Islamic Esotericism, special issue, ed. Liana Saif Correspondences, vol. 7, no. 1 (2019)

Liana Saif

Black Studies Or African American Studies,

Ottoman History,

Postcolonial Studies,

Black/African Diaspora,

Perennial Philosophy

OPEN ACCESS 

http://correspondencesjournal.com/volume-7/issue-1/ 

1) Liana Saif. What is Islamic Esotericism?

 2) W. Sasson Chahanovich. Ottoman Eschatological Esotericism: Introducing Jafr in Ps. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s The Tree of Nuʿmān (al-Shajarah al-nuʿmāniyyah) 61–108

 3) Keith Cantú. Islamic Esotericism in the Bengali Bāul Songs of Lālan Fakir, 109–165

 4) Michael Muhammad Knight. “I am Sorry, Mr. White Man, These are Secrets that You are Not Permitted to Learn”: The Supreme Wisdom Lessons and Problem Book 167–200

 5) Biko Gray. The Traumatic Mysticism of Othered Others: Blackness, Islam, and Esotericism in the Five Percenters 201–237

 6) Francesco Piraino. Esotericisation and De-esotericisation of Sufism: The Aḥmadiyya-Idrīsiyya Shādhiliyya in Italy, 239–276 

7) Mark Sedgwick. Islamic and Western Esotericism 277–299 109–165

Liana Saif

8.4

School of Advanced Study, University of London
Post-Doc

I am currently a post-doctoral fellow for the ERC project "The origin and early development of philosophy in tenth-century al-Andalus: the impact of ill-defined materials and channels of transmission". My objective is to provide an in-depth analysis of the understudied Kitāb al-Baḥth attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, and to gauge its influence in al-Andalus. I will produce a critical edition and translation into English of the text. Before that, I was British Academy postdoctoral fellow at The Oriental Institute in the University of Oxford. Other projects: the pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, the magic textʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq wa iḍāh al-ṭarāʾiq (‘The sources of truths and the explication of methods’) attributed to the alchemist Abū al-Qāsim al-ʿIrāqī (d. c. 1260)

Occult America
The Secret History Of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

by MITCH HOROWITZ


Hardcover, 290 pages, Random House Inc,

https://www.npr.org/books/titles/138139755/occult-america-the-secret-history-of-how-mysticism-shaped-our-nation#excerpt

Book Summary
Traces America's unique relationship with occult movements and thinkers, providing meticulously researched coverage of such topics as the Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and transcendentalism movements; the origins of the Ouija board; and the practices of famous historical figures.

Note: Book excerpts are provided by the publisher and may contain language some find offensive.

Excerpt: Occult America

Chapter one


THE PSYCHIC HIGHWAY

Yet who knows but the institution of a new order of labourers in the great Spiritual vineyard, is to prove the signal for the outpouring of such blessings as have been hitherto unparalleled in the history of our American Israel.
—Western Recorder, 1825

The Age of Reason could seem anything but reasonable for people with unusual religious beliefs—or those accused of them. In 1782, Switzerland sanctioned one of the Western world’s last witch trials, which ended in the torture and beheading of a rural housemaid. In 1791, the Vatican sentenced the legendary Italian occultist called Cagliostro to death on charges of heresy and Freemasonry. Although his execution was stayed, the self-styled “High Priest of the Egyptian Mysteries” died of disease four years later in the dungeons of the Inquisition.


In eighteenth-century England, a young woman with the simple name of Ann Lee, living in the industrial town of Manchester on Toad Lane (where she was born in a leap year), told of magical visions and spoke of prophecies. The girl—who belonged to a radical Christian sect that would become known as the Shaking Quakers, or the Shakers—was hounded, beaten, and jailed on charges of sorcery and public disruption. Local authorities were aghast at the otherworldly possession that seemed to grip her and the other Shakers when they gyrated and shook in spirit trances. But she was not destined to become another casualty. Ann Lee escaped.


In 1774, the woman now called Mother Ann sailed from Liverpool to New York with eight followers and hangers-on. They included an unfaithful husband with whom she had already suffered through the birth and death of four infants. As the legend goes, the ship almost capsized in a storm. But Ann, in a state of eerie calm as waves crashed over the bow, told the captain that no harm would befall them. She reported seeing “two bright angels of God” on the mast. The ship survived.

After toiling at menial labor in New York City, the pilgrims—now twelve, minus Ann’s husband—scraped together enough resources in 1776 to form a tiny colony in the knotty, marshy fields of Niskayuna, near Albany in New York’s Hudson Valley. The twelve apostles, as they saw themselves, anointed the place Wisdom’s Valley. It was a punishing, swampy stretch of two hundred acres swept barren by icy winds in the winter and transformed into muddy, mosquito-infested fields in the summer. Their neighbors were no friendlier than the landscape. Angry rumors painted Mother Ann and the Shakers—all sworn pacifists—as British sympathizers or spies. Revolutionary authorities briefly jailed the religious leader in Albany on charges of sedition. During a Shaker missionary trip to Petersham, Massachusetts, a band of thirty townsmen seized Mother Ann and subjected the celibate woman to the humiliation of disrobing, ostensibly to determine whether she was an English agent in drag. Some accused her of witchcraft or heresy. (“There is no witchcraft but sin,” Mother Ann evenly countered.) But, oddly, the little sect—celibate, poor, steeped in a life of hard labor and little rest—began to grow.

Following a brutal upstate New York winter in 1780, two men from across the Hudson River in the farming community of New Lebanon took advantage of an early spring thaw to visit the Shaker settlement. The men were disappointed followers of one of the many Baptist revivals that had been sweeping the region, and they longed to see the woman whom followers called Christ returned in female form. When they located Mother Ann and her colony in the wilderness, they were astonished at the small group’s survival. They began asking Mother Ann about her mystical teachings and rumors of the sect’s practices, in which members spoke in prophecies, saw visions of the dead, and danced, jumped, and shouted in the thrall of the Holy Spirit. “We are the people who turn the world upside down,” Mother Ann enigmatically told them.

The men returned to New Lebanon to spread word of the people in the woods—and more curiosity seekers trekked to Niskayuna. Strange natural events drove newcomers into Mother Ann’s little world. On May 19, 1780, many parts of New England experienced “The Dark Day”—a period when the daytime skies mysteriously blackened and the sun’s rays were blotted out. The cause may have been a rash of local fires to clear fields, but the effect was panic over the coming of Armageddon. Mother Ann’s warnings about the debased nature of the world suddenly seemed prophetic—and new converts came to her. To the Shakers, it was all expected. The previous year, Mother Ann had told her followers to store up extra provisions: “We shall have company enough, before another year comes about, to consume it all.” Soon New Lebanon itself sprouted a much bigger colony, eventually sporting the immaculate whitewashed buildings, tidy yards, and brick meetinghouses for which the Shakers became famous.

Though Mother Ann died in 1784, her influence extended further in death than in life. The late 1830s saw the dawn of a feverish and profoundly influential period of Shaker activity called “Mother Ann’s Work.” The departed leader appeared as an otherworldly spirit guide directing a vast range of supernatural activity and instruction. Shaker villages—now spread as far south as Kentucky—recorded visits from spirits of historical figures and vanquished Indian tribes. The devout reported receiving ghostly visions and songs, which they turned into strangely beautiful paintings and haunting hymns (many of which still survive). Villagers spoke in foreign tongues, writhing and rolling on the floors in meetings that lasted all night—some even getting drunk on “spirit gifts” of unseen wine or Indian tobacco. In an America that had not yet experienced the Spiritualist wave of séances, table tilting, or conversing with the dead, the Shakers foretold that beings from the afterlife would soon “visit every city and hamlet, every palace and cottage in the land.” And events unfolding outside the manicured grounds of Shaker villages were already bringing that prophecy to life.

The Burned-Over District

The Shakers had laid down their roots in an area that would prove pivotal in American culture, its influence vastly surpassing its size. The region’s role is as central to the development of mystical religions in America as the sands of the Sinai are to Judaism, and no account of American religion is possible without taking stock of it. The twentieth-century historian Carl Carmer called this area “a broad psychic highway, a thoroughfare of the occult.” A snaking stretch of land in central New York State, it was a place of pristine lakes and rolling green hills, about twenty-five miles wide and three hundred miles long, extending from Albany in the east to Buffalo in the west. It became one of the main passages through which Americans flowed west. It remains so today as U.S. Route 20, an east–west highway that begins in New England, gently traversing the bends and slopes of Central New York’s farmland before heading across the expanse of the nation to the Pacific Northwest. It is the longest continuous road in the United States. As fate and geography would have it, this great corridor cuts directly across a part of Central New York that in the nineteenth century became so caught up in the fires of religious revival movements—the fires of the spirit—that it became known as the Burned-Over District.

Before the Revolutionary War, the Burned-Over District was home to the Iroquois nation, whose remnants the new American government pushed out, partly in retaliation for the tribe’s alliance with the British and partly to satisfy the land hunger of early settlers and speculators. And when settlers did arrive after the war, most of them unaware of the Indian lives that had been extinguished or hounded from the rich soil, the place seemed like an Eden of bountiful open land and vast lakes.

Throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century, itinerant ministers continually traveled the newly settled region, crisscrossing its hills and valleys with news of the Holy Spirit. The circuit-riding preachers and their tent revival meetings often left the area in a torrent of religious passion. For days afterward, without the prompting of ministers or revivalists, men and women would speak in tongues and writhe in religious ecstasy. Many would report visitations from angels or spirits.

Folklore told of the area once being home to a mysterious tribe—older than the oldest of Indian tribes, maybe even a lost tribe of Israel. These ancient beings, so the story went, had been wiped out in a confrontation with the Native Americans. Some believed their ghosts and messengers still walked, composing a world within a world amid the daily ?goings-?on of Burned-Over District life.

The Burned-Over District’s early religious communities thrived on a steady pool of migrants drawn to the region’s abundant land. This new breed of Yankee, streaming westward from New England, was spiritually curious, ready to listen and believe. In the starlit nights of pioneer life, many minds and hearts turned to the whispers of the cosmos and the mysteries of what-might-be.

Apocalypse Postponed

If the Burned-Over District became a staging ground for a young nation’s foray into unconventional and alternative religious ideas, it was in the mood and mind-set of its residents that the journey took flight. The mental habits of the Burned-Over District can best be understood by looking at one of the great schisms of American religious history. It concerns an early-nineteenth-century sect called the Millerites, later known as the Seventh-day Adventists. This group of believers, which numbered in the thousands by the 1840s, followed the utopian–millenarian ideas of a Freemason and Baptist clergyman named William Miller. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Miller grew up estranged from his strict Baptist upbringing, more or less indifferent to religion. But after fighting in the War of 1812, he took up a common view among returning soldiers that his survival had somehow been divinely ordained. The former secularist came home with a deep interest in questions of immortality.

Convinced that the Bible was a record of literal truths, Miller undertook a comprehensive study to determine the time of Christ’s return—and the millennium of peace he believed it would bring. Though only moderately educated, Miller spent fourteen years poring over Scripture, organizing and cross-referencing all that he found, and endeavoring—in true Yankee fashion—to find an orderly blueprint to God’s plan. Miller’s data pointed to the end as falling somewhere between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. He later recast the final call to October 22, 1844. By the early 1830s, he had begun to gain a serious audience, first as one of the Burned-Over District’s legion of itinerant religious speakers and later as a Baptist minister.

As Miller’s portentous dates neared, hundreds and then thousands of followers gathered at tent revival meetings throughout Central New York. They filled—and sometimes overflowed—the biggest tent the nation had ever seen, one that could seat three thousand people. Once, near Rochester, a wind squall snapped fifteen of its chains and several inch-thick ropes, violently ripping the tent from its moorings like the opening of a gigantic clamshell. Amazingly, no one was hurt—which deepened local belief that Miller’s movement was charmed. When an economic depression swept the Burned-Over District in the late 1830s and early 1840s, it served only to heighten the yearning for deliverance and the feeling that familiar institutions were slipping away.

A widely promulgated myth tells that as 1843 approached, the man the press called “Mad Miller” and his followers shed their last possessions, donned white “ascension robes,” and waited on hilltops for the new advent. Stories abound in popular histories and local tales that some ran amok, engaging in “free love” and throwing money to the wind in anticipation of a world without wants or demands. Not only is this portrait historically inaccurate—without any viable source material in newspapers of the day—but it misunderstands the unusual blend of magical beliefs and practical habits that marked so many lives in the Burned-Over District.

In fact, Miller’s followers never sold their belongings en masse, retreated to hilltops, or—except for rare cases—threw responsibility to the winds as they awaited their Savior. What few such episodes did occur were seized upon and exaggerated by those neighbors who mocked, and in some cases even physically attacked, the Millerites as they congregated in meeting halls and homes. Most evidence shows that these Yankee acolytes toiled right up to the point of Miller’s end-times, working at their jobs, maintaining their farms, and attending school. Barns were swept, haylofts loaded, and fireplaces stoked before the arrival of the “last days.” While followers believed in—and were passionate for—progress and perfection, they never abandoned the worldly. And this was the distinct habit of thought in the Burned-Over District: the ability to believe so deeply in the otherworld that it could be felt as a palpable presence but also to possess the soundness of mind and instinct to, in the Shaker formulation, keep hands to work even as hearts soared to God. It was a key facet of the occult and metaphysical mind-set being born in America.

The Universal Friend

The dreamers and planners who flourished along the Psychic Highway seemed to relish splitting apart orthodoxies, remaking Christianity as a new source of mystery and magic. One woman, in particular, today long forgotten, created in the mind of her followers a dramatically new idea of what a divine messenger could be. A New Englander by birth, she became the first American-born woman to found a spiritual order. Unlike Ann Lee, she wasn’t seen as a female return of Christ but rather as a medium or channel possessed of the Divine Spirit. Her name was Jemima Wilkinson.

Wilkinson was born in 1752 to a moderately prosperous farming household of Quakers in Cumberland, Rhode Island. She lost her mother at age twelve and grew up under the care of older sisters, riding horses, gardening, and reading the basics of Quaker theology. The girl grew into a young woman of “personal beauty” who “took pleasure in adding to her good appearance the graceful drapery of elegant apparel,” historian Stafford C. Cleveland wrote in his 1873 History and Directory of Yates County, which became the earliest biographical narrative of any repute of Wilkinson. Later in Wilkinson’s life, onlookers commented on her fresh complexion and gently tanned skin, the ringlets of chestnut-brown hair that draped her neck, and her flashing black eyes. The attractive young woman presented a strikingly different figure than Mother Ann Lee—that is, if testimony from the spirit world can be relied upon.

Although no images survive of Mother Ann, some of her nineteenth-century followers doted on a “psychometric portrait” of their founder. The portrait was created by a New York artist who, when handed an object, claimed to clairvoyantly summon the vision of its owner. Whatever his abilities, the “psychometrist” was not attempting flattery. The supernatural image of Ann Lee revealed a dark, straight-haired woman with an unusually large forehead, dull eyes, and thick masculine lips. To her followers, it accurately captured a degree of world-weariness in Ann Lee far different from anything that would have been known by Jemima Wilkinson, raised amid the relative comforts of a successful New England farm.



FROM GOOGLE MORE EXCERPTS 

Contents


What Is the Occult? 1


Mystic Americans 42


Ouija and the Selling 66


The Science of Right Thinking 80

The Hermes of Harlem: Harlem Esoterics

And The Secret Life of Robert T. Browne 

[EXCERPT]

Matt Marble

2014, Abraxas Journal

https://tinyurl.com/y7jaa684

Robert T. Browne (1882-1978) was an unprecedented mystery of a man, both during his life and after. Early on in life he was a religious and political activist, working with Marcus Garvey and others in Harlem for the Black Nationalist movement. Working for the US War Department, he was sent to the Philippines during WWII and captured by Japanese soldiers. For three years he was held captive and starved in an internment camp, where he taught esoteric meditation practices to other prisoners, helping them all to cope with starvation, anger, and madness. He was also an esoteric mathematician and author, with some attention garnered by his The Mystery Of Space. Known as "Mulla Hanaranda" or "The Blessed Master," Browne was also an influential religious leader. He single-handedly created his own religion, The Hermetic Society for World Service, which still operates internationally today. Like many, I first discovered Browne's work in Mitch Horowitz's brilliant Occult America. After contacting Browne's extant religious followers, discovering his own religious texts, and with heavy research in newspapers of his time, I have attempted to compile the most exhaustive portrait of Browne that is now available. His life is further contextualized in the broader role of esotericism in the African-American culture of Harlem during the early part of the 20th century.

Robert T. Browne, a.k.a. Mulla Hanaranda, 1922 You must fight your way upward into the light; you must strive after that realization which awaits you upon thesubtle planes of life and existence. Turn your mind inward to that Group of Divine Beings who have yourdestiny in their keeping. Seek them out; wrestle with them, though unseen to your mortal eye, until they havegiven you your just birthright. For it can only come to you as a result of your ardent seeking. You must take theKingdom by storm! Do you get what I mean? (Reuterdahl, ARP)

Conspirituality Reconsidered: How Surprising and How New is the Confluence of Spirituality and Conspiracy Theory?

Egil Asprem

Asbjørn Dyrendal

https://tinyurl.com/y99lshko

Those who have followed the development of online new religiosity over the past decade will not have failed to notice that conspiracy theories and ‘New Age’ ideas are thriving together. But how new and how surprising is the phenomenon of ‘conspirituality’? In the present article, we challenge the thesis put forward by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in their article of 2011, published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, that a confluence of spirituality and conspiracism has emerged in the past two decades as a form of New Age theodicy. Instead, we argue, on theoretical grounds, that conspirituality can be viewed as a predictable result of structural elements in the cultic milieu and, on historical grounds, that its roots stretch deep into the history of Western esotericism. Together, these two considerations allow us not only to suggest that conspirituality is old and predictable, but also to identify a large potential for further research which will contribute to the study of conspiracy culture and enable a new line of comparative research in religious studies.

Hidden Knowledge, Hidden Power. Esotericism and Conspiracy Culture (Contemporary Esotericism, Equinox 2013)

Asbjørn Dyrendal
Egil Asprem & Kennet Granholm (eds.) Contemporary Esotericism. Equinox 2013
https://tinyurl.com/yd6s676u


Hidden Persuaders and Invisible Wars. Anton LaVey and Conspiracy Culture (The Devil's Party, OUP 2013)

Asbjørn Dyrendal
The Devil's Party. Satanism in Modernity https://tinyurl.com/y8y4jg5b

Conspiracy Theories and the Study of Alternative and Emergent Religions
David Robertson

https://tinyurl.com/ycjv

This introduction addresses a number of approaches to the emerging field of the study of conspiracy theories and new and alternative religions. Scholars can examine how certain religious groups have been the subject of conspiracy narratives created by the wider culture, and how conspiracy narratives are mobilized within religious groups such as Aum Shinrikyo, Scientology or others. Moreover, we can fruitfully examine secular conspiracy theories through ideas typically applied to religions, such as theodicy, millenarianism, and esoteric claims to higher knowledge. Most studies assume that conspiracy theories indicate pathology—paranoia or simply stupidity. Increasingly however, scholars have begun to interpret the term ''conspiracy theory'' as operating polemically to stigmatize certain beliefs and ideas. The field therefore offers a microcosm of broader trends in the interplay of knowledge and power. The study of both new and emergent religions and conspiracy theories comes of age only when we cease to think of them as necessarily deviant and irrational.

Hidden Presence: Race in/and the History, Construct and Study of Western Esotericism

Justine Bakker

2019, Religion

103 Views43 Pages

2 Files ▾

Religion,

Critical Race Theory,

Race and Ethnicity,

Colonialism,

Whiteness Studies

Show more ▾

https://www.academia.edu/39960590/Hidden_Presence_Race_in_and_the_History_Construct_and_Study_of_Western_Esotericism

Except for a few studies that explore the intersections between esoteric ideas/practices and white supremacy, race has largely been ignored in the field of Western esotericism. This article seeks to partake in remedying this lacuna. To do so, it provides a deconstructive analysis of the way race has operated in the field. I argue that race, although consistently overlooked, has functioned as a “hidden presence” that has shaped both the historical formation of the field and the construct of Western esotericism—so much so, in fact, that we may conceive it as a subtext in and for the dominant “grand narrative” of Western esotericism. In conclusion, I investigate recent attempts to omit “Western” as a definitive adjective in the study of esotericism, thereby proposing that, even as we move ‘beyond the West,’ we must also continue to investigate the entanglements of “Western” and whiteness. 

Keywords: race/racialization, whiteness, Western/the West, colonialism, spiritualism, modernity

"SANTURISMO" - The Commodification of Santería & The Touristic Value of Afro-Cuban Religions in Cuba

Julie Rausenberger

https://tinyurl.com/y83ehq4o

Religion,

Tourism Studies,

Cuban Studies,

Consumer Behavior,

Contemporary Religion

Santurismo (Santeria + Turismo) refers to the popular formula of Afro-Cuban religions and tourism and initially served the Cuban government in the 1960s to promote Santeria as a folkloric product of Cuban identity through staged performances in touristic surroundings. Gradually, it became a coping strategy by Cuban people to deal with political and economic hardship during the Special Period in the 1990s which led to the emergence of Diplo-Santeria by so-called jinetero-santeros. While the continuous process of commodification of Cuban Santeria is marked by local social, economic and political influences, it also relates to current tendencies in comparable religious and spiritual phenomena at a global level. Afro-Cuban religions have worked their way up from a stigmatized and persecuted religious system to a widely valorized religion in the spiritual and touristic sphere. Over time, Santeria has proved to serve as a weapon for resistance and struggle, which is still ongoing in Cuban society today. Published in Almatourism - Journal of Tourism, Culture and Territorial Development in 2018.

From Crisis to Cosmos

From crisis to cosmos: could a shift in our values save the planet?
Guest Post by Maria Fernanda Gebara, author of forestless

Frog Medicine

The roots of our ecological crisis can be found in the economic, political and social realities of modern industrial society, its organization of labour and methods of production. To turn things around, a total rethink of the traditional Western values that caused this crisis may be held to be the necessary response to fundamentally shift our attitudes towards the natural environment.

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis1. Spirituality is a category of growing salience for many Westerners. While its genealogy remains complex and usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known, as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Certainly, indigenous spirituality offers a valuable perspective from which to question and rethink traditional Western values. Indigenous narratives emerge from low-lying islands, the tropics and subtropics, where environmental vulnerabilities are acute. Those inhabiting these ecosystems are on the front lines of environmental change, despite often being invisible to the international community. The ways in which such communities navigate environmental change are often shaped by understandings of the ‘other-than-human’ world; understandings that, if not always recognized as spiritual, can certainly be described as cosmological or theological2.

Around the world, indigenous peoples’ movements are protesting against how they, and their sacred landscapes, are impacted by imposed environmental change, normally originating from Western neoliberal policies. In Brazil, the president Bolsonaro’s government is being seen as the essence of a barbarism that for 519 years attempted to exterminate indigenous peoples from their lands. One million of the country’s 209 million inhabitants are indigenous, living on lands that occupy 13.3% of the country’s territory, mostly in the Amazon forest. Indigenous lands remain the forest’s main protective barrier. Last year, deforestation in the Amazon increased by almost 14% on the previous year, the highest rate in ten years. Yet the president, feeling legitimized by polls, attacked native peoples with policies that threaten their lives and rights. According to British NGO Global Witness, Brazil is already the most dangerous country for activists and environmental defenders: in 2017, 57 indigenous leaders, community activists and environmentalists were murdered for protecting the forest and traditional culture from threats like mining and agribusiness. Land conflicts have now increased and will likely get worse.

In a world where artificial intelligence, biogenetics, and very powerful interests are at play, learning to think critically through different ethical models and value systems is timely. We know we depend on our natural environment, that we have the power to destabilize it, thereby threatening our own species. Yet few of us are sensitive to our moral or ethical environment – the surrounding ideas we absorb around how to live. It is this that determines our beliefs; what we find acceptable or unacceptable, what we feel is due to us or from us, and how we relate to others and nature. It shapes our very identities, predispositions, roles and the reciprocal interactions between human beings and their social and natural environments; ultimately, determining our personal and planetary wellbeing. At stake here is not simply whether a tradition supports action on environmental change, but how a tradition’s ideas and values are mobilized to interpret the relations and responsibilities of a particular context. Such ideas and values establish our possibilities for environmental politics; although not always mapping neatly into distinct political positions, they help us interpret which policies seem more or less responsible.

Tata Shaman

In the past, religion was used to delineate “primitive” from advanced cultures, and thereby legitimate colonialism. It is sometimes still used in the postcolonial period to marginalize indigenous ecological knowledges (as sacred but not scientific) or treat relations with a landscape as individual spiritual experiences and, therefore, in the secular imagination, as inessential to political governance and portable across geography3. Many environmental thinkers consider the extension of sociability to non-human domains and persons as central to indigenous cosmologies, creating a moral field based on mutual obligations and respectful relationships4. Others, such as Sessions5, maintain that the anthropocentrism of the Judeo-Christian tradition – and its human mastery over an inanimate nature – represses the ecologically sustainable cosmographies of indigenous peoples. Some political scientists have suggested that the environmental antipathy of some American Evangelicals is tied up with “end times beliefs”6 .

With such reflexivity in view, scholars have begun to anticipate how contemporary environmental change may be stimulating religious and spiritual changes, and how this may affect human participation in ecosystems. Indigenous cultures implicitly locate human beings in larger social, as well as physical, environments. People belong not only to a human community, but to a community of all nature. Existence in this larger society, just as existence in a family and tribal context, places people in an environment in which reciprocal responsibilities and mutual obligations are taken for granted and assumed without question or reflection.

Yawanawa Festival

Spirituality, often experienced in and through relationship with nature, allows us to talk more broadly about such existence, and acknowledge what is strangely invisible, but necessary, if we want to rethink and shape our values. This may rest upon a renewal of humans’ connection to the natural world, one that can drive inward change within the human spirit. Such change, according to Pope Francis, is required to hear “both the cry of the earth and … of the poor”7. It is time to question old certainties, current ideologies and practices, seek intellectual justification for beliefs and practices, and discover new ways to align individual and planetary wellbeing with traditional values, so Western societies can be steered towards more sustainable lifestyles. As Powys Whyte observes, many indigenous peoples are already living their ancestors’ worst fears; with climate change, they must live through yet another period of settler-imposed environmental dislocation8. Finally, according to Danowski and Viveiros des Castros9, if “the Anthropocene is the Apocalypse” then, “indigenous people have something to teach us when it comes to apocalypses…for the native people of the Americas, the end of the world already happened – five centuries ago.”

For more content from Maria Fernanda Gebara, please visit her blog at forestless.

Cited Sources:

1. Vaughan-Lee L. 2013. Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. California: The Golden Sufi Center.

2. Jenkins et al. 2018. Religious and Climate Change. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43:9.1–9.24.

3. Weaver J. 2015. Misfit messengers: Indigenous religious traditions and climate change. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83(2):320–35.
Howe N. 2016. Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Tsotie R. 2013. Climate change and indigenous peoples: Comparative models of sovereignty. Tulane Environmental Law Review 26(2):239–58.

4. Kimmerer R. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
Escobar A. 2016. Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the South.
Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11 (1): 11-32.

5. Sessions G. 1995. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications.

6.Barker D and Bearce D. 2013. End-times theology, the shadow of the future, and public resistance to addressing global climate change. Political Research Quarterly 66(2):267–79.

7.Francis I. 2015. Laudato Si—On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican City: Vatican Publications. 49.

8. Whyte K. 2017. Our ancestors’ dystopia now: indigenous conservation in the Anthropocene. In: Heise, J Christensen and Niemann M (eds.) Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 206–15. London: Routledge

9. Danowski D and Viveiros des Castros E. 2016. The Ends of the World. Translated by Nunes RG. Malden, MA: Polity. 104.