Contemporary Voices from Anima Mundi

Readers may have noted my review of Initiated by Spirits in the last issue, along with Frédérique’s corresponding article. In it, I noted the fundamental discrepancy between the animistic Renaissance worldview of Pico della Mirandola and the mechanistic outlook of Descartes, which not only replaced it, but is still the dominant metaphor within biology and the biomedical sciences today. It is important to highlight that animism is associated with spirituality as a lived experience, which applies personally to all the authors in this significant volume. The two editors are respectively professor emerita of anthropology who is director of the Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration in Peru, and a professor emeritus of Native American studies who is also founder of the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas. The collection is incredibly rich and full of significant developmental insights.

The introduction and first chapter set the scene and provide valuable explanations of the current historical context, introducing the experience of coming-to-knowing by entering into relationship with the energy and animating spirit of the universe. This enables us to listen to and communicate with plants, trees and animals, with a corresponding expansion of our epistemology and ontology beyond our cultural limits. Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme have pioneered an approach that sees us as cosmos-creating subjects, which brings us back to ‘the Renaissance world of intimate presence of all things to each other.’ The essays communicate from within these worlds rather than using the third-person ‘about’ perspective. From this approach, the spirit world is a real world beyond the empirical world that we are accustomed to equating with reality.

The historical process of the 16^th and 17^th centuries created an alliance between mechanistic science and orthodox religion (p. 9) that exterminated the Anima Mundi while establishing an epistemological imperialism ‘through the slave trade, conquests, colonialism and globalisation.’ (p. 3) As Isabelle Stengers puts it, ‘the idea of a hegemonic scientific rationality can be understood as itself the product of the colonisation process.’ However, with the emergence of a post-materialist science (I don’t think the term New Materialism is apt), a broader horizon is reappearing and we can now decolonise our minds. In addition, the psychedelic revolution has many resonances with indigenous shamanic cultures. Moreover, the recovery of the reality of a living, sentient world is imperative as a basis for changing our relationship with Nature and enabling regeneration and healing of the Earth.

Frédérique’s essay on Western modernity and the fate of Anima Mundi is essential reading, and clearly articulates the shift in worldview towards ‘inert mechanism, without sentience, without agency.’ This also removes the subject, and classifies consciousness as a secondary quality, while facilitating an instrumental and exploitative view towards ‘natural resources’. Among others, she discusses the work of James Hillman, Candace Pert and Gregory Bateson, who noted that ‘the observer is an active part of defining reality’, thus shifting metaphors away from dualism towards a co-creative, participatory approach and bringing us back to the primacy of experience corresponding to what Lisa Miller calls ‘inner heart knowing.’ Frédérique’s work in Peru has enabled her to heal the split between her academic and spiritual self and contribute to the emergence of a post-material ecospirituality.

D. Ahmed describes an extraordinary awakening and therapeutic series of experiences that led her to reformulate her understanding of the psyche in a search for balance between Mythos and Logos, the world of meaning and the world of facts, feminine and masculine. Our current imbalance and one-sidedness are also manifest in what she observes as ‘something inherently self-destructive within the modern self.’ (p. 59) She refers to ‘Cartesian Christianism where mental beliefs are regarded as incontrovertible facts, and evil is seen in others, outside the self, which means that the goal becomes destruction, extermination, annihilation.’ (p. 61) The experiential mystical dimension is marginalised, and correspondingly Nature, women, receptivity, the body and sexuality.

In the interests of space, I will confine further comments to two essays: The Sorcerer, the Madman and Grace by Jacques Mabit MD; and To Dwell in the Thick Darkness: The Sacred Dark in Jewish Thought by Rabbi Fern Feldman. Mabit is a French medical doctor who first came to Peru in 1980 and began participative experimental research on traditional Amazonian medicine later in the same decade, founding the Takiwasi Center in 1992. He asks if Jungian archetypes are in fact desacralised spirits, and discusses the objectives of initiation and individuation within tribal or shamanic contexts whereby ‘the “self” is displaced from its habitual position at the centre of being.’ (p. 114) The tribal and Western cultural horizons are very different, with corresponding emphases on the group and the individual. The western view classifies vision-inducing brews as ‘hallucinogenic’ on the basis that what they reveal is not real, that entities encountered have no real existence. For the shamans, ‘the other world is extrinsic to the subject, transcendent, involving the world of the spirits and archetypes…. It is autonomous in relation to the subject and is thus objective.’ (p. 122)

This turns out to be a crucial point in relation to psychiatry and spirit release. For the materialistic psychiatrist, such entities are by definition intra-psychic, so such positions cannot envisage an extra-psychic attack, and may therefore misdiagnose the situation for metaphysical reasons. This would not happen in Brazil. Mabit draws on his extensive experience to shed light on what he calls infestations and describes rituals that can bring about healing as well as eventual integration. He comments that ‘ignorance of the laws [of energy] in no way protects people from their effects, but, rather, makes them more vulnerable.’ (p. 135) He also discusses the fundamental differences between Jungian individuation and shamanic initiation. Evil must be discerned as metaphysically substantial rather than subjected to ‘an impoverishing psychic reductionism.’

Rabbi Feldman explores ‘how in darkness all separation dissolves into oneness. Darkness is depths, cave, womb, soil that sprouts seeds, ceiling shade, Night time during which we dream, grow, and make long-term memory. Darkness can be a source, essence, innermost being, transcendence, embodiment, nothingness, emptiness, mystery.’ (p. 181) She discusses sacred texts along with the work of a number of scholars, providing a counterpoint to the more common focus on light. He quotes Philo describing how ‘Moses entered into the darkness where God was, that is into the unseen, incorporeal and archetypal essence of existing things. Thus he beheld what is hidden from the sight of the mortal nature….’ (p. 191) And in the Zohar, ‘the light of creation came forth out of the more primordial sacred darkness.’ The Divine Centre is represented as the holy of holies in the temple – and this is also within us. This profound reflection needs to be deeply contemplated.

The message of this volume could not be more culturally significant at our time of deep inner and outer systemic crises that demand an ontological revolution, regeneration and healing of our relationships with the divine, Nature and each other.