An Open Letter to NAFPS
I am posting this letter here despite the fact that I run the risk of being ignored and accused of being a troll, because I think what I have to say is valid. I say what I have to say out of a genuine desire for mutual understanding, not to provoke anger.
Let me begin by saying that I am not defending people like Carlos Castaneda, Alberto Villoldo, Maria Yraceburu et al. who misrepresent themselves as emissaries of cultures they have no connection to. I do not support cultural imperialism, the selling of other people's cultures, charlatanry and the exploitation of people's naivety, depression and desire for meaning.
What I am is a "New Ager??? who finds a lot of things on this site and in these discussions extremely troubling. I haven't read the entire contents of the board, and so some of what I say here may have been answered in other places, and if so I apologize. However, I feel that I do have the right to defend what is essentially my own personal cultural tradition.
First off, I object to the spelling "nuager," and the equation of the New Age with fraud. Are you making a pun on the word "nuage," French for cloud? New Agers are frequently accused of being vacuous, so you should be aware of the association. But whatever the case, by creating a parody of a term that has been applied to us by other people (we usually call ourselves spiritualists, pagans, magicians, neo-shamans, heathens, wiccans, Christians, psychics, mystics, healers, occultists, hippies, ravers, sanguinarians, otherkin, starseeds and so on), you have in essence coined a derogatory epithet for us. Personally I find that offensive.
New Agers are members of a loose knit post-Christian religious tradition of European origin that draws heavily on folk beliefs and magical practices, as well as medieval hermeticism. Although it is difficult to characterize the New Age because it is an eclectic movement, we can point to four universals: the belief that all humans are latently psychic, meaning they can develop abilities that lie outside everyday experience; the belief that consciousness is a form of energy that animates all living organisms, and that this energy can be felt and manipulated; the belief in invisible beings, which may actually exist or may be parts of ourselves, that can be contacted using divination tools and non-ordinary states of consciousness; and the belief that history is on the verge of or has entered into a new epoch (the "New Age") that is heralded by a democratization of spiritual powers (meaning they are no longer the exclusive purview of a select few) and cataclysmic social and political change.
Frequently these beliefs are held together by the conception of the natural world as divine; of the universe as the literal body of God (“panentheism???); or a kind of non-exclusive monotheism (as in the Japanese “new religion??? Oomoto-kyo) which sees all beings and divinities as part of a single intelligence, often referred to as "Spirit." Other common beliefs include synchronicity (which predates Jung and in fact derives at least in part from the New England colonists’ practice of interpreting the events of one's life through bible stories), astrology, sympathetic magic, divination, and meditation as a path to spiritual enlightenment.
While it's a common perception that New Age-ism is a twentieth century phenomenon, that is not at all accurate. Our traditions can be traced back to many sources. Some of our foundational influences include Meister Eckhart, Emanuel Swedenborg, Mary Baker Eddy, Saint Francis, Paracelsus, Franz Mesmer and William Blake. The Neo-Platonism of Percy Shelly. Baudelaire’s hedonistic cosmology. Folk traditions like bibliomancy, table knocking and possession by the Holy Spirit. Spiritualism from Hebrew rabbinical tradition and alchemy from Greece and Mesopotamia. In Colonial America, lay people accused their black servants of practicing “voodoo,??? but the construction of poppets and similar charms actually derives from European folk magic. These forms of witchcraft, along with other black magic practices like forging “agreements??? with Satan and reading bible passages backwards, were largely practiced by unhappy white settlers, and have mingled with the more aristocratic traditions of alchemy and hermetics to form the occult foundation of the New Age.
A key change, of course, occurred during the era of “the moderns??? (1875-1914), when H.P. Blavatsky began introducing Hindu cosmology to the New Age. Subsequently, the idea of syncretism was born and other teachers began appropriating beliefs from China and Tibet and ultimately from Native American traditions. The point I am trying to make is that we are part of a tradition that predates Blavatsky. Most of what modern "plastic shamans" sell as native tradition is really European in origin. What you overlook is that these disguised European beliefs form a coherent system that is itself an authentic spiritual tradition.
As for accusations of charlatanry, they are valid only from within the conceptual framework of modern science and biomedicine. Sure, there's no concrete evidence to support faith healing, Tarot reading, astral projection or alien abduction. But from a biomedical standpoint, most traditional medicine is also "fraudulent," including the practices of Native Americans. You could say, with equal irrelevance, that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is form of charlatanry. Likewise, many of the progenitors of the New Age were racists and confidence men. But from a modern standpoint the Aztecs were also racists and their leaders confidence men. And the Christians, whom some of your users seem to think represent the real Euramerican cultural legacy, waged genocide against the arabs and the Native Americans. That strikes me as a little more extreme than Rudolf Steiner writing about the virtues of the Germanic people. At least he had the sense to skip town when the Nazis started killing people.
In reality, the philosophical origin of syncretism (a.k.a. cultural imperialism) lies not with Blavatsky, but in the Scientific Enlightenment. The Scientific Enlightenment taught that we should examine our cultural traditions critically with an eye towards mechanistic verifiability. This ultimately led to the practice of ethno-botany, where Euramerican scientists study indigenous people in order to synthesize new chemical compounds out of their traditional medicines (a practice that, from the comments I read in the ayahuasca thread, I imagine many of you object to). In a way, New Age syncretism is like a twisted form of Spiritual ethno-botany, seeking to extract the "spiritual essence" from the cultural traditions of other people.
What all of this means is that ultimately what is wrong with the New Age is what is wrong with the world as a whole. There are a lot of bad actors out there, both those who defraud Native Americans by stealing their traditions and those who defraud consumers by selling them fantastical beliefs and phony healings. But the New Age is, like it or not, an intrinsic part of the global Euramerican culture. In many ways, it is the New Age, not Christianity, that is the authentic spiritual tradition of white people. While wicca itself may be an artifact of the modern era, there is a magico-religious tradition in Europe, largely Christian in its presuppositions but also influenced by sympathetic magic and pre-Christian religions, from which the modern “New Age??? material largely derives. Thus while criticism of New Age appropriation of other cultures is certainly valid, criticism of the New Age as such is not, at least not more so than any other religion.
That said, I would like to make another important point. The situation of Native Americans with regard to fraud and exploitation is not a unique one. As the existence of Tibet became well known in the early part of the twentieth century, people all over the world tried to capitalize on its reputation as a center of spiritual enlightenment. Not the least was Blavatsky's follower Alice Bailey, who claimed to be in contact with a Tibetan master. Yet despite this fakery, the Tibetan people have largely overcome attempts at appropriation. They have done this not by establishing a bureau of the Tibetan government to police authentic Tibetan teachings, but rather by making knowledge of Tibetan culture so readily available that anyone who cares can learn to distinguish fraud from genuine article.
Like those of Native Americans, traditional Tibetan religious practices are very secretive. Tibetans have kept the esoteric core of their practices out of the public eye, but both Tibetan authors and Euramerican authors working with the cooperation of Tibetans have produced a monumental body of work about the non-secretive, linguistic and artistic components of Tibetan culture. Perhaps some of the energy that you are all investing in making sure we know what is NOT authentic Native American culture would be better spent doing the opposite, teaching us what is. It is more effective to respond to our ignorance by educating us than by calling us names.
My whole life I had been skeptical towards any New Age teachers or materials that claimed a link to Native American traditions. But I met a number of bona fide Native Americans (one of them a friend of Maria Yraceburu) who believed that “Native American traditions??? could be fruitfully blended with Taoism and the Egyptian pantheon. When I read Mehl Madrona’s Coyote Medicine, I found that his description of what he called the “Native American cosmology??? precisely matched the worldview I have held since I was a child. I met a couple of Native Americans who called themselves shamans and who readily encouraged white people to learn about these evidently fraudulent practices. I decided, finally, to do some investigating. And came across this site, which basically confirmed what I had thought before, that Native American traditions do not mix with New Age practices and beliefs.
I am perfectly happy to learn that. I have no interest in appropriating your culture, just as I have no interest in pretending to be a phony Tibetan sorcerer or in converting to authentic Tibetan Buddhism. I would, however, be happy to learn about your people and their traditions. I recognize, of course, that I have no right to demand that from you, but I suggest a) that trying to attain greater visibility of your authentic cultural practices would be a more effective means of educating Euramericans than creating a website devoted to unmasking fakers and ridiculing people who are acting largely out of ignorance; and b) that you make more of an effort to understand our traditions before you call us “fake??? and “plastic.
Throughout your site, people privilege the notion of authentic cultural traditions, and suggest that if we whites desire spirituality we should look into our own ancestral traditions, Christian or pagan. But that devalues our own experience of being spiritual ‘orphans,’ people who have been cut off from tradition and must recreate meaning in our own lives. Many of you seem to look on this ‘orphan’ state as a personal failing and the cause of the emptiness of our lives (when in fact it is a symptom of that emptiness), not to mention a slight against our ancestors and a refusal of our duties as children. However, this search for meaning was not chosen, but thrust upon us by our dismal, materialistic, information-saturated lives. That meaning will not be found in a return to the reactionary and patriarchal traditions of our roots, but through a reinvigoration of what is essential and good in humanity. That is what motivates the admittedly misguided search for secrets in “shamanism??? and Native American religions; people are looking for wisdom from a time before humanity became corrupted by greed. Unfortunately that time, if it exists at all, does so only in some possible future.
As I close, I want to touch on a few other points about syncretism.
1) 'Authenticity' is a modern concept. All cultures are syncretic.
No culture ever exists in a vacuum, and history shows us time and time again that cultures borrow from one another without apologies. Conquerors usurp the culture of the conquered, and sometimes borrow it. Cultures evolve constantly, and what is seen as 'new fangled' or 'revisionist' becomes canonical in a few hundred years.
2) 'Spirit' itself plays fast and loose.
Some of us feel ourselves to be in contact with transcendent entities on a frequent basis, and receive messages from those entities. Those messages often include symbolism borrowed from all sorts of cultures, and weave these things together in bizarre and often insightful ways. Spirit rarely speaks to us in the way that we wish to be spoken to. It shows little respect for our personal idiosyncrasies and pet ideas. Often it shows little regard for human morals, laws, cultures and even human life. Yet we know we are bound to it by duty and by oath. If spirit presents itself to us in forms that are "stolen," why shouldn't we simply accept those appearances and do its work? If your people preserve practices that venerate the spirits in ways that are hundreds of years old, but we venerate those same spirits in ways they taught us yesterday, which practice is more authentic?
In the case of, for instance, ayahuasca, one board member repeatedly said "this is not your people's medicine." Well, what about Santo Daime? Is it their medicine? Meister Irineu was black, and no one knows if any authentic indigenous people gave him permission to use the daime. But his church has become a living part of modern Brazilian culture, and there is unquestionable value in that.
