion.
Music and performance in the modern world often take on highly ritual aspects, a charged atmosphere, the priestly musicians encanting powerful rhythms that effect the audience on a deep physiological level. From the reunion of Led Zeppelin a band charged with magical iconography and Crowleyan flair, to a description of watching someone play Guitar Hero as a spiritual experience, people are often caught up in what seems to be the sheer mysticism of music. Certainly rhythms have pervaded ritualizing throughout history, and the act of playing music can seem to transcend time, but it is the effect on the listener that holds the most magic and mystery, whether as a cue for emotional catharsis, ecstatic dancing, social communitas or revolution. Woodstock and the Beatles, punk rock as a determining factor in culture, spilling far beyond the edge of the stage. No one knows quite how the tension caused by the dissonance and resolution of vibrating air molecules can have such profound effects, even to the point of certain chord patterns like the tritone being cast as unholy, and countless stories arising of songs being taught by the devil (from Tartini to Robert Johnson). In my dreams the devil plays the violin, and I am a priest in a rock and roll cathedral.
From my years of experience playing music to packed crowds, I can say that it was always somewhat breathtaking to be able to cast such swaying spells over so many people with just the movement of fingers on a guitar, to see everyone break into song on the chorus and afterwards spill into the streets still singing into the night. Even the act of playing with other people, regardless of an audience, is ritualistic in itself, the way that musicians jamming together will stumble upon a song, and suddenly find themselves transported, carried on waves of sound that seem to come from a much deeper place, where it is not the musicians writing the song, but riding it, the music a great beast writhing to its own rhythm for all eternity that we can just tap into sometimes, like the ancient alchemists debating the harmonic song of the spheres. Talk about a reaffirmation and transcendence of the self, or better yet, sing.
As music guru David Byrne suggests in a discussion of the future of music with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, "You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends," and in his survival guide for emerging artists, "in the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory."
Music and performance in the modern world often take on highly ritual aspects, a charged atmosphere, the priestly musicians encanting powerful rhythms that effect the audience on a deep physiological level. From the reunion of Led Zeppelin a band charged with magical iconography and Crowleyan flair, to a description of watching someone play Guitar Hero as a spiritual experience, people are often caught up in what seems to be the sheer mysticism of music. Certainly rhythms have pervaded ritualizing throughout history, and the act of playing music can seem to transcend time, but it is the effect on the listener that holds the most magic and mystery, whether as a cue for emotional catharsis, ecstatic dancing, social communitas or revolution. Woodstock and the Beatles, punk rock as a determining factor in culture, spilling far beyond the edge of the stage. No one knows quite how the tension caused by the dissonance and resolution of vibrating air molecules can have such profound effects, even to the point of certain chord patterns like the tritone being cast as unholy, and countless stories arising of songs being taught by the devil (from Tartini to Robert Johnson). In my dreams the devil plays the violin, and I am a priest in a rock and roll cathedral.
From my years of experience playing music to packed crowds, I can say that it was always somewhat breathtaking to be able to cast such swaying spells over so many people with just the movement of fingers on a guitar, to see everyone break into song on the chorus and afterwards spill into the streets still singing into the night. Even the act of playing with other people, regardless of an audience, is ritualistic in itself, the way that musicians jamming together will stumble upon a song, and suddenly find themselves transported, carried on waves of sound that seem to come from a much deeper place, where it is not the musicians writing the song, but riding it, the music a great beast writhing to its own rhythm for all eternity that we can just tap into sometimes, like the ancient alchemists debating the harmonic song of the spheres. Talk about a reaffirmation and transcendence of the self, or better yet, sing.
As music guru David Byrne suggests in a discussion of the future of music with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, "You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends," and in his survival guide for emerging artists, "in the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory."
Nothing but Annihilation
Over the summer, Sophie encouraged me to try a writing exercise of typing free-association images for a given number of minutes each day, and then putting them away unread to be used for a poem later on. I forgot all about them with the advent of school, and found them today while going through my boxes and files during the process of moving. I immediately had to write a poem, which I realized I haven't done in at least a year now.
Nothing but Annihilation
A dark wolf stalks the forest of tin cans and wire,
Slouching over the guardrail and wood-grain of the night.
A solemn golem hunting the hawk-winged angel; Poisoned
Primroses pinned to his suit jacket, shotgun slung over one clay shoulder,
His howls darkling the streetlamps in this tar-pool rain.
Leopard skin bankbook glistening with the fat sweat of his pleated palms,
His tie a hangman’s noose, a serpent woven from liquid gold and ashes
Poised for flight on an arrow of wooden slats and silver dollars.
The lions of greed drink from these dark labyrinths of blood and roses,
An abyss of birds and buildings, clocks falling into the river.
A small dog in a trashcan sinking into the night’s warmth, trailing
The riverbed sewn with hatchets and revolvers, buttons and petrified sinew.
Language is a body dying in the window of the beast called mouth,
Tongues of flame and honey, a shoe forgotten in the gutter’s memory.
She sleeps on a bed of crushed velvet and scavenged newspapers,
A ladder made of bones, the morbid sacrality of moist lungs and halos.
The angel’s thigh, draped in white garments stained a pale rose.
She dreams of dollar-fled fields and pounds of corpulent text,
A child’s face of pure joy, illuminated by the subtlest matrices,
A destroyer of time as her hair sweeps the prismatic streets clean.
Stars fall bleeding to the pavement, crying softly at night to go home,
Small lightning bugs of molten metal and mutilated machinery
Dance like jeweled scarves and cinnamon sticks under the half-eaten moon,
Beneath the weight of a thousand plastic worlds twirling on tilted poles.
The beast weeps at his own reflection, falters the gun into the wasteland,
The sky askew and smoke smiting the city with razor-wire clouds,
He weeps alone, binding the hours till sunrise, presents for a time
When the whole feathered mechanism bursts into flames and hosannas.
Nothing but Annihilation
A dark wolf stalks the forest of tin cans and wire,
Slouching over the guardrail and wood-grain of the night.
A solemn golem hunting the hawk-winged angel; Poisoned
Primroses pinned to his suit jacket, shotgun slung over one clay shoulder,
His howls darkling the streetlamps in this tar-pool rain.
Leopard skin bankbook glistening with the fat sweat of his pleated palms,
His tie a hangman’s noose, a serpent woven from liquid gold and ashes
Poised for flight on an arrow of wooden slats and silver dollars.
The lions of greed drink from these dark labyrinths of blood and roses,
An abyss of birds and buildings, clocks falling into the river.
A small dog in a trashcan sinking into the night’s warmth, trailing
The riverbed sewn with hatchets and revolvers, buttons and petrified sinew.
Language is a body dying in the window of the beast called mouth,
Tongues of flame and honey, a shoe forgotten in the gutter’s memory.
She sleeps on a bed of crushed velvet and scavenged newspapers,
A ladder made of bones, the morbid sacrality of moist lungs and halos.
The angel’s thigh, draped in white garments stained a pale rose.
She dreams of dollar-fled fields and pounds of corpulent text,
A child’s face of pure joy, illuminated by the subtlest matrices,
A destroyer of time as her hair sweeps the prismatic streets clean.
Stars fall bleeding to the pavement, crying softly at night to go home,
Small lightning bugs of molten metal and mutilated machinery
Dance like jeweled scarves and cinnamon sticks under the half-eaten moon,
Beneath the weight of a thousand plastic worlds twirling on tilted poles.
The beast weeps at his own reflection, falters the gun into the wasteland,
The sky askew and smoke smiting the city with razor-wire clouds,
He weeps alone, binding the hours till sunrise, presents for a time
When the whole feathered mechanism bursts into flames and hosannas.
12.17.2007
The mind is the medium
I have recently been considering the possibility that I am agnostic. Certainly, I have had countless experiences that bespeak of some higher force at work, if not in the whole Universe, than at least in my life. On the one hand I once believed that I had met what could be called "God," and was shown the totality of existence and all the various supra-conscious structures that we call deity, and on the other hand, and much later on, when everything was falling to pieces and I quite certainly thought I was going to die, I gave up all sense of control and prayed, and somehow managed to find or be given that which I most needed to continue living. I was raised Catholic, yet never believed in the Christian idea of God, I have read the texts of countless religions, read about the mind, belief, mediums, and have a deep abiding sense of spirituality in my life. And yet, I am really not certain that I can prove that a "god" exists, or that it is even necessary to.
The other day Sophie was reading a book about the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, which we plan on visiting this summer, and while I've never exactly seen a ghost, I've known plenty of people who claim they have, which albeit is a quantitatively smaller experience than claiming to have met God, is still an interesting example to ask the question, where do these extra-real events happen? More and more I begin to wonder if they are not just an aspect of our subjective experience, or as the psychologist and medium Stan Gooch [via Technoccult] might put it, these events arise from our unconscious minds in the same way that we create an alternative universe in our dreams. While I'm not as inclined to side with Gooch's perspective that ghosts, and presumably dreams and God, are caused by an imbalance of the psyche when we repress our unconscious (though this might explain why so many conservatives are devout Christians), I do think it's fair to say that the only way we can know of these things is through the experience of our senses, and that when all the perspectives are on the table, there will always be more things in heaven and earth than we can ever dream of in our philosophies. I tend to agree with the Lily Dale community's definition of a Spiritualist as someone "who believes, as the basis of his or her religion, in the continuity of life and in individual responsibility," which doesn't ask one way or another for a belief in God, and frankly it seems a very materialist agenda to ask only if God exists or not, when perhaps the real question may resolve in whether or not your life has been open to and touched by more than you can rationally account for.
The other day Sophie was reading a book about the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, which we plan on visiting this summer, and while I've never exactly seen a ghost, I've known plenty of people who claim they have, which albeit is a quantitatively smaller experience than claiming to have met God, is still an interesting example to ask the question, where do these extra-real events happen? More and more I begin to wonder if they are not just an aspect of our subjective experience, or as the psychologist and medium Stan Gooch [via Technoccult] might put it, these events arise from our unconscious minds in the same way that we create an alternative universe in our dreams. While I'm not as inclined to side with Gooch's perspective that ghosts, and presumably dreams and God, are caused by an imbalance of the psyche when we repress our unconscious (though this might explain why so many conservatives are devout Christians), I do think it's fair to say that the only way we can know of these things is through the experience of our senses, and that when all the perspectives are on the table, there will always be more things in heaven and earth than we can ever dream of in our philosophies. I tend to agree with the Lily Dale community's definition of a Spiritualist as someone "who believes, as the basis of his or her religion, in the continuity of life and in individual responsibility," which doesn't ask one way or another for a belief in God, and frankly it seems a very materialist agenda to ask only if God exists or not, when perhaps the real question may resolve in whether or not your life has been open to and touched by more than you can rationally account for.
12.13.2007
The Future of Religious Studies
I just had my last talk with Dr. Clothey before the end of the semester and his return to retirement. He mentioned that he has a few more books left in him, including a collected essays on mythology that sounds intriguing, and we debated a little about boundary situations, the need for religious studies to branch into other fields such as literature and music (as well as into other cultures than the current fascination with Hindu and Judeo-Christian religions), modern atheism vs. spirituality, and the necessity of balancing historical vs. comparative studies (a topic that has been increasingly engaging my mind as I struggle to figure out just how it is possible to still give credence to the occurrence of religious phenomena for a particular people while at the same time attempting to understand deeper structures or meta-symbols that may occur throughout human spiritual experience). While Clothey seemed particularly glad of my interest in this field he seemed a bit saddened by the state of Religious Studies both at Pitt and through other Universities. Though many of these programs are growing, most of the interesting journals no longer exist, and any of the really interesting people to study under are either retired or retiring. Furthermore, he suggested that it might be difficult to get a job in the field without a specialization in some particular culture, and even then it's certainly not something to do for the money. Of course, I'm not fascinated by spiritual narratives because I think anyone will pay me to look at them, rather because I think there is something of inestimable value to be learned that may still be useful to understanding human experience, even if this means having to puzzle through all this myself. Thank goodness there are libraries.
Before our talk I checked out "The Forbidden Forest," Mircea Eliade's epic novel which weaves together in a narrative many of his thoughts on myth and symbol, and was quite pleased to find these thoughts in his introduction, which seem to sum up so much of my own desire to study narratives of dreams and beliefs:
"...literature is, or can be, in its own way an instrument of knowledge. Just as a new axiom reveals a previously unknown structure of the real (that is, it founds a new world), so also any creation of the literary imagination reveals a new Universe of meanings and values. Obviously, these new meanings and values endorse one or more of the infinite possibilities open to man for being in the world, that is, for existing... The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of a structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales...
"Quite as revealing in my view are the experiments carried out... in connection with the psychology and physiology of sleep... they confirm the organic need of man to dream- in other words, the need for "mythology." At the oneiric level, "mythology" means above all narration, because it consists in the envisioning of a sequence of epic or dramatic episodes. Thus man, whether in a waking state or dreaming... has need of attending upon adventures and happenings of all sorts, or of listening to them being narrated, or of reading them. Obviously, the possibilities of narrative are inexhaustible, because the adventures of the characters can be varied infinitely. Indeed, characters and happenings can be manifest on all planes of the imagination, thereby making possible reflections of the most "concrete" reality as well as the most abstract fantasy...
"...man- is continually fascinated by the chronicling of the world, that is, by what happens in his world or in his soul. He longs to find out how life is conceived, how destiny is manifest- in a word, in what circumstances the impossible becomes possible, and what are the limits of the possible. On the other hand, he is happy whenever, in this endless "history" (events, adventures, meetings, and confrontations with real or imaginary personages, etc.) he recognizes familiar scenes, personages, and destinies known from his own oneiric and imaginary experiences or learned from others."
Before our talk I checked out "The Forbidden Forest," Mircea Eliade's epic novel which weaves together in a narrative many of his thoughts on myth and symbol, and was quite pleased to find these thoughts in his introduction, which seem to sum up so much of my own desire to study narratives of dreams and beliefs:
"...literature is, or can be, in its own way an instrument of knowledge. Just as a new axiom reveals a previously unknown structure of the real (that is, it founds a new world), so also any creation of the literary imagination reveals a new Universe of meanings and values. Obviously, these new meanings and values endorse one or more of the infinite possibilities open to man for being in the world, that is, for existing... The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of a structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales...
"Quite as revealing in my view are the experiments carried out... in connection with the psychology and physiology of sleep... they confirm the organic need of man to dream- in other words, the need for "mythology." At the oneiric level, "mythology" means above all narration, because it consists in the envisioning of a sequence of epic or dramatic episodes. Thus man, whether in a waking state or dreaming... has need of attending upon adventures and happenings of all sorts, or of listening to them being narrated, or of reading them. Obviously, the possibilities of narrative are inexhaustible, because the adventures of the characters can be varied infinitely. Indeed, characters and happenings can be manifest on all planes of the imagination, thereby making possible reflections of the most "concrete" reality as well as the most abstract fantasy...
"...man- is continually fascinated by the chronicling of the world, that is, by what happens in his world or in his soul. He longs to find out how life is conceived, how destiny is manifest- in a word, in what circumstances the impossible becomes possible, and what are the limits of the possible. On the other hand, he is happy whenever, in this endless "history" (events, adventures, meetings, and confrontations with real or imaginary personages, etc.) he recognizes familiar scenes, personages, and destinies known from his own oneiric and imaginary experiences or learned from others."
12.11.2007
While two gods skip court, another faces imminent execution
In a move somewhat reminiscent of the goats ritually sacrificed to fix a Nepalese jet, but with far greater implications for the modern validity and legality of myth, an Indian judge has summoned two Hindu gods to court to help resolve a 20-year-old property dispute [via Technoccult]. While they are still waiting for Ram and Hanuman to show up so they can decide who owns the land adjacent to temples dedicated to the two gods, this raises a host of serious question for the modern world.
Can mythic beings own property? What is the legal status of godhood? Where do the gods actually live so they can be contacted? Will the mothers of all the heroic demigods finally file paternity lawsuits? How intricately is human life still wrapped up in the stories of religion?
Earlier I came across an the first two essays on Shadow Democracy of a planned ten part series titled: "Does God Have a Future?" The second article had some interesting points about the rise of spirituality versus the decline of religious participation, a suggestion that modern man (I can only assume the article refers to Americans in particular) is moving towards a view of spirituality that does not necessarily include the worship of distinct deities. While organized religious participation may be down, it is also worth noting that ritual behavior is up, and hundreds of new religious movements have been created in the last few decades. However, I was a bit disappointed with a few perspectives from the first article, not the least of which was that it only focuses on the Christian God, as if He were the only deity active in the world right now. Furthermore, the article suggested that God has mainly been a means for explaining natural phenomena, a point that I recently tried to address my problems with, and suggests that God and religion are inseparable, which also makes me wince. While I generally appreciate any current discussion on the subjects I fear that perspectives like this only add fervor to the "new atheist" movement. Not that it's necessary, or possible, to prove whether or not gods actually exist, but it is certainly disheartening to know that a lot of bright minds, and a lot of everyday yahoos, are belittling religious feelings and practices as nothing more than a quirk of human consciousness that should play no part in the modern, rational world. It makes me feel that, among all the otherwise interesting projects I have planned for my life, I will have to spend an inordinate time defending the validity and efficacy of myth, ritual, and spiritual experiences, both in their historical contexts and as a real, lived existential condition that still pertains to the modern world.
Can mythic beings own property? What is the legal status of godhood? Where do the gods actually live so they can be contacted? Will the mothers of all the heroic demigods finally file paternity lawsuits? How intricately is human life still wrapped up in the stories of religion?
Earlier I came across an the first two essays on Shadow Democracy of a planned ten part series titled: "Does God Have a Future?" The second article had some interesting points about the rise of spirituality versus the decline of religious participation, a suggestion that modern man (I can only assume the article refers to Americans in particular) is moving towards a view of spirituality that does not necessarily include the worship of distinct deities. While organized religious participation may be down, it is also worth noting that ritual behavior is up, and hundreds of new religious movements have been created in the last few decades. However, I was a bit disappointed with a few perspectives from the first article, not the least of which was that it only focuses on the Christian God, as if He were the only deity active in the world right now. Furthermore, the article suggested that God has mainly been a means for explaining natural phenomena, a point that I recently tried to address my problems with, and suggests that God and religion are inseparable, which also makes me wince. While I generally appreciate any current discussion on the subjects I fear that perspectives like this only add fervor to the "new atheist" movement. Not that it's necessary, or possible, to prove whether or not gods actually exist, but it is certainly disheartening to know that a lot of bright minds, and a lot of everyday yahoos, are belittling religious feelings and practices as nothing more than a quirk of human consciousness that should play no part in the modern, rational world. It makes me feel that, among all the otherwise interesting projects I have planned for my life, I will have to spend an inordinate time defending the validity and efficacy of myth, ritual, and spiritual experiences, both in their historical contexts and as a real, lived existential condition that still pertains to the modern world.
12.10.2007
Haunting Tradition: Ritual Failure in the Lakota Ghost Dance
Haunting Tradition: Ritual Failure in the Lakota Ghost Dance
On December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers massacred over three hundred and fifty Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, in response to a supposed “Indian Outbreak” (Mooney 119). Both the agents in charge of the Lakota reservations and the Bureau of American Ethnology believed that a ritual form, known as the Ghost Dance, might have been responsible for the hostility of the Lakota tribe that led to the Wounded Knee massacre (Wallace vii). The Ghost Dance doctrine, as it was preached by the prophet Wovoka of the Paiute tribe in Nevada, may have originally contained a message of interracial peace, but the Lakota, who adopted the ritual in early 1890, believed that this dance would bring about an “Indian millennium,” both destroying their white oppressors and restoring all aspects of their traditional way of life (Mooney 14, 19). Extreme socio-economic deprivations may have led the Lakota to practice this version of the Ghost Dance (Mooney 73), and though some scholars, such as Alice Kehoe, argue that the Ghost Dance revitalized Lakota life prior to, and after, the Wounded Knee massacre (Kehoe 143), this ritual may also have failed to achieve its hoped for millenarian purpose. By looking at specific ways in which the ritual form of the Lakota Ghost Dance was derived, and deviated, from both Wovoka’s original doctrine and traditional Lakota ritualizing, and by applying Ronald Grimes’ classifications of ritual sensibilities and infelicitous performances, it may be possible to offer an interpretation of if and how the Lakota Ghost Dance failed.
Prior to European-American settlement in North America, the Sioux held an immense territory across the Great Plains, on which an unlimited food supply of buffalo and the acquisition of horses in the 1600s made them the largest and strongest Native American tribe until the middle of the 19th Century (Mooney 69). Though Sioux is the common name for these tribes, it is derived from a derogatory term given to them by the Ojibwa tribe, the Sioux’s traditional enemies; the Sioux called themselves Lakota, Dakota, or Nakota, which in their own dialect mean “allies” or “friends” (Mooney 293). Historically, the Sioux organized their tribe from a large number of smaller hunting bands (DeMallie and Parks 6), and were divided into three distinct linguistic divisions, depending on geographic location across the plains: the eastern Santee, middle Yankton, and western Teton (Mooney 293). Lakota is the self-designation from the Teton dialect, the tribal division living in what are now the states of North and South Dakota, who constituted more than two-thirds of all the Sioux (DeMallie and Parks 6-7, and Mooney 294). The Lakota were the wildest of the Sioux branches, pursuing extreme warlike behavior against neighboring tribes, and displaying an “air of proud superiority” that the ethnohistorian James Mooney found unusual among the Native Americans he had visited (Mooney 295-6). Of the 20,000 Sioux who took up the Ghost Dance, 16,000 were from this Lakota or Teton division (Mooney 61).
Written records of Christian missionaries show that the Lakota had contact with European-Americans as early as 1665 (DeMallie and Parks 7). However, in the decades following the Civil War in 1865, the United States government waged an increasing war on Native American tribes, who were seen as a hindrance to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny (Mooney 28), the expansion of European-American settlement across the entire continent. In 1868, the government negotiated a treaty with the Lakota to cut back their land into reservations; the coming of railroads, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, the Custer War in 1876, a host of epidemics, and the surrendering of more territory over the next thirteen years further reduced their hunting grounds, until the Lakota subsisted solely on government rations and the farming of arid land (Mooney 69-72). By the time the first rumors of Wovoka and his new Ghost Dance religion reached the Lakota in the winter of 1888-9, they were suffering from starvation (Mooney 29), and had become increasingly enculturated by European-American churches, farming, schools, businesses, the railroad, and the postal service (Wallace vii). In the last two decades of the 19th Century, the Lakota had been transformed from a traditionally prosperous hunting and warring lifestyle into poor farmers wearing the clothes of European-American civilization (DeMallie and Parks 12). Though scholars have generally focused on the socio-economic factors leading to the Lakota adoption of the Ghost Dance, the Sioux may still have been in a better economic position than other tribes that did not take up the Ghost Dance (Wallace ix). It is also worth noting that in the 1880s, the U.S. government had prohibited the primary Lakota ritual of the Sun Dance, due to a perception of the ritual cutting and hanging from hooks as a form of self-torture (Amiotte 75, 88), and the Lakota may have embraced and modified the new ritual in order to fill this void. These social, economic, and religious crises my have led the Lakota to perceive the rumors of a new messiah as a hope that would lead them out of their cultural deprivation (Kehoe 39).
After the Wounded Knee massacre, James Mooney was dispatched from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D. C. to investigate the Ghost Dance religion, and its messiah Wovoka, of the Paiute tribe in Nevada, who was blamed for riling up the Sioux (Kehoe 3). Mooney talked with Wovoka in person about the Ghost Dance doctrine, and was shown the ‘Messiah Letter,’ a document copied by an earlier Arapaho delegate that Mooney describes as the “genuine official statement” of the Ghost Dance religion (Mooney 22). Wovoka told Mooney that he had experienced a vision during a solar eclipse in which he had seen God living with all the Native Americans who had died, and was instructed to tell his people to be honest and to live in peace with the European-Americans (Mooney 13-4). If these instructions were followed, and the Ghost Dance performed at intervals for four consecutive nights, along with ritual bathing and feasting, the Native Americans would soon be reunited with their dead friends and families and the whole earth would be renewed (Mooney 19-20, 23). This doctrine may have drawn from Christian and Mormon theology that framed Wovoka’s upbringing in Mason Valley, Nevada, as well as from the traditional Paiute Round Dance and an earlier, failed version of the Ghost Dance in 1870 (Mooney 6, Hittman 84, 93, and 96), but it was surely a powerful promise for a people suffering from epidemics, the loss of resources, malnourishment, and cultural genocide (Kehoe 8). Despite the Ghost Dance’s origins, the Native Americans revered Wovoka as a direct messenger from the “Other World” (Mooney 7), and delegations were sent on pilgrimage to Mason Valley from around the country to seek guidance and healing for their tribes (Kehoe 6).
Wovoka’s message spread through a process of Native Americans visiting neighboring tribes, observing the ritual, becoming inspired, and returning to their own tribes with the new faith (Kehoe 8). The ritual had been communicated to the Lakota by the northern Arapaho and Shoshoni tribes of Wyoming, and a delegation was sent West by the Lakota in order to confirm the rumors (Mooney 61-3). When they returned in the spring of 1890, the Ghost Dance ritual was immediately accepted and inaugurated by the majority of the tribe (Mooney 29). According to James McLaughlin, the agent at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the Lakota were excited about the prospect of an “Indian millennium:” if they believed in and practiced the Ghost Dance their dead families and buffalo herds would return, they would be impervious to bullets, and the European-Americans would be annihilated that coming spring (Mooney 29). However, this idea of an “Indian millennium” does not seem to have been part of the original Ghost Dance doctrine; it was only among the warlike Lakota Sioux that the Ghost Dance assumed this hostile expression (Mooney 19).
Part of the reason for the broad acceptance and distortion of Wovoka’s Ghost Dance message was that the doctrine was abstract enough to allow for a variety of local interpretations (Wallace viii). Each tribe reconstructed the central Ghost Dance beliefs in a return of the dead and the regeneration of the earth from their own mythology, and each believer filled in the details from their own life and trance experiences (Mooney 19). The idea that the earth must be renewed was common to a number of Native American tribes (Mooney 27). The Lakota believed that this renewal of life would occur in the early spring, when the earth’s natural regeneration takes place, and was the time of year when their annual Sun Dance ceremony was formerly held (Mooney 19-20), in which a sacrifice is performed in order to recreate the world and reactivate the wakan, or sacred power of the Universe (Amiotte 76). Similarly, the Lakota strongly believed that the spirits of the dead still exist in the world and can be reached for support (DeMallie and Parks 21). Wovoka’s message, “when your friends die, do not cry,” was interpreted by the plains tribes as forbidding their customary funerary practice of killing horses, burning property, and gashing the mourner’s body, and instead trances were performed during the dance in which they could communicate directly with their dead (Mooney 24, 186). More importantly, Wovoka’s suggestion of living in peace was interpreted as a call to put down the war dances, scalp dances, and the self-inflicted violence of the Sun Dance, that had been an integral part of life for warring plains tribes like the Lakota (Mooney 25).
However, there may have been some discrepancy in Wovoka’s original message that allowed the Lakota Sioux to interpret it in such a millenarian way. It is possible that Wovoka had different revelations that he offered to his different visitors, reflecting doctrinal shifts before and after the perceived involvement of his Ghost Dance in the Wounded Knee massacre (Hittman 98). Black Elk, a Lakota wicaša wakan, or holy man, recounts that Wovoka told the Sioux delegation that a “cloud was coming like a whirlwind” that would crush the old world and restore the buffalo (Neihardt 233). This prediction may have spoken to the central Lakota myth of the White Buffalo Woman, wherein two men hunting buffalo come across a mysterious woman and one of them is filled with evil thoughts towards her. The woman destroys this man with a cloud, reveals herself as Wakan Tanka, a manifestation of the “Great Mystery,” and gives the other man a sacred pipe, the tribal rituals, and the sanction of the buffalo as an everlasting food source (Looking Horse, 68 and DeMallie 28, 31). The offering of the pipe was the primary means of prayer for the Lakota Sioux, and was ritually accompanied by the physical and spiritual cleansing of the sweat lodge, and the communal sacrifice of the Sun Dance, which had been practiced without interruption throughout the previous century (DeMallie and Parks 14). When the Lakota adopted the Ghost Dance in 1890, they included in their adopted version several aspects from these rituals, as well as their mythic desire to see the “evil man,” now embodied by the European-Americans, destroyed in a similar supernatural cloud, altering both the original Ghost Dance doctrine and their own traditional religious practices.
Lakota religion was not separate from everyday life, and due to man’s ability to share in the wakan power, no distinction was seen between man and nature, or between nature and the supernatural; the world was characterized by a sense of unity or oneness (DeMallie 27-8). This relationship to the sacred, established in the myth of the White Buffalo Woman, was symbolized as a fixed and unending circle, and characterized Lakota ritualizing until the advent of European-American settlement and the decline of the buffalo (DeMallie 31). The traditional rituals, whether public or private, taught through myths or personal revelation, were all patterned in accordance to this circular relationship with the Wakan Tanka (DeMallie 33). The Lakota had no standardized theological beliefs; though the tribe shared basic spiritual concepts, individuals formulated specific knowledge of the wakan, whereas the rituals eventually reached an accepted public structure through continual repetition (DeMallie 34). Lakota rituals were often spoken of in terms of “pleasing” the all-powerful wakan beings, and it was believed that if they were left unsatisfied, the Wakan Tanka would do great harm to mankind (DeMallie 33, 29). Consequently, the power of the rituals made their performance dangerous, and if executed incorrectly the rituals would fail to produce their desired results, bringing on the wrath of the wakan beings, which led to an importance of proper instructions for novices and a greater uniformity of rituals (DeMallie 34). Despite pre-established ceremonial forms, Lakota ritualizing was not static, and could be changed through the influence of each individual’s visionary experience (DeMallie 42-3, and Kehoe 71). Mooney felt that such innovative visionary states were the primary feature of the Ghost Dance, and that Native Americans have an implicit faith in the content of such dreams and visions (Mooney 186, 16). Lakota participants would strive to imitate whatever they had seen while entranced, creating new songs, objects, games, and articles of clothing to be used in the next dance (Mooney 186). This mutability of Lakota ritualizing possibly accounts for what may have been a rapid, and spiritually dangerous, accruement of ritual innovations in their Ghost Dance over against Wovoka’s original doctrine.
The Lakota Ghost Dance had many features in common with Wovoka’s Ghost Dance, and with the traditional Paiute Round Dance: the ritual leaders sat in the middle of the dance circle, fires were kept on the outside, no instruments accompanied the ritual songs, and both men and women danced with joined hands, moving from right to left in the direction of the sun (Hittman 93-4, Mooney 179, 185-6, and Neihardt 237). The Lakota also participated in the communal feast that was part of every large Native American ceremony, and in the continuation of the Ghost Dance over four nights, as four was considered a sacred number in most Native American belief systems (Mooney 24), presumably indicating the four cardinal directions. Like in Wovoka’s original Ghost Dance, the Lakota ritual began with the wicaša wakan painting the dancers faces with a red-ochre paint given to the Lakota delegates by Wovoka, which the Paiute collected from their sacred mountain, Mount Grant, and was supposed to ward off illness and assist in the mental vision of the trance (Mooney 20-1). The Lakota however used other colors of paint determined by individual trance visions, and a variety of specific tribal designs that were painted on the dancer’s cheek or forehead (Mooney 68, 184).
Other differences arise between the two versions of the Ghost Dance, drawn from traditional Lakota ritual forms. While the Lakota followed Wovoka’s instruction to bathe in a stream, in order to wash away evil and dirt after the ritual, they also began the Ghost Dance with a large version of their traditional sweat lodge, in which a circular framework of willow branches is covered with blankets, and then filled with the steam from heated stones splashed with water in order to ritually purify those within (Mooney 186, 66-8). The Sweat Lodge was used to begin all Lakota ritualizing, representing the mother’s womb from which the ritual participants would be reborn (Mooney 29, and Looking Horse 72), in the same way they believed that they had been born from the womb of the earth in unity with the buffalo (DeMallie 27). A tree was also raised in the center of the Lakota Ghost Dance circle from which a sacred bow and arrows were hung, along with other ritual objects (Mooney 182, 30). The inclusion of the sweat lodge and a central tree were not found in the Paiute Ghost Dance, though a non-sacred pole was used in the traditional Piute Round Dance in order to orient the dancers in the circle (Mooney 46-7, Hittman 94). Due to Wovoka’s explicit message of peace, weapons like the bow and arrows were specifically disallowed in the Paiute Ghost Dance (Mooney 30). Finally, though trance visions became a dominant feature of the Ghost Dance for many tribes, including the Lakota, Wovoka claimed that there were no innovative trances in the Paiute Ghost Dance, a statement Mooney confirmed through eyewitness reports from neighboring ranchmen (Mooney 14). However, it does seem that Wovoka demonstrated visionary trance performances to the Lakota delegation as part of his preaching campaign, which may have helped lead the Lakota to adopt both the Ghost Dance and the use of trances in their ritual (Neihardt 231-2).
The Lakota use of a tree in the center of the Ghost Dance circle, and the opening ritual sequence associated with the tree are of particular significance as an example of individual innovation from the established ritual form of the Sun Dance. Mooney notes that at many Lakota camps, after the preparatory face painting, the Ghost Dance participants gathered in a circle around the tree, and a woman signaled the beginning of the dance by shooting four sacred arrows, made in the traditional fashion with bone heads dipped in the blood of a steer, towards each of the four cardinal directions. These arrows were then tied to the tree along with the bow, a gaming wheel and sticks, and a horned staff, while the woman remained standing throughout the performance holding a sacred redstone pipe stretched towards the west, from where the messiah was supposed to appear (Mooney 68). A wicaša wakan may also have taken the horned “ghost stick,” which was roughly six feet long and trimmed with red cloth and feathers, and waved it over the participants heads while they faced the sun in the east (Mooney 178-9). Short Bull, a Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation who had been part of the delegation to visit Wovoka, was said to have been responsible for the innovations of the woman holding the pipe and shooting arrows (Mooney 299, 31). Upon their return, the delegates proselytized for the Ghost Dance and acted as its ritual leaders, often changing it to fit their own cultural precepts (Mooney 65). In Short Bull’s version of Wovoka’s message, a tree should be raised in the middle of the dance circle, and objects representing the Lakota and surrounding tribes were to be placed in the four directions (Mooney 31).
However, Short Bull may have derived some of these innovations in the Lakota Ghost Dance from aspects of the Sun Dance. The focus in this traditional ritual was a tree placed in the center of the sacred circle to act as an axis mundi, connecting above and below into a place where the wakan powers could descend to communicate with mankind (Amiotte 79). Like in the Ghost Dance, the Sun Dance tree was painted with the sacred red paint, and hung with offerings, cloth, and sacred bundles, which represented all the things that mankind needed in order to construct and preserve life (Amiotte 83). Likewise, in the Sun Dance, a woman touched the tree with the sacred pipe as an offering to the wakan powers; she was supposed to represent the White Buffalo Woman, while the pipe symbolized the center of the world and the tobacco expressed all things in the universe being gathered in this one place (Amiotte 85). However, as this traditional earth renewal ritual had been recently prohibited, Short Bull seems to have taken the inward-looking Sun Dance symbolism and directed it beyond the boundaries of their established religious forms. Perhaps there was a hope that the Ghost Dance ritual would be able to renew their culture both from within the ritual tradition of the sacred tree and pipe, and from without, through the messiah in the west, the wakan power of the sun in the east, and the support of all the surrounding Native American tribes who were also participating in the Ghost Dance. It is possible that such innovations and adaptations are an integral part of the ritual process, serving to legitimate new religious forms in relation to traditional patterns of behavior (Clothey 5), and while the Lakota seem to have adapted their version of the Ghost Dance to their traditional rituals, there are still innovations that may not have been founded in their desire to ritually “please” the wakan powers.
The horned staffs that were hung on the tree and waved over the dancer’s heads may have originated in a trance vision Black Elk had during his first participation in the Ghost Dance. In the account of this trance that he gave to the poet John Neihardt, Black Elk claims that he saw these red-painted sticks being used by the dead in the spirit world, along with “ghost shirts” that he afterwards made for other members of the tribe (Neihardt 241-4). While the staffs seem to have been one of many other innocuous innovations envisioned into the Ghost Dance, the Ghost Shirts became an integral part of the Lakota ritual and constituted the most significant break from both their own traditions and Wovoka’s original doctrine.
The Ghost Shirts were made in a traditional fashion from white cloth and sinew, fringed and adorned with feathers, and painted with a variety of designs drawn from mythology and trances (Mooney 31-4). All adherents to the Ghost Dance religion, men, women, and children, wore the Ghost Shirts as an outside garment during the ritual and under their ordinary clothes at all other times (Mooney 31). Along with the rejection of European-American clothing in favor of the Ghost Shirts, the Lakota did not allow any metal in the Ghost Dance, especially the jewelry and belts of German silver that had become an important part of their tribal costume (Mooney 30, 186). What is most striking about this ritual garment is that the Ghost Shirts were believed to be impenetrable to weapons and bullets (Mooney 34), an idea that may have readily lent itself to the Lakota doctrine of an “Indian millennium,” or helped ferment their resistance to the European-Americans, but at the very least seemed to betray Wovoka’s message of peace (Kehoe 13). When reservation police tried to disband a Ghost Dance ceremony in June of 1890, possibly the first at which the Ghost Shirts were worn, the Lakota reportedly lowered their guns and said that they would defend their religion with their lives, though by this time they may already have been defiant due to starvation (Mooney 92). The neighboring Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes rejected the innovation of Ghost Shirts as being an example of “Sioux belligerency” that distorted Wovoka’s doctrine (Kehoe 14, and Mooney 35), and when Mooney asked the messiah about the Ghost Shirts in person, Wovoka disclaimed any responsibility for this war-like novelty, and said it was better for the Native Americans to peacefully “adopt the habits of civilization” (Mooney 14).
While Black Elk claims some credit for devising the Ghost Shirts in his trances, and introducing them to other Lakota reservations (Neihardt 249), Mooney suggests that Kicking Bear, another of the delegates sent to Wovoka, was actually the idea’s originator (Hittman 85), or at least its disseminator (Kehoe 13-4). It is worth noting that on first seeing the Ghost Dance performed, Black Elk told Neihardt that he was surprised at how much the ritual coincided with a vision he had experienced earlier in his life, but had not told anyone (Neihardt 249, 237). While this may say something about the efficacy of visionary experiences, or the interconnectedness of Native American symbolism as a whole, the belief in the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts may have been equally inspired from outside of Lakota cultural practices. Lakota warriors were customarily protected by feathers, tiny bags of sacred powder, war paint, or animal claws twisted into their hair, and went into battle naked above the waist, as any covering would have hindered their movements (Mooney 34). It is instead possible that the Ghost Shirts were motivated by observations of Mormon “endowment robes,” a white and symbol-clad badge of office (Mooney 34), that the Mormons believed would protect them from disease, death, and even bullets (Kehoe 13, and Hittman 85). The Mormons living in the Nevada area had a long contact with and interest in the local Native Americans, and the concept of invulnerable articles of clothing may have spread to the Lakota through other tribes (Mooney 35). Furthermore, while Wovoka disclaimed credit for the Ghost Shirts in his talks with Mooney, independent reports suggest that Wovoka claimed to be invulnerable to bullets himself; among the various magical tricks and visions he used to demonstrate his powers as a prophet to the Native American delegates, Wovoka would apparently let himself be shot at and yet remain unharmed (Hittman 83-4). Perhaps the Lakota delegates saw the messiah’s act of invincibility, which along with reports of the Mormon “endowment robes,” and their own war-like nature, lent credibility to Black Elk’s vision of the Ghost Shirts as a central vestment of the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual.
While a belief in the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts and the immanent destruction of the European-Americans may have added to the Lakota feelings of discontent and defiance, the official U.S. government statement on the causes of the Wounded Knee massacre suggests that these were only symptoms of and a defensive reaction to the already staggering cultural and economic deprivations suffered by the Sioux tribes (Mooney 74-6). The Lakota did not actively revolt until troops were called onto their lands in November 1890, in response to the fears of the reservation agents that they were losing control of the Native Americans (Mooney 73, 95). Even after the prohibition of the Ghost Dance on the reservations; the death of Sitting Bull, a conservative chief whose camp had become a center for plotting resistance to the government; and the panicked flight of Short Bull, Kicking Bull, and many Lakota from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations into the Badlands of South Dakota after the arrival of troops, Mooney believes that there was still no premeditated “Indian Outbreak” leading to the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek (Mooney 99, 108, 119). However, on the morning of December 29, 1890, when the Lakota were being rounded up from the Badlands to be disarmed and returned to the reservations, a wicaša wakan named Yellow Bird continued to urge the Lakota warriors to resist by claiming that their Ghost Shirts would keep them safe (Mooney 115-8). This final incitement, along with what was most likely a rather tense situation, may have proved a tipping point; when Yellow Bird threw a handful of dust into the air, the Lakota took this as a signal to attack, precipitating the return fire of the government troops (Mooney 118), and the interment of the Lakota Ghost Dance as a historical anomaly. One wounded woman said after the massacre that she no longer wanted her Ghost Shirt, as it had failed to protect her from the bullets (Mooney 34), and though a few Lakota leaders continued to proselytize for the Ghost Dance afterwards (DeMallie and Parks 8), the majority of the tribe gave up the new religion, as they may have become convinced that their expectations of invulnerability, and of a coming supernatural assistance for their plights, were groundless (Mooney 200).
While ritual studies have generally ignored rites that do not work, participants may experience ritual failure as often as success, and to engage in ritual criticism may presuppose that rituals can “exploit, denigrate, or simply not do what people claim they do” (Grimes, Ritual 284, 282). It is, however, necessary to determine on what grounds the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual did not work. As the ritual theorist Ronald Grimes suggests, one difficulty in critiquing rituals is that there is often no separation between “failure in” and “failure of” the ritual; is the problem in the performance of the ritualists, in the ritual itself, or in the relation between the ritual and its surrounding “religiocultural processes” (Grimes, Ritual 290)? In the Lakota Ghost Dance we have the hostility and trance innovations of the Lakota, the inclusion of Ghost Shirts and weapons within the originally peaceful ritual, and a discrepancy between the stated desires of the Lakota Ghost Dance and both traditional Lakota ritualizing and their current socio-economic crises. Another difficulty Grimes raises in critiquing ritual is the point of view: do the ritual participants or observers determine if the ritual has actually failed (Grimes, Ritual 290)? It may be too simplistic to take a modern, rational perspective and argue that the Lakota Ghost Dance failed because Ghost Shirts cannot really protect someone from bullets, or because a supernatural cloud that will destroy the European-Americans could not really happen. Instead it is important to take the failure of the Lakota Ghost Dance on its own terms, as a ritual that could have brought about these changes if something had not gone wrong with its performance. As mentioned previously, the Lakota themselves believed that their ritualizing could fail and bring about the disastrous retribution of the wakan powers. That the Lakota stopped performing the Ghost Dance after the Wounded Knee massacre suggests that they may have believed that their ritual had failed.
In order to discuss just how this ritual may not have worked, it is first necessary to articulate what it intended to accomplish, by applying Grimes’ six modes of ritual sensibility, the “embodied attitudes, that may arise in the course of a ritual” (Grimes, Beginnings 35). The first mode, “ritualization,” establishes the relationship of the participants to their ecological and psychosomatic environments through stylized gestures (Grimes, Beginnings 36-7). In the Lakota Ghost Dance the participants would move in a circle following the direction of the sun, and all the songs were adapted to the measure of this dance step (Mooney 185), thus identifying themselves with their physical environment and spiritual powers in accordance with their traditional belief in the unity of man, nature, and the supernatural. The Lakota expressed the second mode of “decorum,” or their conventional interpersonal intentions (Grimes, Beginnings 40-1), by having the men and women dance together, and by intentionally not disturbing those who fell in trance (Mooney 181). While the Lakota placed a high value on such trance states, the spiritual powers of men and women were considered qualitatively different, reflecting a rigid distinction between their roles in everyday life (DeMallie 34). However, as women were much more likely to succumb to trances (Mooney 199), it may have been necessary to break this convention and encourage a new social unity in order to assure the success of the ritual. The third mode of ritual sensibility, “ceremony,” expresses the political or ideological power to conserve or create change (Grimes, Beginnings 41-2). Here we see the Lakota rejecting European-American clothing and tools in favor of the Ghost Shirts, and attempting to articulate their prohibited cultural heritage by offering the pipe and sacred arrows to the messiah and wakan powers. These actions, and the Lakota Ghost Dance songs that refer to the coming of the messiah and the establishment of their cultural practices in the myth of the White Buffalo Woman (Mooney 297-8), express a “liturgical” sentiment, a sense of cosmic necessity that waits on the coming of sacred powers and serves as a preparation for a coming transformation (Grimes, Beginnings 43, 49). The last mode, a “celebratory” expression of play and spontaneity (Grimes, Beginnings 48), may have only arisen in the Lakota trance innovations, and employment of new songs and sacred objects. It seems however that the Lakota were most concerned with rendering themselves invulnerable to and capable of destroying the European-Americans, as well as with restoring the buffalo and their traditional way of life. Anxiously seeking these transcendent and empirical results, the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual may be best expressed in Grimes’ terms as the sixth, “magical” mode of ritual sensibility (Grimes, Beginnings 45).
Desire is an essential factor in the efficacy of magic rituals (Grimes, Beginnings 46), but it seems unlikely that the Lakota “abused” the Ghost Dance ritual through a lack of sincerity, performing their dance without the feelings, thoughts, or intentions necessary in order to make it succeed (Grimes, Ritual 286). If anything they may have been too overzealous to revitalize their decaying religiocultural processes. Instead we must turn to other types of infelicitous performances, which Grimes adapted from J. L. Austin’s Speech-act theory. Austin makes a distinction between descriptive language, and “performative utterances:” words that do something, or fail to do what they intend, and Grimes suggests that while speech-acts only constitute one dimension of ritual action, rituals can be seen as a convergence of several performative genres that likewise have the possibility of doing something, or infelicitously failing to do something (Grimes, Ritual 283).
Beyond the “professed but hollow” abuse type of ritual infelicity, that does not seem present in the Lakota Ghost Dance, Grimes posits a typology of ritual “misfires,” based off of Austin’s own categorizations, where the ritual formula is not effective (Grimes, Ritual 284). Perhaps most directly relevant would be a “nonplay,” where the ritual procedures are either illegitimate or do not exist, among which Grimes includes rites that have been recently invented or borrowed, without being grounded in structures that might legitimate them (Grimes, Ritual 285). While some aspects of the Lakota Ghost Dance seem to be grounded in their traditional Sun Dance and sweat lodge rituals, the Lakota borrowed the main ritual form from Wovoka’s Ghost Dance teachings, itself adapted from the Paiute Round Dance, and invented several elements of their own, including the Ghost Shirts that do not seem to be supported by either religious tradition. While Wovoka’s Ghost Dance may have been a legitimate ritual for the Paiute Native Americans, for the Lakota it was possibly a “misapplication,” their desperate circumstances and warlike nature were inappropriate for the performance of a ritual originally designed to bring interracial peace (Grimes, Ritual 285). Grimes proposes that ritual participants will often blame themselves for a ritual’s failure rather than the rite itself, or blame part of the rite rather than the whole (Grimes, Ritul 291), but it seems that after the discontinuation of the Ghost Dance, the Lakota may have admitted that their ritual contained a “flaw” (Grimes, Ritual 285); their pronouncement that the Ghost Shirts would make them invulnerable proved to be incorrect, and this may have cast doubt on the efficacy of the Ghost Dance as a whole to bring about the desired millennium and earth-renewal. In this case the Ghost Dance may have produced one of Grimes’ own infelicitous types, the more serious “ineffectuality,” where a magical ritual fails to cause its intended changes (Grimes, Ritual 286). Finally, it might be worth noting that the Ghost Dance succeeded to some degree, in stirring up the Lakota to resist the European-Americans in favor of their own cultural traditions, but in doing so served as an example of ritual “contagion” (Grimes, Ritual 287); the Ghost Dance was unable to contain the Lakota’s desire for resistance and an apocalyptic destruction, and this will to violence contaminated their social relationship with the government to the point of precipitating the Wounded Knee massacre.
Grimes admits that this typology of infelicitous rituals needs more testing through application to specific rituals, but he also suggests that the right to criticize a ritual is bought with participation in it or through a richness of observations and interpretations (Grimes, Ritual 290-1). It is unfortunately too late to participate in the Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, and even Mooney himself, who was in a better position to do so, was told by the Lakota he interviewed that, “The dance was our religion, but the government sent soldiers to kill us on account of it. We will not talk any more about it” (Mooney, 296). However, even relying on the interpretation of relevant texts alone presents challenges to fully examining the Lakota Ghost Dance. The complex multivalence of symbolism and action makes ritual one of the most difficult human behaviors to evaluate; it is complicated to show that a rite has completely failed; while it may not have achieved a particular stated goal, a ritual can still have other social repercussions (Grimes, Ritual 283).
While the Lakota Ghost Dance may have failed to bring about a magical “Indian millennium,” it possibly fulfilled another aspect of ritualizing: to affirm and transform the participants’ identities and social contexts (Clothey 1-2). Alice Kehoe suggests that prior to the Wounded Knee massacre, the Ghost Dance revitalized the Lakota Sioux by reformulating their cultural patterns to better suit their needs and preferences (Kehoe 142-3). The ritual may have offered them hope of communal identity and transformation during their cultural and economic deprivations at the end of the 1800s. Though the Lakota discontinued the Ghost Dance in early 1891, the ritual spread to the Yanktonai Sioux at the Standing Rock reservation and into Canada (DeMallie and Parks 8), where the Saskatchewan Sioux gave up the practice of trances and the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts, and incorporated the Ghost Dance into their traditional Dakota Medicine Feast (Kehoe 46-8). For the Lakota, the discontinuation of the Ghost Dance allowed them to sign a new treaty in February 1891, for increased rations and an end of hostilities with the U.S. government (Mooney 145). Black Elk was also inspired by this new need for an effective ritual, and he reorganized the traditional Lakota religious practices, albeit within a Christian framework (Kehoe 40, 71), but including a revival of the Sun Dance in 1924 (Amiotte 75). In 1973, Leonard Crow Dog, a Lakota activist in the American Indian Movement, tried to revive the 1890 Ghost Dance, along with hostilities towards the European-American government, but the only result was a second Wounded Knee massacre (Kehoe 51, 86-7, and DeMallie and Parks 8), suggesting that a hostile version of the Ghost Dance truly was not an effective ritual for cultural transformation.
Little belief in the Ghost Dance ritual survives among the Lakota, besides the recollection of the more poignant Ghost Dance songs (DeMallie and Parks 8), but many of the basic spiritual concepts of the Lakota continue to develop in the context of modern life (DeMallie 27), and the Lakota reservations in South Dakota continue to serve as a locus for contemporary religious revitalization (DeMallie and Parks 7). In adopting Wovoka’s Ghost Dance over against their own cultural traditions, and altering the ritual by the inclusion of the violence-provoking Ghost Shirts, the Lakota were unable to bring about a destruction of the European-Americans through their participation in the Ghost Dance. Though this primary, magical intention failed, the performance of the Lakota Ghost Dance, during their critical period of cultural deprivation at the close of the 19th Century, may have succeeded in expressing something vital to the United States government. The Lakota desired to practice their traditional religious forms, and after the disgrace of the Wounded Knee massacre they were again allowed to do so, leading to an eventual rebirth of their cultural and spiritual beliefs that continues through the present day.
Bibliography
Amiotte, Arthur. “The Lakota Sun Dance: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 75-89
Clothey, Fred. “Rhythm and Intent.” Madras: Blackie and Son, 1982
DeMallie, Raymond J. “Lakota Belief and Ritual in the Nineteenth Century.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 25-43
DeMallie, Raymond J., Parks, Douglas R. “Introduction.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 3-22
Grimes, Ronald. “Beginnings in Ritual Studies.” Lanham: University Press of America, 1982
- - - “Ritual Criticism and Infelicitous Performances.” Readings in Ritual Studies. Ed. Ronald Grimes. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1996. Pp. 279-293
Hittman, Michael. “Wovoka and the Ghost Dance.” Expanded edition. Ed. Don Lynch. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997
Kehoe, Alice Beck. “The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization.” 2nd edition. Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc., 2006
Looking Horse, Arval. “The Sacred Pipe in Modern Life.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 67-73
Mooney, James. “The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965
Neihardt, John G. “Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988
Wallace, Anthony F. C. “Introduction.” The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965
On December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers massacred over three hundred and fifty Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, in response to a supposed “Indian Outbreak” (Mooney 119). Both the agents in charge of the Lakota reservations and the Bureau of American Ethnology believed that a ritual form, known as the Ghost Dance, might have been responsible for the hostility of the Lakota tribe that led to the Wounded Knee massacre (Wallace vii). The Ghost Dance doctrine, as it was preached by the prophet Wovoka of the Paiute tribe in Nevada, may have originally contained a message of interracial peace, but the Lakota, who adopted the ritual in early 1890, believed that this dance would bring about an “Indian millennium,” both destroying their white oppressors and restoring all aspects of their traditional way of life (Mooney 14, 19). Extreme socio-economic deprivations may have led the Lakota to practice this version of the Ghost Dance (Mooney 73), and though some scholars, such as Alice Kehoe, argue that the Ghost Dance revitalized Lakota life prior to, and after, the Wounded Knee massacre (Kehoe 143), this ritual may also have failed to achieve its hoped for millenarian purpose. By looking at specific ways in which the ritual form of the Lakota Ghost Dance was derived, and deviated, from both Wovoka’s original doctrine and traditional Lakota ritualizing, and by applying Ronald Grimes’ classifications of ritual sensibilities and infelicitous performances, it may be possible to offer an interpretation of if and how the Lakota Ghost Dance failed.
Prior to European-American settlement in North America, the Sioux held an immense territory across the Great Plains, on which an unlimited food supply of buffalo and the acquisition of horses in the 1600s made them the largest and strongest Native American tribe until the middle of the 19th Century (Mooney 69). Though Sioux is the common name for these tribes, it is derived from a derogatory term given to them by the Ojibwa tribe, the Sioux’s traditional enemies; the Sioux called themselves Lakota, Dakota, or Nakota, which in their own dialect mean “allies” or “friends” (Mooney 293). Historically, the Sioux organized their tribe from a large number of smaller hunting bands (DeMallie and Parks 6), and were divided into three distinct linguistic divisions, depending on geographic location across the plains: the eastern Santee, middle Yankton, and western Teton (Mooney 293). Lakota is the self-designation from the Teton dialect, the tribal division living in what are now the states of North and South Dakota, who constituted more than two-thirds of all the Sioux (DeMallie and Parks 6-7, and Mooney 294). The Lakota were the wildest of the Sioux branches, pursuing extreme warlike behavior against neighboring tribes, and displaying an “air of proud superiority” that the ethnohistorian James Mooney found unusual among the Native Americans he had visited (Mooney 295-6). Of the 20,000 Sioux who took up the Ghost Dance, 16,000 were from this Lakota or Teton division (Mooney 61).
Written records of Christian missionaries show that the Lakota had contact with European-Americans as early as 1665 (DeMallie and Parks 7). However, in the decades following the Civil War in 1865, the United States government waged an increasing war on Native American tribes, who were seen as a hindrance to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny (Mooney 28), the expansion of European-American settlement across the entire continent. In 1868, the government negotiated a treaty with the Lakota to cut back their land into reservations; the coming of railroads, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, the Custer War in 1876, a host of epidemics, and the surrendering of more territory over the next thirteen years further reduced their hunting grounds, until the Lakota subsisted solely on government rations and the farming of arid land (Mooney 69-72). By the time the first rumors of Wovoka and his new Ghost Dance religion reached the Lakota in the winter of 1888-9, they were suffering from starvation (Mooney 29), and had become increasingly enculturated by European-American churches, farming, schools, businesses, the railroad, and the postal service (Wallace vii). In the last two decades of the 19th Century, the Lakota had been transformed from a traditionally prosperous hunting and warring lifestyle into poor farmers wearing the clothes of European-American civilization (DeMallie and Parks 12). Though scholars have generally focused on the socio-economic factors leading to the Lakota adoption of the Ghost Dance, the Sioux may still have been in a better economic position than other tribes that did not take up the Ghost Dance (Wallace ix). It is also worth noting that in the 1880s, the U.S. government had prohibited the primary Lakota ritual of the Sun Dance, due to a perception of the ritual cutting and hanging from hooks as a form of self-torture (Amiotte 75, 88), and the Lakota may have embraced and modified the new ritual in order to fill this void. These social, economic, and religious crises my have led the Lakota to perceive the rumors of a new messiah as a hope that would lead them out of their cultural deprivation (Kehoe 39).
After the Wounded Knee massacre, James Mooney was dispatched from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D. C. to investigate the Ghost Dance religion, and its messiah Wovoka, of the Paiute tribe in Nevada, who was blamed for riling up the Sioux (Kehoe 3). Mooney talked with Wovoka in person about the Ghost Dance doctrine, and was shown the ‘Messiah Letter,’ a document copied by an earlier Arapaho delegate that Mooney describes as the “genuine official statement” of the Ghost Dance religion (Mooney 22). Wovoka told Mooney that he had experienced a vision during a solar eclipse in which he had seen God living with all the Native Americans who had died, and was instructed to tell his people to be honest and to live in peace with the European-Americans (Mooney 13-4). If these instructions were followed, and the Ghost Dance performed at intervals for four consecutive nights, along with ritual bathing and feasting, the Native Americans would soon be reunited with their dead friends and families and the whole earth would be renewed (Mooney 19-20, 23). This doctrine may have drawn from Christian and Mormon theology that framed Wovoka’s upbringing in Mason Valley, Nevada, as well as from the traditional Paiute Round Dance and an earlier, failed version of the Ghost Dance in 1870 (Mooney 6, Hittman 84, 93, and 96), but it was surely a powerful promise for a people suffering from epidemics, the loss of resources, malnourishment, and cultural genocide (Kehoe 8). Despite the Ghost Dance’s origins, the Native Americans revered Wovoka as a direct messenger from the “Other World” (Mooney 7), and delegations were sent on pilgrimage to Mason Valley from around the country to seek guidance and healing for their tribes (Kehoe 6).
Wovoka’s message spread through a process of Native Americans visiting neighboring tribes, observing the ritual, becoming inspired, and returning to their own tribes with the new faith (Kehoe 8). The ritual had been communicated to the Lakota by the northern Arapaho and Shoshoni tribes of Wyoming, and a delegation was sent West by the Lakota in order to confirm the rumors (Mooney 61-3). When they returned in the spring of 1890, the Ghost Dance ritual was immediately accepted and inaugurated by the majority of the tribe (Mooney 29). According to James McLaughlin, the agent at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, the Lakota were excited about the prospect of an “Indian millennium:” if they believed in and practiced the Ghost Dance their dead families and buffalo herds would return, they would be impervious to bullets, and the European-Americans would be annihilated that coming spring (Mooney 29). However, this idea of an “Indian millennium” does not seem to have been part of the original Ghost Dance doctrine; it was only among the warlike Lakota Sioux that the Ghost Dance assumed this hostile expression (Mooney 19).
Part of the reason for the broad acceptance and distortion of Wovoka’s Ghost Dance message was that the doctrine was abstract enough to allow for a variety of local interpretations (Wallace viii). Each tribe reconstructed the central Ghost Dance beliefs in a return of the dead and the regeneration of the earth from their own mythology, and each believer filled in the details from their own life and trance experiences (Mooney 19). The idea that the earth must be renewed was common to a number of Native American tribes (Mooney 27). The Lakota believed that this renewal of life would occur in the early spring, when the earth’s natural regeneration takes place, and was the time of year when their annual Sun Dance ceremony was formerly held (Mooney 19-20), in which a sacrifice is performed in order to recreate the world and reactivate the wakan, or sacred power of the Universe (Amiotte 76). Similarly, the Lakota strongly believed that the spirits of the dead still exist in the world and can be reached for support (DeMallie and Parks 21). Wovoka’s message, “when your friends die, do not cry,” was interpreted by the plains tribes as forbidding their customary funerary practice of killing horses, burning property, and gashing the mourner’s body, and instead trances were performed during the dance in which they could communicate directly with their dead (Mooney 24, 186). More importantly, Wovoka’s suggestion of living in peace was interpreted as a call to put down the war dances, scalp dances, and the self-inflicted violence of the Sun Dance, that had been an integral part of life for warring plains tribes like the Lakota (Mooney 25).
However, there may have been some discrepancy in Wovoka’s original message that allowed the Lakota Sioux to interpret it in such a millenarian way. It is possible that Wovoka had different revelations that he offered to his different visitors, reflecting doctrinal shifts before and after the perceived involvement of his Ghost Dance in the Wounded Knee massacre (Hittman 98). Black Elk, a Lakota wicaša wakan, or holy man, recounts that Wovoka told the Sioux delegation that a “cloud was coming like a whirlwind” that would crush the old world and restore the buffalo (Neihardt 233). This prediction may have spoken to the central Lakota myth of the White Buffalo Woman, wherein two men hunting buffalo come across a mysterious woman and one of them is filled with evil thoughts towards her. The woman destroys this man with a cloud, reveals herself as Wakan Tanka, a manifestation of the “Great Mystery,” and gives the other man a sacred pipe, the tribal rituals, and the sanction of the buffalo as an everlasting food source (Looking Horse, 68 and DeMallie 28, 31). The offering of the pipe was the primary means of prayer for the Lakota Sioux, and was ritually accompanied by the physical and spiritual cleansing of the sweat lodge, and the communal sacrifice of the Sun Dance, which had been practiced without interruption throughout the previous century (DeMallie and Parks 14). When the Lakota adopted the Ghost Dance in 1890, they included in their adopted version several aspects from these rituals, as well as their mythic desire to see the “evil man,” now embodied by the European-Americans, destroyed in a similar supernatural cloud, altering both the original Ghost Dance doctrine and their own traditional religious practices.
Lakota religion was not separate from everyday life, and due to man’s ability to share in the wakan power, no distinction was seen between man and nature, or between nature and the supernatural; the world was characterized by a sense of unity or oneness (DeMallie 27-8). This relationship to the sacred, established in the myth of the White Buffalo Woman, was symbolized as a fixed and unending circle, and characterized Lakota ritualizing until the advent of European-American settlement and the decline of the buffalo (DeMallie 31). The traditional rituals, whether public or private, taught through myths or personal revelation, were all patterned in accordance to this circular relationship with the Wakan Tanka (DeMallie 33). The Lakota had no standardized theological beliefs; though the tribe shared basic spiritual concepts, individuals formulated specific knowledge of the wakan, whereas the rituals eventually reached an accepted public structure through continual repetition (DeMallie 34). Lakota rituals were often spoken of in terms of “pleasing” the all-powerful wakan beings, and it was believed that if they were left unsatisfied, the Wakan Tanka would do great harm to mankind (DeMallie 33, 29). Consequently, the power of the rituals made their performance dangerous, and if executed incorrectly the rituals would fail to produce their desired results, bringing on the wrath of the wakan beings, which led to an importance of proper instructions for novices and a greater uniformity of rituals (DeMallie 34). Despite pre-established ceremonial forms, Lakota ritualizing was not static, and could be changed through the influence of each individual’s visionary experience (DeMallie 42-3, and Kehoe 71). Mooney felt that such innovative visionary states were the primary feature of the Ghost Dance, and that Native Americans have an implicit faith in the content of such dreams and visions (Mooney 186, 16). Lakota participants would strive to imitate whatever they had seen while entranced, creating new songs, objects, games, and articles of clothing to be used in the next dance (Mooney 186). This mutability of Lakota ritualizing possibly accounts for what may have been a rapid, and spiritually dangerous, accruement of ritual innovations in their Ghost Dance over against Wovoka’s original doctrine.
The Lakota Ghost Dance had many features in common with Wovoka’s Ghost Dance, and with the traditional Paiute Round Dance: the ritual leaders sat in the middle of the dance circle, fires were kept on the outside, no instruments accompanied the ritual songs, and both men and women danced with joined hands, moving from right to left in the direction of the sun (Hittman 93-4, Mooney 179, 185-6, and Neihardt 237). The Lakota also participated in the communal feast that was part of every large Native American ceremony, and in the continuation of the Ghost Dance over four nights, as four was considered a sacred number in most Native American belief systems (Mooney 24), presumably indicating the four cardinal directions. Like in Wovoka’s original Ghost Dance, the Lakota ritual began with the wicaša wakan painting the dancers faces with a red-ochre paint given to the Lakota delegates by Wovoka, which the Paiute collected from their sacred mountain, Mount Grant, and was supposed to ward off illness and assist in the mental vision of the trance (Mooney 20-1). The Lakota however used other colors of paint determined by individual trance visions, and a variety of specific tribal designs that were painted on the dancer’s cheek or forehead (Mooney 68, 184).
Other differences arise between the two versions of the Ghost Dance, drawn from traditional Lakota ritual forms. While the Lakota followed Wovoka’s instruction to bathe in a stream, in order to wash away evil and dirt after the ritual, they also began the Ghost Dance with a large version of their traditional sweat lodge, in which a circular framework of willow branches is covered with blankets, and then filled with the steam from heated stones splashed with water in order to ritually purify those within (Mooney 186, 66-8). The Sweat Lodge was used to begin all Lakota ritualizing, representing the mother’s womb from which the ritual participants would be reborn (Mooney 29, and Looking Horse 72), in the same way they believed that they had been born from the womb of the earth in unity with the buffalo (DeMallie 27). A tree was also raised in the center of the Lakota Ghost Dance circle from which a sacred bow and arrows were hung, along with other ritual objects (Mooney 182, 30). The inclusion of the sweat lodge and a central tree were not found in the Paiute Ghost Dance, though a non-sacred pole was used in the traditional Piute Round Dance in order to orient the dancers in the circle (Mooney 46-7, Hittman 94). Due to Wovoka’s explicit message of peace, weapons like the bow and arrows were specifically disallowed in the Paiute Ghost Dance (Mooney 30). Finally, though trance visions became a dominant feature of the Ghost Dance for many tribes, including the Lakota, Wovoka claimed that there were no innovative trances in the Paiute Ghost Dance, a statement Mooney confirmed through eyewitness reports from neighboring ranchmen (Mooney 14). However, it does seem that Wovoka demonstrated visionary trance performances to the Lakota delegation as part of his preaching campaign, which may have helped lead the Lakota to adopt both the Ghost Dance and the use of trances in their ritual (Neihardt 231-2).
The Lakota use of a tree in the center of the Ghost Dance circle, and the opening ritual sequence associated with the tree are of particular significance as an example of individual innovation from the established ritual form of the Sun Dance. Mooney notes that at many Lakota camps, after the preparatory face painting, the Ghost Dance participants gathered in a circle around the tree, and a woman signaled the beginning of the dance by shooting four sacred arrows, made in the traditional fashion with bone heads dipped in the blood of a steer, towards each of the four cardinal directions. These arrows were then tied to the tree along with the bow, a gaming wheel and sticks, and a horned staff, while the woman remained standing throughout the performance holding a sacred redstone pipe stretched towards the west, from where the messiah was supposed to appear (Mooney 68). A wicaša wakan may also have taken the horned “ghost stick,” which was roughly six feet long and trimmed with red cloth and feathers, and waved it over the participants heads while they faced the sun in the east (Mooney 178-9). Short Bull, a Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation who had been part of the delegation to visit Wovoka, was said to have been responsible for the innovations of the woman holding the pipe and shooting arrows (Mooney 299, 31). Upon their return, the delegates proselytized for the Ghost Dance and acted as its ritual leaders, often changing it to fit their own cultural precepts (Mooney 65). In Short Bull’s version of Wovoka’s message, a tree should be raised in the middle of the dance circle, and objects representing the Lakota and surrounding tribes were to be placed in the four directions (Mooney 31).
However, Short Bull may have derived some of these innovations in the Lakota Ghost Dance from aspects of the Sun Dance. The focus in this traditional ritual was a tree placed in the center of the sacred circle to act as an axis mundi, connecting above and below into a place where the wakan powers could descend to communicate with mankind (Amiotte 79). Like in the Ghost Dance, the Sun Dance tree was painted with the sacred red paint, and hung with offerings, cloth, and sacred bundles, which represented all the things that mankind needed in order to construct and preserve life (Amiotte 83). Likewise, in the Sun Dance, a woman touched the tree with the sacred pipe as an offering to the wakan powers; she was supposed to represent the White Buffalo Woman, while the pipe symbolized the center of the world and the tobacco expressed all things in the universe being gathered in this one place (Amiotte 85). However, as this traditional earth renewal ritual had been recently prohibited, Short Bull seems to have taken the inward-looking Sun Dance symbolism and directed it beyond the boundaries of their established religious forms. Perhaps there was a hope that the Ghost Dance ritual would be able to renew their culture both from within the ritual tradition of the sacred tree and pipe, and from without, through the messiah in the west, the wakan power of the sun in the east, and the support of all the surrounding Native American tribes who were also participating in the Ghost Dance. It is possible that such innovations and adaptations are an integral part of the ritual process, serving to legitimate new religious forms in relation to traditional patterns of behavior (Clothey 5), and while the Lakota seem to have adapted their version of the Ghost Dance to their traditional rituals, there are still innovations that may not have been founded in their desire to ritually “please” the wakan powers.
The horned staffs that were hung on the tree and waved over the dancer’s heads may have originated in a trance vision Black Elk had during his first participation in the Ghost Dance. In the account of this trance that he gave to the poet John Neihardt, Black Elk claims that he saw these red-painted sticks being used by the dead in the spirit world, along with “ghost shirts” that he afterwards made for other members of the tribe (Neihardt 241-4). While the staffs seem to have been one of many other innocuous innovations envisioned into the Ghost Dance, the Ghost Shirts became an integral part of the Lakota ritual and constituted the most significant break from both their own traditions and Wovoka’s original doctrine.
The Ghost Shirts were made in a traditional fashion from white cloth and sinew, fringed and adorned with feathers, and painted with a variety of designs drawn from mythology and trances (Mooney 31-4). All adherents to the Ghost Dance religion, men, women, and children, wore the Ghost Shirts as an outside garment during the ritual and under their ordinary clothes at all other times (Mooney 31). Along with the rejection of European-American clothing in favor of the Ghost Shirts, the Lakota did not allow any metal in the Ghost Dance, especially the jewelry and belts of German silver that had become an important part of their tribal costume (Mooney 30, 186). What is most striking about this ritual garment is that the Ghost Shirts were believed to be impenetrable to weapons and bullets (Mooney 34), an idea that may have readily lent itself to the Lakota doctrine of an “Indian millennium,” or helped ferment their resistance to the European-Americans, but at the very least seemed to betray Wovoka’s message of peace (Kehoe 13). When reservation police tried to disband a Ghost Dance ceremony in June of 1890, possibly the first at which the Ghost Shirts were worn, the Lakota reportedly lowered their guns and said that they would defend their religion with their lives, though by this time they may already have been defiant due to starvation (Mooney 92). The neighboring Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes rejected the innovation of Ghost Shirts as being an example of “Sioux belligerency” that distorted Wovoka’s doctrine (Kehoe 14, and Mooney 35), and when Mooney asked the messiah about the Ghost Shirts in person, Wovoka disclaimed any responsibility for this war-like novelty, and said it was better for the Native Americans to peacefully “adopt the habits of civilization” (Mooney 14).
While Black Elk claims some credit for devising the Ghost Shirts in his trances, and introducing them to other Lakota reservations (Neihardt 249), Mooney suggests that Kicking Bear, another of the delegates sent to Wovoka, was actually the idea’s originator (Hittman 85), or at least its disseminator (Kehoe 13-4). It is worth noting that on first seeing the Ghost Dance performed, Black Elk told Neihardt that he was surprised at how much the ritual coincided with a vision he had experienced earlier in his life, but had not told anyone (Neihardt 249, 237). While this may say something about the efficacy of visionary experiences, or the interconnectedness of Native American symbolism as a whole, the belief in the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts may have been equally inspired from outside of Lakota cultural practices. Lakota warriors were customarily protected by feathers, tiny bags of sacred powder, war paint, or animal claws twisted into their hair, and went into battle naked above the waist, as any covering would have hindered their movements (Mooney 34). It is instead possible that the Ghost Shirts were motivated by observations of Mormon “endowment robes,” a white and symbol-clad badge of office (Mooney 34), that the Mormons believed would protect them from disease, death, and even bullets (Kehoe 13, and Hittman 85). The Mormons living in the Nevada area had a long contact with and interest in the local Native Americans, and the concept of invulnerable articles of clothing may have spread to the Lakota through other tribes (Mooney 35). Furthermore, while Wovoka disclaimed credit for the Ghost Shirts in his talks with Mooney, independent reports suggest that Wovoka claimed to be invulnerable to bullets himself; among the various magical tricks and visions he used to demonstrate his powers as a prophet to the Native American delegates, Wovoka would apparently let himself be shot at and yet remain unharmed (Hittman 83-4). Perhaps the Lakota delegates saw the messiah’s act of invincibility, which along with reports of the Mormon “endowment robes,” and their own war-like nature, lent credibility to Black Elk’s vision of the Ghost Shirts as a central vestment of the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual.
While a belief in the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts and the immanent destruction of the European-Americans may have added to the Lakota feelings of discontent and defiance, the official U.S. government statement on the causes of the Wounded Knee massacre suggests that these were only symptoms of and a defensive reaction to the already staggering cultural and economic deprivations suffered by the Sioux tribes (Mooney 74-6). The Lakota did not actively revolt until troops were called onto their lands in November 1890, in response to the fears of the reservation agents that they were losing control of the Native Americans (Mooney 73, 95). Even after the prohibition of the Ghost Dance on the reservations; the death of Sitting Bull, a conservative chief whose camp had become a center for plotting resistance to the government; and the panicked flight of Short Bull, Kicking Bull, and many Lakota from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations into the Badlands of South Dakota after the arrival of troops, Mooney believes that there was still no premeditated “Indian Outbreak” leading to the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek (Mooney 99, 108, 119). However, on the morning of December 29, 1890, when the Lakota were being rounded up from the Badlands to be disarmed and returned to the reservations, a wicaša wakan named Yellow Bird continued to urge the Lakota warriors to resist by claiming that their Ghost Shirts would keep them safe (Mooney 115-8). This final incitement, along with what was most likely a rather tense situation, may have proved a tipping point; when Yellow Bird threw a handful of dust into the air, the Lakota took this as a signal to attack, precipitating the return fire of the government troops (Mooney 118), and the interment of the Lakota Ghost Dance as a historical anomaly. One wounded woman said after the massacre that she no longer wanted her Ghost Shirt, as it had failed to protect her from the bullets (Mooney 34), and though a few Lakota leaders continued to proselytize for the Ghost Dance afterwards (DeMallie and Parks 8), the majority of the tribe gave up the new religion, as they may have become convinced that their expectations of invulnerability, and of a coming supernatural assistance for their plights, were groundless (Mooney 200).
While ritual studies have generally ignored rites that do not work, participants may experience ritual failure as often as success, and to engage in ritual criticism may presuppose that rituals can “exploit, denigrate, or simply not do what people claim they do” (Grimes, Ritual 284, 282). It is, however, necessary to determine on what grounds the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual did not work. As the ritual theorist Ronald Grimes suggests, one difficulty in critiquing rituals is that there is often no separation between “failure in” and “failure of” the ritual; is the problem in the performance of the ritualists, in the ritual itself, or in the relation between the ritual and its surrounding “religiocultural processes” (Grimes, Ritual 290)? In the Lakota Ghost Dance we have the hostility and trance innovations of the Lakota, the inclusion of Ghost Shirts and weapons within the originally peaceful ritual, and a discrepancy between the stated desires of the Lakota Ghost Dance and both traditional Lakota ritualizing and their current socio-economic crises. Another difficulty Grimes raises in critiquing ritual is the point of view: do the ritual participants or observers determine if the ritual has actually failed (Grimes, Ritual 290)? It may be too simplistic to take a modern, rational perspective and argue that the Lakota Ghost Dance failed because Ghost Shirts cannot really protect someone from bullets, or because a supernatural cloud that will destroy the European-Americans could not really happen. Instead it is important to take the failure of the Lakota Ghost Dance on its own terms, as a ritual that could have brought about these changes if something had not gone wrong with its performance. As mentioned previously, the Lakota themselves believed that their ritualizing could fail and bring about the disastrous retribution of the wakan powers. That the Lakota stopped performing the Ghost Dance after the Wounded Knee massacre suggests that they may have believed that their ritual had failed.
In order to discuss just how this ritual may not have worked, it is first necessary to articulate what it intended to accomplish, by applying Grimes’ six modes of ritual sensibility, the “embodied attitudes, that may arise in the course of a ritual” (Grimes, Beginnings 35). The first mode, “ritualization,” establishes the relationship of the participants to their ecological and psychosomatic environments through stylized gestures (Grimes, Beginnings 36-7). In the Lakota Ghost Dance the participants would move in a circle following the direction of the sun, and all the songs were adapted to the measure of this dance step (Mooney 185), thus identifying themselves with their physical environment and spiritual powers in accordance with their traditional belief in the unity of man, nature, and the supernatural. The Lakota expressed the second mode of “decorum,” or their conventional interpersonal intentions (Grimes, Beginnings 40-1), by having the men and women dance together, and by intentionally not disturbing those who fell in trance (Mooney 181). While the Lakota placed a high value on such trance states, the spiritual powers of men and women were considered qualitatively different, reflecting a rigid distinction between their roles in everyday life (DeMallie 34). However, as women were much more likely to succumb to trances (Mooney 199), it may have been necessary to break this convention and encourage a new social unity in order to assure the success of the ritual. The third mode of ritual sensibility, “ceremony,” expresses the political or ideological power to conserve or create change (Grimes, Beginnings 41-2). Here we see the Lakota rejecting European-American clothing and tools in favor of the Ghost Shirts, and attempting to articulate their prohibited cultural heritage by offering the pipe and sacred arrows to the messiah and wakan powers. These actions, and the Lakota Ghost Dance songs that refer to the coming of the messiah and the establishment of their cultural practices in the myth of the White Buffalo Woman (Mooney 297-8), express a “liturgical” sentiment, a sense of cosmic necessity that waits on the coming of sacred powers and serves as a preparation for a coming transformation (Grimes, Beginnings 43, 49). The last mode, a “celebratory” expression of play and spontaneity (Grimes, Beginnings 48), may have only arisen in the Lakota trance innovations, and employment of new songs and sacred objects. It seems however that the Lakota were most concerned with rendering themselves invulnerable to and capable of destroying the European-Americans, as well as with restoring the buffalo and their traditional way of life. Anxiously seeking these transcendent and empirical results, the Lakota Ghost Dance ritual may be best expressed in Grimes’ terms as the sixth, “magical” mode of ritual sensibility (Grimes, Beginnings 45).
Desire is an essential factor in the efficacy of magic rituals (Grimes, Beginnings 46), but it seems unlikely that the Lakota “abused” the Ghost Dance ritual through a lack of sincerity, performing their dance without the feelings, thoughts, or intentions necessary in order to make it succeed (Grimes, Ritual 286). If anything they may have been too overzealous to revitalize their decaying religiocultural processes. Instead we must turn to other types of infelicitous performances, which Grimes adapted from J. L. Austin’s Speech-act theory. Austin makes a distinction between descriptive language, and “performative utterances:” words that do something, or fail to do what they intend, and Grimes suggests that while speech-acts only constitute one dimension of ritual action, rituals can be seen as a convergence of several performative genres that likewise have the possibility of doing something, or infelicitously failing to do something (Grimes, Ritual 283).
Beyond the “professed but hollow” abuse type of ritual infelicity, that does not seem present in the Lakota Ghost Dance, Grimes posits a typology of ritual “misfires,” based off of Austin’s own categorizations, where the ritual formula is not effective (Grimes, Ritual 284). Perhaps most directly relevant would be a “nonplay,” where the ritual procedures are either illegitimate or do not exist, among which Grimes includes rites that have been recently invented or borrowed, without being grounded in structures that might legitimate them (Grimes, Ritual 285). While some aspects of the Lakota Ghost Dance seem to be grounded in their traditional Sun Dance and sweat lodge rituals, the Lakota borrowed the main ritual form from Wovoka’s Ghost Dance teachings, itself adapted from the Paiute Round Dance, and invented several elements of their own, including the Ghost Shirts that do not seem to be supported by either religious tradition. While Wovoka’s Ghost Dance may have been a legitimate ritual for the Paiute Native Americans, for the Lakota it was possibly a “misapplication,” their desperate circumstances and warlike nature were inappropriate for the performance of a ritual originally designed to bring interracial peace (Grimes, Ritual 285). Grimes proposes that ritual participants will often blame themselves for a ritual’s failure rather than the rite itself, or blame part of the rite rather than the whole (Grimes, Ritul 291), but it seems that after the discontinuation of the Ghost Dance, the Lakota may have admitted that their ritual contained a “flaw” (Grimes, Ritual 285); their pronouncement that the Ghost Shirts would make them invulnerable proved to be incorrect, and this may have cast doubt on the efficacy of the Ghost Dance as a whole to bring about the desired millennium and earth-renewal. In this case the Ghost Dance may have produced one of Grimes’ own infelicitous types, the more serious “ineffectuality,” where a magical ritual fails to cause its intended changes (Grimes, Ritual 286). Finally, it might be worth noting that the Ghost Dance succeeded to some degree, in stirring up the Lakota to resist the European-Americans in favor of their own cultural traditions, but in doing so served as an example of ritual “contagion” (Grimes, Ritual 287); the Ghost Dance was unable to contain the Lakota’s desire for resistance and an apocalyptic destruction, and this will to violence contaminated their social relationship with the government to the point of precipitating the Wounded Knee massacre.
Grimes admits that this typology of infelicitous rituals needs more testing through application to specific rituals, but he also suggests that the right to criticize a ritual is bought with participation in it or through a richness of observations and interpretations (Grimes, Ritual 290-1). It is unfortunately too late to participate in the Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, and even Mooney himself, who was in a better position to do so, was told by the Lakota he interviewed that, “The dance was our religion, but the government sent soldiers to kill us on account of it. We will not talk any more about it” (Mooney, 296). However, even relying on the interpretation of relevant texts alone presents challenges to fully examining the Lakota Ghost Dance. The complex multivalence of symbolism and action makes ritual one of the most difficult human behaviors to evaluate; it is complicated to show that a rite has completely failed; while it may not have achieved a particular stated goal, a ritual can still have other social repercussions (Grimes, Ritual 283).
While the Lakota Ghost Dance may have failed to bring about a magical “Indian millennium,” it possibly fulfilled another aspect of ritualizing: to affirm and transform the participants’ identities and social contexts (Clothey 1-2). Alice Kehoe suggests that prior to the Wounded Knee massacre, the Ghost Dance revitalized the Lakota Sioux by reformulating their cultural patterns to better suit their needs and preferences (Kehoe 142-3). The ritual may have offered them hope of communal identity and transformation during their cultural and economic deprivations at the end of the 1800s. Though the Lakota discontinued the Ghost Dance in early 1891, the ritual spread to the Yanktonai Sioux at the Standing Rock reservation and into Canada (DeMallie and Parks 8), where the Saskatchewan Sioux gave up the practice of trances and the invulnerability of the Ghost Shirts, and incorporated the Ghost Dance into their traditional Dakota Medicine Feast (Kehoe 46-8). For the Lakota, the discontinuation of the Ghost Dance allowed them to sign a new treaty in February 1891, for increased rations and an end of hostilities with the U.S. government (Mooney 145). Black Elk was also inspired by this new need for an effective ritual, and he reorganized the traditional Lakota religious practices, albeit within a Christian framework (Kehoe 40, 71), but including a revival of the Sun Dance in 1924 (Amiotte 75). In 1973, Leonard Crow Dog, a Lakota activist in the American Indian Movement, tried to revive the 1890 Ghost Dance, along with hostilities towards the European-American government, but the only result was a second Wounded Knee massacre (Kehoe 51, 86-7, and DeMallie and Parks 8), suggesting that a hostile version of the Ghost Dance truly was not an effective ritual for cultural transformation.
Little belief in the Ghost Dance ritual survives among the Lakota, besides the recollection of the more poignant Ghost Dance songs (DeMallie and Parks 8), but many of the basic spiritual concepts of the Lakota continue to develop in the context of modern life (DeMallie 27), and the Lakota reservations in South Dakota continue to serve as a locus for contemporary religious revitalization (DeMallie and Parks 7). In adopting Wovoka’s Ghost Dance over against their own cultural traditions, and altering the ritual by the inclusion of the violence-provoking Ghost Shirts, the Lakota were unable to bring about a destruction of the European-Americans through their participation in the Ghost Dance. Though this primary, magical intention failed, the performance of the Lakota Ghost Dance, during their critical period of cultural deprivation at the close of the 19th Century, may have succeeded in expressing something vital to the United States government. The Lakota desired to practice their traditional religious forms, and after the disgrace of the Wounded Knee massacre they were again allowed to do so, leading to an eventual rebirth of their cultural and spiritual beliefs that continues through the present day.
Bibliography
Amiotte, Arthur. “The Lakota Sun Dance: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 75-89
Clothey, Fred. “Rhythm and Intent.” Madras: Blackie and Son, 1982
DeMallie, Raymond J. “Lakota Belief and Ritual in the Nineteenth Century.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 25-43
DeMallie, Raymond J., Parks, Douglas R. “Introduction.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 3-22
Grimes, Ronald. “Beginnings in Ritual Studies.” Lanham: University Press of America, 1982
- - - “Ritual Criticism and Infelicitous Performances.” Readings in Ritual Studies. Ed. Ronald Grimes. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1996. Pp. 279-293
Hittman, Michael. “Wovoka and the Ghost Dance.” Expanded edition. Ed. Don Lynch. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997
Kehoe, Alice Beck. “The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization.” 2nd edition. Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc., 2006
Looking Horse, Arval. “The Sacred Pipe in Modern Life.” Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Pp. 67-73
Mooney, James. “The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965
Neihardt, John G. “Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988
Wallace, Anthony F. C. “Introduction.” The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965
12.06.2007
The Trouble with Sleeping
From an interesting series of articles called, The Trouble with Dream Studies, on the relationship of dreams to science, from the Dream Studies Portal:
This is one of the basic tenets that I hold, both about dreams and waking life. What we believe influences what we choose to pay attention to. And what we attend to influences, or even directly creates, both our waking experiences and dream adventures. The trick is in learning to look at your beliefs clear enough to be able to choose what to attend to, and thus how to live. One of the clearest places to see these beliefs at work, in a somewhat hyper-symbolic way, is in our dreams.
"...in the study of dreams our personal beliefs influence our perception so much that we literally experience different realities. That’s why dream interpretation is dismissed by hard scientists, and also why Freudians dream about their mothers and Jungians dream about Germanic mythological creatures."
This is one of the basic tenets that I hold, both about dreams and waking life. What we believe influences what we choose to pay attention to. And what we attend to influences, or even directly creates, both our waking experiences and dream adventures. The trick is in learning to look at your beliefs clear enough to be able to choose what to attend to, and thus how to live. One of the clearest places to see these beliefs at work, in a somewhat hyper-symbolic way, is in our dreams.
12.05.2007
Science vs. Mythology: The Search for Natural Explanations and Cosmic Relationships
Brother Consolmagno,the astronomer for the Vatican, recently dismissed Creationism as a "kind of paganism" [via Technoccult], claiming that it should not be taught in schools because it harked back to the days when "nature gods" were thought to be responsible for natural events. Instead, he posits that the Christian God is a supernatural one, and that consequently religion and science have to work together to promote a kind of ethical realism about world events.
This is kind of fascinating for several reasons, not the least that it ties in with much of what I've learned this semester from two of my classes. Science and God have had a long and often troubled relationship, many of the earlier natural philosophers were concerned with either getting God and other supernatural forces out of their descriptions of reality, or were trying to tailor their natural philosophies to the Church and Scriptural doctrine, trying to describe reality in physical terms that non-the-less still had a place for God as a supreme creator. This conflict particularly came to a head over astronomy, and the question of whether the earth or sun was at the center of the Universe. Due to a Scriptural passage which suggested that God made the sun move and the earth stand still, any astronomer who suggested otherwise was at the very least excommunicated, up till the point of Newton's theory of relativity, which was partly motivated by an attempt to suggest that relative to an observer on Earth, the sun does seem to move, and in this light the Bible might still be correct despite growing scientific evidence to the contrary. Thankfully it is now the 21st Century, and it sounds like the current Vatican astronomer is willing to accept the possibility and necessity of scientific change.
Though I think it is a positive move to dismiss Creationism, as taking any myth literally may perhaps be missing the point, I feel that its comparison to paganism, and to the "days of nature gods" also might miss the point. Certainly there was a point, even up to fifty years ago, when scholars looking at ancient mythology were wont to say that all deities arose from a primitive mindset trying to explain natural phenomena in lack of more scientific explanations. This may however be an erroneous Western mindset. Certainly there are gods that have been associated with natural phenomena, take all the "thunder deities" for instance, Thor, Zeus, Indra, even Yahweh himself was originally associated with bringing destruction and power from the sky. The current view however, is not that primitive people, lacking scientific means said, that lightning is a god, or a god's weapon, but that it was symbolic of an inexplicable and transcendent power. Lightning first and foremost is awesome and deadly, and says to someone, anyone who really attends to it no matter when they live, that we are small and fragile in comparison to the vast powers that exist in the world. And so stories get created, not to explain that power, but perhaps as a way of taming it, or at the very least finding the human relationship to it. Both the god and the phenomena are suggestive of a depth of being that man, even modern man, can only approach with head bowed and a sense of creative praise about him. Scientific explanations of natural phenomena may be just as misleading as attributing these phenomena to the gods, because though science can offer what passes for a rational explanation, so that we can know what lightning "is" and "how it works," if you step outside during a storm you may still feel just as small and awed, trembling in the knees, and in need of a good story as your ancestors did thousands of years before. Imagine the kind of awe invoked by thoughts of the beginning of the world. Evolution and the Big Bang theory may be no closer to offering us a true picture of how reality began, but what they fail to offer is a human element, they fail as stories to suggest what man's relationship is to the beginning of time. The account of creation in Genesis, as well as the creation myths from around the world, may not be factual accounts of reality, but they ground mankind in reality, in particular traditions, places, behaviors, beliefs.
Science maybe able to explain how the world works, but myth offers us a reason to care, a way that we can take such grand cosmic and natural occurrences and live with them on a personal and cultural basis. It is precisely this disbelief in myths, and reliance on scientific explanations alone, that has led modern man to devalue and destroy the world.
This is kind of fascinating for several reasons, not the least that it ties in with much of what I've learned this semester from two of my classes. Science and God have had a long and often troubled relationship, many of the earlier natural philosophers were concerned with either getting God and other supernatural forces out of their descriptions of reality, or were trying to tailor their natural philosophies to the Church and Scriptural doctrine, trying to describe reality in physical terms that non-the-less still had a place for God as a supreme creator. This conflict particularly came to a head over astronomy, and the question of whether the earth or sun was at the center of the Universe. Due to a Scriptural passage which suggested that God made the sun move and the earth stand still, any astronomer who suggested otherwise was at the very least excommunicated, up till the point of Newton's theory of relativity, which was partly motivated by an attempt to suggest that relative to an observer on Earth, the sun does seem to move, and in this light the Bible might still be correct despite growing scientific evidence to the contrary. Thankfully it is now the 21st Century, and it sounds like the current Vatican astronomer is willing to accept the possibility and necessity of scientific change.
Though I think it is a positive move to dismiss Creationism, as taking any myth literally may perhaps be missing the point, I feel that its comparison to paganism, and to the "days of nature gods" also might miss the point. Certainly there was a point, even up to fifty years ago, when scholars looking at ancient mythology were wont to say that all deities arose from a primitive mindset trying to explain natural phenomena in lack of more scientific explanations. This may however be an erroneous Western mindset. Certainly there are gods that have been associated with natural phenomena, take all the "thunder deities" for instance, Thor, Zeus, Indra, even Yahweh himself was originally associated with bringing destruction and power from the sky. The current view however, is not that primitive people, lacking scientific means said, that lightning is a god, or a god's weapon, but that it was symbolic of an inexplicable and transcendent power. Lightning first and foremost is awesome and deadly, and says to someone, anyone who really attends to it no matter when they live, that we are small and fragile in comparison to the vast powers that exist in the world. And so stories get created, not to explain that power, but perhaps as a way of taming it, or at the very least finding the human relationship to it. Both the god and the phenomena are suggestive of a depth of being that man, even modern man, can only approach with head bowed and a sense of creative praise about him. Scientific explanations of natural phenomena may be just as misleading as attributing these phenomena to the gods, because though science can offer what passes for a rational explanation, so that we can know what lightning "is" and "how it works," if you step outside during a storm you may still feel just as small and awed, trembling in the knees, and in need of a good story as your ancestors did thousands of years before. Imagine the kind of awe invoked by thoughts of the beginning of the world. Evolution and the Big Bang theory may be no closer to offering us a true picture of how reality began, but what they fail to offer is a human element, they fail as stories to suggest what man's relationship is to the beginning of time. The account of creation in Genesis, as well as the creation myths from around the world, may not be factual accounts of reality, but they ground mankind in reality, in particular traditions, places, behaviors, beliefs.
Science maybe able to explain how the world works, but myth offers us a reason to care, a way that we can take such grand cosmic and natural occurrences and live with them on a personal and cultural basis. It is precisely this disbelief in myths, and reliance on scientific explanations alone, that has led modern man to devalue and destroy the world.
12.04.2007
Schools of Sleep
"Somewhere in between the Cinderella school of dreaming and the darker dreamscape of “The Matrix” lies Stephen LaBerge, an expert in a technique called lucid dreaming..."
This is the first line from a recent ABC News article on lucid dreaming [via Technoccult]. While lucid dreaming is a fascinating and worthwhile practice for anyone doing dreamwork (it was the discussions on lucid dreaming in the film "Waking Life" that got me fascinated with dreaming to begin with, or was it reading too much "Little Nemo in Slumberland" when I was a kid?), this distinction between the "Cinderella" and "Matrix" schools of dreaming is somewhat fascinating, and probably deserves further comment. Not knowing what the ABC journalists meant by these terms I will try to unpack them myself.
In the story of Cinderella you have a young girl in a destitute familial situation who, through the help of a dream-like fairy godmother, is transformed into a beautiful princess and lives happily ever after. Dreams aren't necessary to the story's plot, but the idea of self-transcendence through fantasy has many dream-like connotations, particularly in the Jungian sense of the individuation process. On the other hand, the Matrix features a young man who, through the help of a dream-like revolutionary leader, is made to realize that he is living in a constructed reality and that modern life is really only a fabrication concealing a much more destitute world. Dreams are only slightly more relevant to this plot, and though there is a similar idea of self-transcendence, it is to a waking up from illusion, and not an escape to a deeper happily-ever-after fantasia. In both cases however, the primary point is that real life, or waking life, is not so real after all, and there are ways we can wake up from it. Similarly, lucid dreaming espouses a body of techniques for realizing that you are dreaming, within your dreams, and thus take control of them as if they were real life. On the opposite end of that spectrum we have buddhist philosophy and dream techniques that espouse that our waking life is a dream that we can wake up from in order to more fully take, or relinquish, control of our lives. I suppose the point that the article's writers were making is that there are both feel-goody and nightmarish kinds of dream interpretation and reality manipulation, and somewhere between the two might lay the abillity to tell just what is actually going on in our pscyhes.
Personally, I take a rather different tactic to dreamwork, feeling that learning to take control of your dreams is perhaps not the most important aspect of dreaming. Certainly it can be fun to decide to fly, but I suspect that there is a reason we dream the things we do, that if dreams are taken on their own terms we might be able to learn something more about our lives that would have an effect on how we live while awake (and consequently, while we're asleep). To this end I am inclined to look at dreams as active and personal symbol systems, remaining uncertain about the universality of Jungian archetypes I instead try and take the imagistic contents of my dreams as being multivalent expressions of my individual thought processes (though these of course have been influenced by culture and my life to a degree that certain symbols that appear for me might appear for other people in an archetypal way, but they may mean something very different to both of us). Taking these symbols as a system, I try to interpret both what they might mean for my waking life, in a similar manner to techniques of free association, but also try to take them as a larger, creative expression on the whole. That is, the various symbols that come up in my sleep can be pieced together to form a narrative, a personal mythology that can be interpreted on that deeper level, not just to say something about my day residues or childhood dramas, but about the way I live my life, the desires and fears I choose to act out as they are founded in the myth of my dreams. Perhaps a simiar approach is suggested by James Hillman in his "Dream and the Underworld," and one project I spent many nights working on was to symbolically journey to the underworld, drawing on the symbols of various myths and legends of the descent narrative in order to find my way to the bottom of my own subconsciuous fears, and thus no longer need to be afraid of them.
The problem that I see with lucid dreaming is that by actively trying to control your dreams, you are not letting them give as full expression to what is going on in yourself, and that they might actively cover up such deeper psychological rifts without allowing you to work at or understand what is actually going on. I argue, from my own experience, that by looking at the symbols of your dreams, as they are presented to you, you can change your perceptions on your life, and thus, by being able to focus your attention on more positive, life-affirming things, your dreams will end up reflecting that shift in consciousness and such lucid acts as flying will arise naturally when you sleep.
This is the first line from a recent ABC News article on lucid dreaming [via Technoccult]. While lucid dreaming is a fascinating and worthwhile practice for anyone doing dreamwork (it was the discussions on lucid dreaming in the film "Waking Life" that got me fascinated with dreaming to begin with, or was it reading too much "Little Nemo in Slumberland" when I was a kid?), this distinction between the "Cinderella" and "Matrix" schools of dreaming is somewhat fascinating, and probably deserves further comment. Not knowing what the ABC journalists meant by these terms I will try to unpack them myself.
In the story of Cinderella you have a young girl in a destitute familial situation who, through the help of a dream-like fairy godmother, is transformed into a beautiful princess and lives happily ever after. Dreams aren't necessary to the story's plot, but the idea of self-transcendence through fantasy has many dream-like connotations, particularly in the Jungian sense of the individuation process. On the other hand, the Matrix features a young man who, through the help of a dream-like revolutionary leader, is made to realize that he is living in a constructed reality and that modern life is really only a fabrication concealing a much more destitute world. Dreams are only slightly more relevant to this plot, and though there is a similar idea of self-transcendence, it is to a waking up from illusion, and not an escape to a deeper happily-ever-after fantasia. In both cases however, the primary point is that real life, or waking life, is not so real after all, and there are ways we can wake up from it. Similarly, lucid dreaming espouses a body of techniques for realizing that you are dreaming, within your dreams, and thus take control of them as if they were real life. On the opposite end of that spectrum we have buddhist philosophy and dream techniques that espouse that our waking life is a dream that we can wake up from in order to more fully take, or relinquish, control of our lives. I suppose the point that the article's writers were making is that there are both feel-goody and nightmarish kinds of dream interpretation and reality manipulation, and somewhere between the two might lay the abillity to tell just what is actually going on in our pscyhes.
Personally, I take a rather different tactic to dreamwork, feeling that learning to take control of your dreams is perhaps not the most important aspect of dreaming. Certainly it can be fun to decide to fly, but I suspect that there is a reason we dream the things we do, that if dreams are taken on their own terms we might be able to learn something more about our lives that would have an effect on how we live while awake (and consequently, while we're asleep). To this end I am inclined to look at dreams as active and personal symbol systems, remaining uncertain about the universality of Jungian archetypes I instead try and take the imagistic contents of my dreams as being multivalent expressions of my individual thought processes (though these of course have been influenced by culture and my life to a degree that certain symbols that appear for me might appear for other people in an archetypal way, but they may mean something very different to both of us). Taking these symbols as a system, I try to interpret both what they might mean for my waking life, in a similar manner to techniques of free association, but also try to take them as a larger, creative expression on the whole. That is, the various symbols that come up in my sleep can be pieced together to form a narrative, a personal mythology that can be interpreted on that deeper level, not just to say something about my day residues or childhood dramas, but about the way I live my life, the desires and fears I choose to act out as they are founded in the myth of my dreams. Perhaps a simiar approach is suggested by James Hillman in his "Dream and the Underworld," and one project I spent many nights working on was to symbolically journey to the underworld, drawing on the symbols of various myths and legends of the descent narrative in order to find my way to the bottom of my own subconsciuous fears, and thus no longer need to be afraid of them.
The problem that I see with lucid dreaming is that by actively trying to control your dreams, you are not letting them give as full expression to what is going on in yourself, and that they might actively cover up such deeper psychological rifts without allowing you to work at or understand what is actually going on. I argue, from my own experience, that by looking at the symbols of your dreams, as they are presented to you, you can change your perceptions on your life, and thus, by being able to focus your attention on more positive, life-affirming things, your dreams will end up reflecting that shift in consciousness and such lucid acts as flying will arise naturally when you sleep.
12.02.2007
The Absolute Narrative of the "Principia"
The other day I was reading Newton's "Principia" for my last Magic, Medicine, and Science class, and found myself struggling to really understand Newton's distinction between relative and absolute space. Unike the spaces, times, and motions that we can percieve, which are all relative to other scales of space, time, and motion, Newton posits an absolute space-time in which all these relative happenings take place. Of course, since even the stars' motions seem to be relative to at least each other, it may be impossible to ever really "know" what this absolute is.
Halfway through the text I found myself day-dreaming, and imagined someone saying to Newton, doesn't this absolute space-time sound a lot like God? Not the individual, personified conceptions of God(s) that people generally have, but an absolute and all-encompassing being that all things exist inside of, but we can only know through these failed, personified conceptions of what something absolute and wholly other might be like. In short, God as the absent and absolute narrative. I ruminated on the idea that all we can know about the Gods is solely what's been said about them, and that perhaps, as far as we can honestly tell, gods exist only to the amount that they are invoked, which led to many other fanciful thoughts and story ideas. Returning to my work, I was delighted to discover that someone must have asked Newton this very thing, for he ends the whole Principia with a discussion of such an absolute being, and its intimate relationship to knowledge and science:
It seems that my teacher's final words on Newton are that these scientific theories, on which the majority of modern physics is based, depended significantly on Newton's intense fascination with alchemy and occult principles, and that the history of science in general is intimately wrapped up in the magical world view. Ultimately, there is still an appeal to subtle or metaphysical forces as an explanation for observable phenomena, and a desire, whether misguided or not, to actively operate on the world around us.
Halfway through the text I found myself day-dreaming, and imagined someone saying to Newton, doesn't this absolute space-time sound a lot like God? Not the individual, personified conceptions of God(s) that people generally have, but an absolute and all-encompassing being that all things exist inside of, but we can only know through these failed, personified conceptions of what something absolute and wholly other might be like. In short, God as the absent and absolute narrative. I ruminated on the idea that all we can know about the Gods is solely what's been said about them, and that perhaps, as far as we can honestly tell, gods exist only to the amount that they are invoked, which led to many other fanciful thoughts and story ideas. Returning to my work, I was delighted to discover that someone must have asked Newton this very thing, for he ends the whole Principia with a discussion of such an absolute being, and its intimate relationship to knowledge and science:
"This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokratwr , or Universal Ruler; for God is a relative word, and has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants. The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion, cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the God of Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say, my Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of Gods; we do not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have no respect to servants. The word God usually signifies Lord; but every lord is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes duration and space. Since every particle of space is always, and every indivisible moment of duration is every where, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no where. Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given successive parts in duration, co-existent puts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, or his thinking principle; and much less can they be found in the thinking substance of God. Every man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense. God is the same God, always and every where. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without substance. In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God. It is allowed by all that the Supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always, and every where. Whence also he is all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us. As a blind man has no idea of colours, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be seen, nor heard, or touched; nor ought he to be worshipped under the representation of any corporeal thing. We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of any thing is we know not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells, and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not to be known either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds: much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final cause: we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. But, by way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work, to build; for all our notions of God are taken from. the ways of mankind by a certain similitude, which, though not perfect, has some likeness, however. And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy." -Isaac Newton, from "Principia"
It seems that my teacher's final words on Newton are that these scientific theories, on which the majority of modern physics is based, depended significantly on Newton's intense fascination with alchemy and occult principles, and that the history of science in general is intimately wrapped up in the magical world view. Ultimately, there is still an appeal to subtle or metaphysical forces as an explanation for observable phenomena, and a desire, whether misguided or not, to actively operate on the world around us.
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