Shamanism in Detroit

Photo: Detroit Metro Times

Michael Harner, cover your ears. Despite the new interest in shamanism since the 1970s, the real shamans on the American religious scene (and elsewhere) are certain Pentecostal Christian preachers.

Contacting the unseen world while in an altered state of consciousness? Check.

Faking when it they have to because the audience expects it? Check.

Healing people, sometimes? Check.

Frequently having deep problems of illness or bad behavior in their own pasts, problems that went away once they acknowledge or were granted their “spiritual gifts”? Check.

Identifying spiritual causes of mundane misfortune? Check.

Putting on a good show, a spiritual spectacle? Check.

It all sounds like shamanism to me. Read this story about the Triumph Prophetic Worship Glory and Deliverance Center.

Some in the audience spin off from the circular march and sit alone in their seats, praying intensely, with heads bowed. Others are crying their eyes out, standing along the wall, sobbing with their whole bodies, as others lay their hands on them, exhorting them to give in, to let the self melt away and allow the voice of the spirit to break through in the same unreal language being shouted by the woman on the stage. Everything is now a swirl of loud noise and quick movement and sheer intensity, and it feels like something’s about to give, the room’s about to burst, and everyone’s just waiting to finally exhale or collapse in surrender.

Read the whole thing. Tell me if all the essential elements of the spiritual technology that we call shamanism aren’t there.

 

Lucid-Dreaming Mask

Anyone ever try such a gadget? I could be tempted to buy one.

MAPQVEST

How long the journey and how much the cost for a private traveler going from Roma to Londinium in January?

Orbis knows.

Click the “Using Orbis” menu button first.

(Via Borepatch.)

Pentagram Pizza for May 18th

• Twelve words for for bloggers, pointed towards people in the medical professions, but likely appropriate for academia as well.

• While we are in the workplace, some thoughts from a Psychology Today article on why “diversity training” is a waste of time. Or why good manners are better than rules enforced by bureaucratic idiots.

• More thoughts on cult-occult films of the 1960s, this time from Zan at The Juggler. I have a couple in my Netflix queue now.

Timothy Leary Floated Here

To raise money for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies  (MAPS), the organization is auctioning off a floatation tank used by Timothy Leary near the end of his life.

MAPS raises money and lobbies for research in using psychedelic (entheogenic) drugs in mental-health treatments. I donate to them and have the MAPS hoodie to show for it, but a $5,000 opening bid is a little rich for my blood.

But I did try the floatation tank experience, back in the early 1980s. From Wikipedia:

Flotation therapy developed from the research work of John Lilly although he was not primarily interested in therapy, rather in the effect of sensory deprivation on the human brain and mind.

People using early float tanks discovered that they enjoyed the experience and that the relaxed state was also a healing state for many conditions including stress, anxiety, pain, swelling, insomnia and jet lag.

As a result float tanks were produced for commercial uses and commercial float centres offering flotation therapy opened in several countries during the period from 1980 to the present day when there are hundreds of flotation centres in dozens of countries. In almost all cases these float centres offer wellness treatments and in particular the release of stress.

And it was John Lilly himself who donated this tank originally.

I found the experience restful and relaxing, but I did it without the DMT or LSD that made it really “cosmic” for some folks.

In the early 1990s I attended a nature-writing workshop at New Buffalo in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico. In the late 1960s, funded by one guy’s inheritance, it was a famous commune, until it suffered the typical fate of being overrun by losers and freeloaders, and the residents shut the gates, so to speak. When I was there, the owners were trying to make it a mini-conference center and extremely crunchy B&B.

There was a sign in the main room, which read something like, “Timothy Leary slept here. Or maybe he stayed up all night.”

The Potential Strength of a Liberal Arts Degree

I have written here before about the Higher Education Bubble. Related to that perception, you hear a lot of people devaluing education in the humanities and arts. High-profile news stories about graduates with degrees in, for example, film studies and a big debt load did not help.

But here is an article from a business publication saying that liberal arts grads are being hired—if they can demonstrate what are essentially good research and rhetorical skills. And by “rhetorical” I mean the ability to analyze and argue a given problem or situation. Quintilian, call your office.

From an article titled “Revenge of the Liberal Arts Major,”

More interesting, at least for those of us who got some parental grief over our college choice, was the apparent love being shown for liberal arts majors. Thirty percent of surveyed employers said they were recruiting liberal arts types, second only to the 34 percent who said they were going after engineering and computer information systems majors. Trailing were finance and accounting majors, as only 18 percent of employers said they were recruiting targets.

“The No. 1 skill that employers are looking for are communication skills and liberal arts students who take classes in writing and speaking,” said Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding and an expert on Generation Y. “They need to become good communicators in order to graduate with a liberal arts degree. Companies are looking for soft skills over hard skills now because hard skills can be learned, while soft skills need to be developed.”

Contrary to what the “expert on Generation Y” says, however, a liberal arts degree is no guarantee of communication skills, however. I see plenty of Facebook and blog posts from professor friends’ complaining of their students’ poor writing, inadequate research, and inability to think beyond checking the right answer on a multiple-choice test.

You have to work at it.

 

Where to Watch the Eclipse

NASA has the map for Sunday’s celestial event. It looks like we will get a glimpse before sunset.

Pentagram Pizza for May 15, 2012

• At The Allergic Pagan, a three-part series on Neopaganism in America (link goes to the third part) with a lot of “whatever happened to?”.

• Jason Pitzl-Waters uses the reunion of the band Dead Can Dance (one of my favorites) to look back at the history of Pagan music.

• A new blog devoted to the history of Chicago occultism has me excited, since I will be there in November.

Ask Academic Abby

“Ask Academic Abby” is a service of the American Academy of Religion, so it is slanted towards graduate students in religious studies, but a lot of the advice is applicable to academic generally. But it appears only in the online Religious Studies News.

Yeah, Public Altars . . .

. . . like this.

I want to see them.