WHAT IS THE SHAMANIC TRACE? (MY MIND IS BLOWN!)

WHAT IS FLUID HISTORY? WHAT IS REVERSION? WHAT IS CULTURAL INVERSION/SCHIZMOGENESIS? WHAT IS EXODUS? WHAT IS ETHNOGENESIS?

The Effigy Mound builders adopted the idea of the mound from Cahokian/Mississippian Civilization, but they changed the entire meaning of the mounds into a symbolic language that transpires both within Nature and about Nature simultaneously.

If it were not for the ravages of time and the Wisconsin dairy industry, we would possess an entire “Koran”, as it were, of “waymarks on the horizons” of Nature—a “Bible” of lessons about the correct relations among humans, animals, plants, and spirits. Most of the “book” is missing and the rest in fragments—but those fragments lie before us openly on the ground.

As “words” in a language of images, each Emblem seems to hold within itself the fractal image of the whole System, the entire emblematic landscape.

If we offer tobacco, and receptive silence, they may still speak.

-Peter Lamborn Wilson

HEY FOLKS,

HOLY FUCK! I just read an incredible book and it was one of them books that makes you go: HOLY FUCK!

The book is called The Shamanic Trace by Peter Lamborn Wilson and technically it’s not even a book. It’s an essay contained within a book called Escape from the 19th century, which was published in 1998.

Now, I don’t know if your average reader would get anywhere near excited as I am about this essay, which is about an indigenous society that built huge mounds in the effigies of different animals, birds, and human figures in what is now Wisconsin.

But it just so happens to be about something that I have been very interested in lately - the idea that the cultural anarchism of indigenous Turtle Islands had been the result of a hard-won battle with an oppressive state centred in a place called Cahokia, which is now St. Louis, Missouri.

Basically, there is way more evidence to support the anarchist revolution theory of the Fall of Cahokia than I was previously aware. The history is fascinating!

Wilson goes so far as to suggest that after the Cahokians were defeated, some of them travelled south and became the Aztecs. This makes me wonder whether they might have anything to do with the abandonment of Teotihuacan, which I have never understood.

So, basically, we might eventually be able to agree on the exact location of Aztlan - it seems that it may well have been St. Louis, Missouri. If the author of the classic train-hopping novel Evasion is to be believed, there is a horribly negative terrible energy to East St. Louis to this day. To be fair, though, he was judging it based on the slum next to the train yard. But there was a lot of cannibalism and ritual murder that took place in St. Louis, and apparently it’s still a violent place to this day. Crazy.

But that’s just scratching the surface of what an incredibly mind-blowing book/essay this is.

Peter Lamborn Wilson also presents original evidence and by far the most compelling interpretation of the Effigy Mound Builder culture I had ever heard. He did fieldwork, visiting “about a hundred” mounds and consulting with multiple knowledge Winnebago knowledge keeper, which it seems that no credential archaeology had bothered doing. He seems to have even located a member of an indigenous secret society which preserves the sacred knowledge of that lineage. How mind-blowing is that?

If you didn’t know that there are indigenous secret societies all throughout Turtle Island, now you do!

Wilson then introduces the idea of “the Clastrian machine”, which refers to cultural mechanisms within indigenous society that prevent the emergence of hierarchy. The name is a tribute to Pierre Clastres, an anarchist anthropologist who wrote a classic book called Society against the State, in which he explains how culture acts as a force which prevents the emergence of dominance behaviour.

Some people think that anarchists believe indigenous people were innocent children who never had dominant urges or tyrannical impulses, but those people don’t get it. Hunter-gatherers are people just like us - no better, no worse. It’s just that culture that causes people to behave in certain ways that allow them to live in harmony. And in cultures that have stood the test of time, there’s certain ways of dealing with certain problems, and all cultures have to have ways of dealing with the problem of a tyrannical leader. One of the purposes which a functional culture must serve is that of counter-dominance.

This is very similar to an idea that I got from David Graeber - that of imaginary counterpower. Put together, the two ideas are more than the sum of their parts.

Put it all together, and what have you got? The makings of a whole new way of conceiving of political possibility, along with a set of analytical tools and vast reservoir of theory. It’s a pretty frigging exciting time to be into this stuff!

THE BEST POLITICAL IDEAS ARE IN ANTHROPOLOGY

I feel like I’ve been wandering around in a desert of ideas and suddenly find that I’m at some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet. It turns out that the ideas were always there waiting to be discovered, but I wasn’t looking in the right place. The right place to look is in anthropology.

When you read Mauss, Clastres, Graeber, and Wilson together, an increasingly clear picture begins to emerge. There are certain things that every culture that wishes to remain one of equals must do, and those can be enumerated and expanded upon.

Then we can look at the different solutions that different cultures have had to those problems and consider what we might be able to learn from them.

And that’s what we should do, if you ask me. We need to figure out where we want to get to before we can figure out how to get from here to there. So we do need a vision, and the vision needs to be compelling. You really shouldn’t go around trying to convince people of things that you don’t yourself believe, so we need to really think things through before we go proposing actual strategies.

As I have said before, my preferred strategy is Cultural Inversion, Exodus, and Ethnogenesis. The goal is to create a permanent counterculture which develops its own ways of meeting its needs outside of the system. The idea of counter-economics, which Derrick Broze promotes, is part of this also.

The Shamanic Trace also introduces the idea of REVERSION, which is another term that I think that we start using.

Reversion is the opposite of progress. It involves returning to an earlier state instead of advancing to a new one. If people were agriculturists, but then abandoned agriculture and took up foraging instead, they are said to have reverted to hunting-gathering. But what if they were slaves? Their reversion, in that case, would be an improvement upon their former state as unfree labourers.

The Myth of Progress casts Forward Momentum in Time as if it were some good in and of itself, but such is not the case. If you took a wrong turn, sometimes the smartest thing you can do is go backwards. When we reimagine collapse, we should reimagine reversion. When we look at the ways different societies are changing now, let’s keep in mind that they could also change back to the way they used to be. Culture does not move unidirectionally.

In the case of the Effigy Mound Builders, it seems that they rejected the hierarchy and brutality of the Cahokian culture. Indeed, many of the mounds are, according to preserved indigenous knowledge, monuments to agreements made between nations. They may be read as monuments to cooperation.

Anyway, really, just read the book/essay. Then read it again. Then let a few years go by and read it again. This is a serious barnburning razzling-dazzler of a book. I’m seriously blown away by this man’s encyclopedic knowledge of world mysticism. It’s bonkers.

This book should be a classic, yet it’s incredibly obscure!

Anyway, I will probably write something about the Clastrian machine eventually, but for, I really just want you to read The Shamanic Trace. It’s a highly significant piece of the puzzle.

Thank you for much to the Immediatism podcast for producing an audio version of this book/essay, which you can find here.

I hope that you enjoy The Shamanic Trace, and don’t forget to leave a comment!

for the wild,

Crow Qu’appelle

The Shamanic Trace

(For the Dreamtime Avocational Archaeology Group)

“In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
the jails are made of tin,
And you can walk right out again
as soon as you are in.”
—Harry K. McClintock, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”

“Where there is still a people, it does not understand the state and hates it as the evil eye and the sin against customs and rights.”
—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I.

1. Birth of a Notion

The emergence of a State seems revolutionary in terms of la longue durée, but appears gradual in terms of human generations. The State emerges slowly, even hesitantly, and never without opposition.

“State” stands for a tendency toward separation and hierarchy. Is “capital” a different force? At the level of custom in the non-authoritarian tribe, the two are not necessarily distinguished. Accumulation of goods, for example, is seen as usurpation of power; the chief in such a case will be virtually powerless because the chiefly function is redistribution (“generosity”), not accumulation.

Where does the State emerge? In Sumer or Egypt? But separation and hierarchy must have already occurred long before the “sudden appearance” (as archaeologists say) of the first ziggurat or pyramid. We should look “back” to the first moment when the durable but fragile structure of the non-authoritarian tribe is shattered by separation and hierarchy. But such a moment leaves no trace in stone or written record. We must reconstruct it on a structural basis making the best use we can of “ethnographic parallels”. We should investigate whether myth and folklore contain “memories” of such a moment.

Now the great contribution of P. Clastres was to point out that no such thing as a “primitive” society exists or ever existed, if we mean a society that is innocent of the knowledge of separation and hierarchy.^[6] The problem proposed by Rousseau to the Romantics:—how can one return to innocence?—is a non-problem. The actual situation is much more interesting. The “savages” are neither ignorant nor unspoiled. Every society, if it is a society, must have already considered the problem—the catastrophe—of separation. Humans are not blank slates, to be “spoiled” by some mysterious outside force (—where would it come from? outer space?). Separation is inherent in the very nature of consciousness itself. How could there ever have existed a time when it was unknown, since “to know” is already to separate?

The problem for “primitive” society therefore is to prevent separation from reaching catastrophic proportions and manifesting as hierarchy-eventually as “State” (and/or “Capital”). Normal humans want to preserve autonomy and pleasure for themselves—the whole group—and not give it up to a few. Therefore normal society is defined by rights and customs that actively prevent catastrophic emergence. The question whether any given individual or group is “consciously aware” of the purpose of such structures is far less important than the operative existence of the structures themselves. If “rights” allow for fair redistribution of goods, for example, and “customs” (including normative mythologies) succeed in preventing the accumulation of power, then these structures must be seen as efficient modes of reproducing non-authoritarian society, no matter what “explanation” may be given by the “ethnographic subject” or informant.

Society opposes itself to the “State”:—that is the Clastrian thesis. Its motive is clear and unambiguous, provided we understand the life of the non-authoritarian tribe not as "nasty, brutish and short" but as a process of maximizing autonomy and pleasure for the whole group. This process is closed to separation and hierarchy, so the individual maximizing of pleasure, for instance, is limited by the requirement of a rough equality of condition, and the autonomy of the individual (though it may be extreme) is limited by the autonomy of the group. The hunter/gatherer economy, dependent on small groups in ecological balance with nature, is ideally suited to this non-authoritarian structure. And as Sahlins made clear in Stone Age Economics, the hunter/gatherer economy—even in ecologically disadvantaged areas like deserts, rain forests, and the Arctic—is based on abundance and leisure.^[7] (The hunter can know starvation of course-but not “scarcity”—because scarcity is the opposite of surplus or accumulation, and opposites cannot exist without each other.) In Paleolithic times, when humans occupied the richest ecologies of Earth, the hunter’s “subsistence” must have been rather idyllic. No wonder hunting survived well into the era of agriculture under the sign of a kind of magical freedom from work and routine; at one point hunting was supposed to be the privilege of the aristocracy, and resistance to authority took the form of poaching. Even in medieval times the elaborate rules for dressing game can be seen as prolongations of the essential act of the primordial hunter:—the just distribution of the kill. (This is also one of the origins of animal sacrifice.)

The non-authoritarian hunter/gatherer tribe seems to have been the universal form of human society for 99% of its existence. We have legends of lost and prediluvian “civilizations” like Atlantis, but no archaeological evidence for them. Perhaps we should take them seriously, however, as mythic reminders of the fact that separation and hierarchy could have emerged at any point in that longest of long durations we call “prehistory”. Once tools were developed by homo erectus, implying the existence of full consciousness (since tools represent a prosthesis or “doubling” of self), presumably the potential for emergent catastrophe was already complete as well. But it “failed” to emerge. The anti-authoritarian institutions analyzed by Clastres prevented it from emerging.

From a certain point of view agriculture is the one and only “new thing” that has ever happened in the world. We are still living in the Neolithic, and industry (even “information” technology!) is still a prolongation of agricultural technology—or rather agriculture as technology. If we could eat information, we might speak of a “revolution” and an end to the Neolithic. Who knows? it may happen. But it hasn’t happened yet. Civilization itself—the “culture” of cities—our conceptual world—was formed at Çatal Hüyük or Jericho (or somewhere similar) less than 10,000 years ago. Not very impressive in terms of the Long Haul!

Moreover, since Sahlin’s paradigm-shift, a great mystery hovers around the question of agriculture. Namely:—What on earth could induce any sane person to give up hunting and gathering (four hours daily labor or less, 200 or more items in the “larder”, “the original leisure society”, etc.) for the rigors of agriculture (14 or more hours a day, 20 items in the larder, the “work ethic”, etc.)? The “first farmers” had no idea of the glories of Sumer or Harappa to spur them on in their drudgery—and if they could have foreseen such glories, they would’ve dropped their seed-sticks in despair and disgust. Babylon was not destined for peasants to enjoy, after all.

A study of myths and folk tales about the origin of agriculture reveals over and over again that it was the invention of women—a logical extension of womens’ gathering, of course—and that the establishment of agriculture somehow entailed violence to women (sacrifice of a goddess, for example). The link between agriculture and ritual violence is strong. Not that hunters are ignorant of ritual violence (e.g., “primitive warfare”)—not at all. But human sacrifice, head-hunting, and cannibalism, for example, seem to belong much more to agriculturalists (and to “civilization”) than to the hunter/gatherers. Offhand I can’t think of one hunting tribe that practiced such customs—all the cannibals, etc., were “primitive agriculturalists”, or advanced agriculturalists such as “us”, who disguise our human sacrifices (in an “electric chair” no less!) as legal punishments. No doubt exceptions will be found—I simply haven’t read enough anthropology to make any categorical statements—but I will stand by my intuitions about the “cruelty” of agriculture (“raping the body of our Mother Earth”, as hunters often call it). Intense anxiety about the calendar, the seasonal year, which must be adjusted to “fit” the astral year (the image of divine perfection), leads to a view of time itself as “cruel”. The smooth time of the nomadic hunter (unstriated, rhizomatic, like the forests and mountains, like “nature”) is replaced by the grid-work, the cutting of earth into rigid rows, the year into layers, society into sections. “Division of labor” has really emerged; separation has emerged. Hence there must be cruelty. The farmers who work 14 hours a day instead of four are being cruel to themselves; logically then they will be cruel to each other.

The hunter is violent—but the farmer is cruel.

So we might expect to find the moment of emergence of the “State” somehow associated with the “Agricultural Revolution”. For some time after reading Sahlins (and misinterpreting him) I looked for a direct link between the catastrophe of agriculture and the catastrophe of State-and-Capital. But I couldn’t find it. True, separation has occurred. But separation does not appear to lead “all at once” to hierarchy. In fact “primitive” farmers are just as staunchly non-authoritarian as the hunters. Perhaps we need to revive the old idea of a “stage” of horticulture as opposed to agriculture per se. The gardener works hard, but also still hunts, both for meat and for pleasure (and for the sake of preserving an actual and ritual relation with “nature”). Even free peasants are fiercely independent, and horticulturalists are quite “ungovernable”. Hard work is seasonal for the gardener, with plenty of time left for laziness and feasting. The Dyaks, gardeners and headhunters, have an extreme zerowork mentality, and spend as much time as possible lying about drinking and telling stories (see Nine Dyak Nights.^[8]) The gardeners’ chief has the most yams or pigs, but is also obliged to beggar himself by giving feasts—his “power” is constantly deconstructing itself in potlatch. Warfare is still “primitive”, in that it still operates to diffuse and centrifugalize power and wealth rather than accumulate it. The war chief is still a temporary appointment; his power ends with the end of war. Custom and right still protect group autonomy, and still prevent the effective emergence of the State. It may still prove to be the case that the State is an epiphenomenon of agriculture; but the key would not lie in the crop-growing process itself. since cultivation of the earth can be carried out without accumulation. The key is the invention of surplus and scarcity. The whole thrust of the “Clastrian machine” (if I can use this term to describe the entire system of rights and customs that resists State-emergence) is not aimed at any economic technique, and in fact can survive even the great transition from hunting to horticulture. It is aimed against the accumulation of wealth and power, which must be resisted by keeping wealth and power in maximum (potential) movement. Accumulation is stasis—stasis is scarcity. Scarcity implies surplus (opposites cannot exist without each other)—and surplus implies appropriation. Agriculture makes surplus possible—but not necessary. The State begins with the breakdown of the “Clastrian machine”.

Fine. But where did it happen? And when, and how? It might be interesting to consider the possibility that it never really happened at all. If we are all still living in the Neolithic, then it must be true that we are all somehow still living in the Paleolithic as well. We still have our immemorial rights and customs (i.e., customs “older than memory”) that preserve for us the remnants of our autonomy and pleasure. These fragments are not “lost” but perhaps severely reduced in scope and scale, limited to secret corners and cracks where the monolithic power of State-and-Capital cannot penetrate. I believe this to be the case in a sense, and this paper will be devoted to tracing those rights and customs as they appear out of prehistory, so to speak, and enter into history, and persist. History itself can be viewed as a process of Enclosure, a fencing-in and reduction of the area ruled by “custom” in our sense of the word (which we owe to E. P. Thompson).^[9]

Yet this process remains (by definition?) incomplete. Autonomy and pleasure have failed to disappear; the rule of State and Capital depends in part on a spectacular delusion, and pretense of the erasure of customs. And even when autonomy does disappear, it is sustained by a kind of secret tradition, rooted in the Paleolithic, that guarantees its re-appearance. (Again: the “tradition” need not be conscious to be “real”.) The “Clastrian machine” never breaks down—entirely.

Nevertheless, something happened! We have the evidence at Uruk. I saw evidence myself at Aztalan in Wisconsin, the site of the farthest-north extension of the Mississippian or Cahokian culture of pre-Columbian North America, where agricultural city dwellers killed and ate hundreds of human beings (some archaeologists speak of the “Southern Death Cult”). The ziggurats, mounds, and pyramids reveal the very structure of these catastrophic societies:—hierarchy has burst its ancient bonds, freed itself of the restraints of “right and custom”, and triumphed over a beaten class of peasants and slaves. The strictures of the old tribal laws and myths of equality and abundance and against separation and hierarchy have proven so weak as to seem non-existent, never existent. State and/or Capital has triumphed. Autonomy and pleasure have become property.

We may never be able to track down the “moment” of the State. But one thing we can be sure of:—it didn’t just happen, on its own, spontaneously, and according to some law of evolution. No climate change or population growth pushed an innocent and unresisting mass of humans into History. Humans were involved. The State (as G. Landauer said) is a human relation, a relation amongst humans and within humans.^[10] It is always possible. But so is resistance.

In a sense the State can be seen as a revolt against the old rights and customs. We cannot call it the revolt of a “class” because non-authoritarian societies have no classes. But it does have roles, functions, divisions. Hunter/gatherer, men/women, chiefs/people, shamans/non-shamans. One or more of these divisions must have revolted against the others. If the shamans revolted we would expect the emergence of a “priestly” State; if the chiefs or warriors, a “kingly” State; if the women, a “matriarchy”—and so forth. Unfortunately we can find examples of all these, and mixtures as well. An analysis of primitive institutions cannot provide us with an answer, because each of these institutions in itself is designed to prevent the State, not to facilitate it. As Blake would say, each of these institutions possesses its emanation or form and its spectre; the former holds the latter in check. The revolt we’re looking for would be a spectral emergence, therefore, and thus perhaps impossible to see.

In order to throw light on this problem we need two things: a more complete definition of the “Clastrian machine” (Clastres himself dealt mostly with primitive warfare); and a number of examples of how it works not only in “primitive” societies but also and especially in “historical” societies, where it operates as opposition to separation and hierarchy. Once we can view the mechanism more clearly perhaps we can “read it back” and see where catastrophe would be most likely to occur. Of course we must avoid any “mechanistic” interpretations—our “machine” is organic, complex, even chaotic. But some generalizations may prove feasible, even so. Our hope lies in the continuity of the institutions in question, their “traditions”, their cohesion toward meaning. Rather than seeing “rights and customs” merely as Paleolithic survivals or extrusions of non-authoritarian mores into a later and more developed authoritarian totality, we should see them as representing the consideration of catastrophe that society has always already made, and that resists all corrosion despite its infinite mutations, regressions, compromises, and defeats—a consciousness that persists, and finds expression.

In order to define more clearly the “Clastrian machine”, then, we need to name its parts—which, for the sake of brevity, we will limit to three: “primitive warfare”, the “Society of the Gift”, and shamanism. We might examine any customs of non-authoritarian peoples in the expectation that all of them will harmonize (however indirectly) with the double function of realizing autonomy and pleasure and suppressing separation and hierarchy. But these three areas of custom are directly concerned with the social economy or dialectic we want to examine. Do we have a problem of categorization here, in trying to compare three such “separate spheres” under the rubric of some apparently unified or universal force? But Society itself has already done so:—it combines war, economy, and spirituality within its “universe”. Admittedly the world of ethnographic discourse is not a clearly-bounded pure and impermeable abstraction; nevertheless we would be unable to sociologize or anthropologize to any extent whatsoever if we could not assume that a given society experiences itself on certain levels as a whole. We have located the “Clastrian machine” on such a level; our demonstration will depend on comparing our examples according to this hypothesis. In order to suggest the persistence of the “machine” through history we shall have to expand our search beyond the “perfect case” of the non-authoritarian hunter/gatherer or horticulturalist tribe (which in any case exists for most of us only in ethnography, archaeology, folklore, etc.); we need to examine cases from eras in which Society is losing or has already lost power to the State (and/or Capital), and in which the “machine” now acts as an oppositional force, or for the facilitation of autonomous zones within the space of Power.

2. Machinations

According to Clastres, “primitive” warfare and “classical” warfare are radically different phenomena. Warfare as we know it, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz, is waged on behalf of separation, appropriation, hierarchy, accumulation of power. In this sense we are still waging classical war, despite its supposed apotheosis into the “purity” of instantaneity and cyber-spectacle (“information war”). For us, warfare is centripetal, drawing power towards the center. Primitive war, however, is centrifugal—it causes power to flee the center. First, warriors have no (political) power except on the warpath. Second, war is considered an affair of personal glory (“immortal fame”), not a means of acquiring property, slaves, or land. The rare prisoner is either killed or adopted into the tribe; there is no “surplus of labor”. Third, in fact, and most importantly, any booty must be shared out with the whole tribe—the warrior acquires nothing for himself alone, nor does the warband enrich itself as a sodality at the tribe’s expense. Fourth, actual death is rather rare in such war; there is no “excess manpower” to spare. Honorable wounds (or even symbolic wounds, as in “counting coup” among the Plains Indians in North America) and clever thefts are more highly valued than martyrdoms. But the primitive warrior soon comes to understand that a life devoted to war can end only in a glorious death, or in a miserable old age of poverty and powerlessness-since the tribe is very careful to see that he accumulates neither wealth nor authority.^[11] Hence the well-known “melancholy” of the primitive warrior, so often noted in the literature. The “uncleanness” of the warrior, frequently expressed in ritual and myth, represents the anxiety about his role shared by the tribe as a whole. If the warrior revolts against tribal custom and seizes power and wealth for himself (an obvious temptation), he has committed what G. Dumezil called “the sin of the warrior”^[12]—in effect, the creation of “classical warfare”.

Thus for Clastres primitive warfare was the perfect model of rights and customs institutionalized as a force for the dissipation and centrifugality of power as separation. Primitive war serves precisely the purpose of Society in resisting the emergence of the State. It is not really “primitive” in the sense of being a crude and imperfect foreshadowing of classical war; in fact, it is a highly sophisticated complex evolved for distinct “political” purposes. Violence, which appears as a “natural” human trait, must not be allowed to cause separation within the tribe. Violence must be used to protect and express the egalitarian structure of the non-authoritarian group, not to threaten it. Violence is the price of freedom, as the 18th century revolutionaries might have expressed it—but not of appropriation and slavery.

The idea of the Economy of the Gift as a “stage” in social development was clarified by M. Mauss and refined by G. Bataille and others.^[13] Here it would be misleading to speak of “primitive exchange” or “primitive communism”, since it is not a matter of property-in-movement or property-in-common but of the failure of property to emerge. The potlatch of the Northwest Amerindian tribes, as we know it from ethnographic literature, is perhaps not the ideal model for elucidating the “Gift”; its “classical” form of “conspicuous consumption” is now seen as perhaps owing too much to pressure from an encroaching money-economy to be considered as an organic expression of the economy of reciprocity. Potlatch in this form might better be considered in the light of Bataille’s “Excess”—the necessity for non-exchange in a society of “primitive abundance”. The original “pre-Contact” form of potlatch would perhaps have included a wider system of smaller but more numerous and frequent ceremonies, in which the essentially redistributive nature of potlatch might be seen more clearly. If we accept an historical development from the economy of the Gift to the economy of redistribution to the society of exchange, then potlatch would belong to the second “stage”, not the first. And this would make ethnographic sense, since the Tlingit, Haida, and other tribes were in fact highly civilized town-dwellers with authoritarian chieftaincies, hereditary usages, division of labor, monumental architecture, etc.—more comparable to Çatal Hüyük or even pre-Dynastic Egypt than to, say, the Inuit, Australian Aborigines, rain forest pygmies, or even “primitive” horticulturalists. The true economy of the Gift is to be found among such non-authoritarian peoples. It originates in the equal sharing-out of game and gathered food, and is anything but arbitrary or “spontaneous”. Every person has a “right” to the Gift, and knows exactly what will constitute reciprocity. But nothing “enforces” the Gift except “rights and customs” (and the possibility of recourse to violence). The Gift is “sacred”—and generosity is “divine”—because the very structure of the social depends utterly and absolutely on the free movement of the Gift. The Gift in turn is related to the Sacrifice, in which the spirits that provided the game (and who in effect are the game) are included in the kinship structure of the tribe by the gift of a portion of the kill (usually blood or smoke) in return for the gift of life’s very sustenance. This structure also holds for plants and the “lesser mysteries” of gathering—which will evolve into the grand sacrificial ideology of the Neolithic. The Gift is the voluntary sacrifice that “atones” for the violence of the hunt or the cruelty of agriculture, and "at-ones" the fabric of society by including everything (animals, plants, the dead, the living, the unseen) in symbolic unity and renewal. Property fails to appear in such a society because everything that might be property is already Gift; the possibility of exclusive possession has been pre-empted by usage and by donation, or donativeness, to coin a term.

In reality however, the three “stages of economic development”—gift, redistribution, and exchange—cannot be seen as a crude linearity or conceptual grid or diachronic fatality. Each is overlaid, super-inscribed, contaminated, magnetized, and compromised with the others in a palimpsestic permeability of cross-definitions, paradoxes, and dialectical violence. The economy of the Gift is also obviously an economy of redistribution and exchange, in broad general terms. We somewhat arbitrarily reserve the term redistribution to refer to the chiefs (and later the States) in their function as ritual conduit of wealth for the people—it flows to the “top” and is redistributed “justly” and as widely as possible. As we’ve seen, in some tribes this means the chiefs are periodically bankrupted by the custom of excessive generosity they must honor—and even the “classical Civilizations” of Sumer, the Indus Valley, Egypt, or the Mayans experienced ceilings or upper limits on their power of accumulation, due to the ancient rights and customs of redistributive justice. In a sense, then, the structure of redistribution is a prolongation of certain aspects (or “survivals”) of the structure of the Gift; the Gift is still embedded in the economy that now overcomes or (at least) absorbs it. The imperative of redistributive justice, to which even the most despotic of despots must pay lip service, if not true devotion, consists in fact of the “Clastrian machine” at work within the authoritarian structure of the ancient kingships and theocracies. Not even king or priest must interfere with this justice, which is (therefore) cosmic in nature—an eternal truth—a morality.

Now the mystery of the third stage of economic development—“exchange”—as K. Polanyi pointed out^[14] —is its failure to appear. In the ideal terms of Classical Economics, exchange was always the purpose and telos of any “earlier” or “more primitive” economic form. Property was inherent in these forms as the flower in the seed, and only needed to “evolve” toward the dawn of “the Market” eventually to be born as full-fledged 19th century Capital. The assumption is that all societies are based on greed and competition, but that we moderns have at last realized a rational system to maximize the positive (wealth-generating) aspects of this eternal law of nature while suppressing the negative aspects by legislation. But Polanyi, as an economic anthropologist, was able to prove that no known human society ever based itself or its economy on the presumption of greed and competition as laws of nature. On the contrary, the economics of the Gift and of Redistribution are based on a deliberate refusal of such a possibility. They represent the “Clastrian machine” at work against the emergence of “pure exchange”, which has always already been foreseen and suppressed by the Social for itself and in itself. The one and only social system based on “exchange” is that of 18th and 19th century European capitalists and their class-allies among the intelligentsia. Even in the 20th century, the “Market” still failed to emerge, thanks to the redistributive ideologies of Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin—who for all their evil still paid lip service to the immemorial ideal of economic justice. In fact “exchange” really only emerges in 1989 with the collapse of the movement of the Social, already hopelessly betrayed by its own leaders and thinkers. For the first time in history, the Market today rules unopposed. Or so it believes. In fact, of course, the “earlier” economies of Gift and redistribution are still present “under” the inscriptions and prescriptions of the Capital State. They cannot be erased, and they cannot be considered as “failed precursors” to the triumphalist Market. If they have been forced underground into a “shadow economy” of barter, “black work”, fluid cash and alternative forms of money, etc., they nonetheless persist and find expression. The totality of Capital remains illusory—and in fact has its true being in “virtuality” and “simulation”. The very completeness of its victory, which seems to culminate a long, drawn-out process of gradual encroachment, evertightening enclosure, and relentless erosion of “empirical freedoms”, presents Capital all at once with the question posed to it by its very universality.

This question could perhaps best be expressed in terms of money.

Symbolic exchange already exists within the economy of the Gift. Malinowski’s Pacific Argonauts, who trade splendid but useless works of ritual art over thousands of miles of open sea, practiced a closed system in which symbols could only be exchanged for symbols, not for “real wealth”. In fact the process was a kind of Bataillesque Excess, not a form of money. The extremely important but little-studied trade in ceremonial polished-stone axe-heads that pervaded all of late Paleolithic and early Neolithic Eurasia and Africa, may offer another example. Earlier axe-heads tend to be full-sized and utilitarian, while later ones move toward delicacy, miniaturization, and aesthetic perfection. The axe-heads had an obvious spiritual value for numerous and wide-spread cultures, ranging from Neanderthal to Minoan Crete. It’s interesting to note that an early form of Chinese coinage took the shape of small axe-heads. It’s possible that the Paleolithic axe-heads were not merely traded for other symbolic goods, but also for “real wealth”, in which case they could be considered “money”. If so, however, it must have been a money hedged around with taboos in order to prevent its becoming an opening to separation and hierarchy through “primitive accumulation”, because we have no evidence that the ceremonial axe-heads changed society the way money changes society. No doubt these objects took their place in a complex system based on reciprocity rather than the “profit motive”!

A most persuasive argument was made by the German scholar Bernhard Laum and his followers, who assert that the origin of money is in the Sacrifice.^[15] Each part of the animal in venery and in sacrifice has its designated recipient as gift. Incidentally this constitutes a kind of pecking order, a potential form of separation that must be “rectified” by the concept of rights and customs. This rectification holds good within the intimacy of the hunting band or horticultural village-but when the group becomes too large to share in a single sacrifice (for example, in a typical agricultural Neolithic town of 500 or so), then tokens must be distributed among the whole group, while the sacrifice itself is reserved to the “priests” (a custom that survives into Greece and Judea, of course). These tokens eventually take the shape of “temple souvenirs”, which are later traded (because they have “numinous value” or mana) for real wealth. Hence the first coins, from 7th century Be Asia Minor, are issued by temples, stamped with numinous symbols, and made of symbolic metal (electrum, a mixture of solar gold and lunar silver). The idea of money as numismatic numina explains how money will be able to reproduce itself even though it is not alive (money is the sexuality of the dead). When "money begets money", the old rectified egalitarianism of the sacrifice is shattered by the possibility of accumulation and appropriation (“usury”). Religion has in a sense inadvertently let loose the demon of money in the world, which explains religion’s ambiguous relation to the stuff. For religion, all exchange is usury—and yet religion is the very fountainhead of money itself. Jesus of Nazareth, for example, is said to have felt this paradox with particular poignancy.

The temple-token theory of money’s origin is instructive but not conclusive—since in fact money makes a much earlier appearance—(somewhere in the proto-Sumerian millennia of the mid-to-late Neolithic)—as pure debt. Its pre-history can be traced in the rubbish-heaps and tells of archaeological digs in the Near East, in the form of clay tokens representing units of material wealth (we can guess this because some of them have the obvious shapes of hides, animals, containers, plants, etc.). Later on one finds clay envelopes containing sets of clay tokens, with symbols of the tokens pressed into the clay to record the envelope’s contents. At some point around 3100 BC in Uruk, some clever accountants realized that if you have symbols of tokens on the outside of the envelope you don’t need actual tokens inside the envelope. You can manage much more easily with a clay tablet impressed with symbols. Thus writing was invented.^[16]

Now the clay tokens can only have been symbols of exchange—but obviously not money in the way coins are money. They were records of debt. It’s easy to see that the token-system developed along with the Temple cult, since the tokens are found in or near Temple storehouses. We can guess that the primitive tokens represent promises to pay, and we can surmise that the Temple was the focus of accumulation and redistribution for the whole community. We can presume this because the earliest cuneiform tablets that can be deciphered seem to show such a system (or State!) already long established and taken for granted. There are promises to pay the Temple, and there are “cheques” issued by the Temple—in effect, “money”. Once again we see money emerging from a religious matrix.

Money can be defined as a symbolic medium of exchange—although on the basis of the “sacrificial” origin-theory it might be more accurate to call money a medium of symbolic exchange. In Sumer however these perhaps complementary definitions can be subsumed into a much older and deeper definition:—money is debt. As soon as debt begins to circulate, credit appears—since opposites cannot exist without each other. Your debt is my credit, just as your scarcity is my surplus, and your powerlessness is my power. Just as mana once seemed to adhere to the temple souvenir and made it more valuable than the “cost” of the useless symbolic metals that composed it, so also “wealth” now seems to adhere to money itself, even to mere paper, despite the fact that the “medium” is strictly imaginary (a consensus-hallucination), and that the “wealth” in question is nothing but debt, “promise to pay”, sheer absence. The anarchist P.-J. Proudhon once hypothesized that money must have been invented by “Labor”—the poor—as a clever means of forcing primitive accumulation into motion, so that some wealth might flow at least as “wages”.^[17] lt’s an intriguing notion, because it reveals that money in interest-free and immediate circulation—“innocent” money, so to speak-can appear as a form of empirical freedom. But Proudhon was wrong about the origin of money, if not about a certain aspect of its fate. Money originates and emerges in history as debt. But it has a “pre-history” as appropriation. The egalitarian economy of the Gift—which does not know money—can be shattered only by the economy of surplus and scarcity. Now these terms can have meaning only for human beings:—some few will enjoy surplus, the rest must experience scarcity. Slavery, tribute, and debt are all forms of scarcity. Without writing and even without arithmetic, sophisticated systems of surplus/scarcity accounting are quite possible—but writing succeeds not merely in accounting but in representing surplus and scarcity, a form of control that appears as “magical” because it emanates from the Temple, and because it effects action-at-a-distance. At this point the Temple became a Bank, a moment that can still be traced in the architectural details of modern banks-and at the same time, it became a bureaucracy (or perhaps we should say the bureaucracy, since all bureaucracy is somehow the same bureaucracy).

Money is still today heavily inscribed (almost “overdetermined”) with religious and heraldic symbolism, an obvious clue to its true “origin”. But once the idea of money is born into the world (with writing as midwife, not mother), the link between money and writing can be broken. Anything can be money provided people believe it to be money:—cows, cowrie shells, huge stones, gold dust, salt. All that need be grasped is the notion of representation-the notion of separating wealth from the symbol of wealth and then simultaneously (and “magically”) recombining them as “money”. This kind of separation and paradoxical thinking can only be achieved by a society already split by separation and hierarchy, surplus and scarcity. Money does not create the State, though it may serve to mark the border between a “primitive State” and the full-fledged genuine article,^[18] In clashes between a money economy and a non-money economy (say between Europeans and Natives in 16th century America), money itself inevitably acts as an opening wedge into the psyche of the infected people, since it bears with it all the “interest” that animates the society of separation. The Cargo Cults serve as modern-day examples of this process, as do millenarian cults with the opposite objective of refusing money and “White Man’s goods”,^[19] Money reveals its true nature in such borderland situations where it comes into conflict with gift economies and non-authoritarian tribes, or even with quite sophisticated (but essentially moneyless) civilizations such as the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans. The “Clastrian Machine” goes into overdrive in an attempt to ward off catastrophe not from within its own society but from outside it. Both the beautiful ideals of the millenarians and their violence are attempts to construct a theory and praxis of resistance out of a “way of life” that had always already considered the catastrophe of its breakdown into separation and hierarchy. Once the economy of the Gift is destroyed and then even its memory is effaced (except in folklore and custom), resistance must take other forms. But the ideals, secretly enshrined in tradition, never die out entirely. They may come to take quite bizarre and superstitious forms, fragmentary, unconscious, ineffable—but they persist. Peasant revolts, bread riots, the cloud-cuckoo-lands of mad heretics and rebels, forest outlaws and poachers-thus for example did the primordial tradition of resistance find expression in medieval Europe.^[20] The ideal of reciprocity, and (failing that) the ideal of redistribution, can never be entirely effaced and replaced by the idea of exchange. The very moment of the apparent triumph of the Market—of exchange—will inevitably call forth the old, old dialectic once again (like the phoenix reborn from its ashes)—and the re-appearance of the cause of the Gift.

Like primitive warfare and the economy of reciprocity, shamanism is a part of the “Clastrian machine” and an almost-inevitable feature of hunting and gardening societies. (Obviously I’m using the word “shamanism” quite loosely.) The important thing to note about the shaman is that he or she is not a priest. The line of demarcation may grow quite fuzzy, but on either side of the line one can discern quite distinct realities. The priest serves separation and hierarchy and the shaman does not. The shaman is not paid a salary and is not a “specialist”, does not necessarily receive a “line of succession” from teachers, and does not "worship God".^[21] The shaman must hunt or keep a garden like anyone else. In many tribes, “everyone shamanizes” to some extent, and “the” shaman is simply a first-among-equals, not at all comparable to a modern “specialist”. Initiation for the shaman may or may not be mediated by other shamans, but inevitably it consists of direct unmediated contact with spirits or “gods”. No succession is involved, and no faith. The shaman does not look on “worship” as a one-way street, or as debt to be paid; the shaman works with the spirits and even compels them. Great shamans are even greater than great spirits. Even so, the shaman has no “authority” except that of the successful practitioner. In many tribes a shaman who fails too often (or even once!) may be killed. Shamans may be chiefs or warriors or advisors to chiefs and warriors, but in the end possess no more political power than chiefs or warriors. In non-authoritarian society everyone shamanizes a bit, and is also a bit of a chief and a warrior—even the women and children (who have mysteries and sodalities of their own, and perhaps also voices in the assembly). Thus although shamanism as an institution fulfills Durkheimian functions of social cohesion, it also serves as a dissipative or centrifugal force in relation to accumulation of power. Most significantly, the shaman does not represent the spirits but makes them present (either with entheogenic plants, or by becoming possessed, or by the “trickery” of sucking out witch-objects, etc.). Spirits that are present are experienced by “everyone”, not just by the shaman. The priest by contrast may no longer be capable even of an exclusive “experience” of presence, much less able to facilitate it for his entire congregation. Among the Huichol of Mexico only the shamans see and communicate with the “Great Spirits” while eating peyote but everyone else on the Pilgrimage also eats peyote, and witnesses the shaman communicating with the Spirits. But with or without entheogens, shamanism is experiential and therefore “democratic” (or rather, rhizomatic)—while priestcraft is based on mediation and faith, and is therefore separative and hieratic.

The shaman is directed by the “Clastrian machine”, so to speak, inasmuch as he or she is prevented from acquiring unjust accumulations of power—but the shaman also directs the machine, inasmuch as the spirits always vote for the supremacy of “rights and customs” that guarantee or at least safeguard autonomy for society. It’s interesting to consider the shamans as not only the visionaries of their societies but also as the intellectuals. They “think with” plants, animals and spirits rather than with philosophies and ideologies. Shamans are “outsiders” in many ways and yet they occupy a kind of “center” of their societies, a focal-point of social self- and co-definition. In societies of separation the intelligentsia are “insiders” (priests, scribes) but displaced, out of focus, and finally powerless.

Thus we have named at least three parts of the complex of rights and customs that expressed Society against the State—war, economics, and spirituality. They are a unified entity inasmuch as society itself is “one”, first in its opposition to the emergence of the State, and then (later) in its resistance against the hegemony of the State. In the former case, their unity is effective; in the second case, it is shattered and even fragmented—but still on some level a recognizable whole. For instance, even the classical and modern societies still harbor “survivals” of reciprocity and redistribution, or shamanic experience, or violence as a defense of autonomy. But even in such fragmented conditions there persists a deeper “substructure” in which a living connectedness among these parts can be experienced. For example, on one level war, reciprocity, and spirituality all have to do with death and the Dead, and with the relation between the Dead and the Living. Since classical and modern social paradigms cannot “speak to the condition” of the Dead with the same directness and unity as the “ancient ways”, we still live with vestiges, shreds, hints, and unconscious apprehensions of those old ways—we still live “in” the Paleolithic.

It seems that only in some relation with the primordial “rights and customs” can we hope to resist the totality of separation and strive for the degree of autonomy and pleasure our imaginations can encompass. Of course the paradigm of hierarchy has long ago proven itself adept in the appropriation of opposition; it makes shamans into priests, chiefs into kings, warriors into an instrument of oppression; and the spectrum of human potential it transmutes into caste and class. But once all the old roles have seemingly been appropriated, somehow they re-appear outside the bounds of control or even definition. Shamanic talents crop up in salesmen and housewives (especially after the re-emergence of ceremonial entheogenism in the 1960s); non-authoritarian structures suddenly appear within institutions:—the “facilitator” and the “talking stick” replace Robert’s Rules of Order. The courage of the warrior deserts the hi-tech battlefield and manifests in gangs of young criminals; and the old slogan of the peasant revolts—“Land and Liberty!”—refuses to go away.

My contention is that the “Clastrian machine” goes on manifesting itself long after its original non-authoritarian social matrix has been destroyed and seemingly lost in the amnesiac obsessions of “History”. Writing, which serves power, has only deepened the amnesia with its deliberate lies and its perpetuation of stupidities. History as writing must be circumvented and evaded in order to come at the truth.

What truth? For example: that the “nomadic war machine” subverts the very centripetality of classical war, and is always veering off into chaos. That there are whole economies that know nothing of money or exchange (economies of emotion, of language, of sensation, of desire). That there exists an unbroken underground tradition of spiritual resistance, a kind of hermetic “left” that has roots in Stone Age shamanism, and flowers in the heresies of the “Free Spirit”. We must now turn to tracking the traces of that spirit—the “Clastrian machine”—through the tangled thickets of historiography, ethnography, -graphia itself.

3. Wild Man

In the search for exemplary cases I will focus on shamanism more than on warfare or economics. All institutions of right and custom can be visualized as pillars holding up the edifice of non-authoritarian society; and even when the house is in ruins, reduced to the slums or margins of Civilization, the unity of the original structure can still be discerned. Of all the pillars, however, shamanism claims for itself a certain centrality:—axis mundi, in effect—conceptual focus of the whole social construction. And even in the decay and ruination of the Social, shamanic “remnants” still appear in axial positions in the geographic or conceptual spaces of exile, dispossession, and depletion. In other words, as the field of rights and customs is gradually enclosed, the spirit of resistance “loses its body” and is deprived of its geographical, tactical, and economic materiality, till only "spirit" remains. A defeated or enslaved people will be reduced to tales and memories of former glory; till one day the people, spurred by those memories, rise to re-embody them in material resistance. And as shamanism is precisely that which pertains to spirit (ésprit), we must look to shamanism, or to its fragmented survivals, or even to its “trace”, in order to see the continuity of the “Clastrian machine” in History.

Hélène Clastres (wife of P. Clastres) has provided us with vital epistemological tools for our search in her Land-Without-Evil, a study of the mysterious mass migrations of the Tupi-Guarani of South America in search of an earthly utopia, the “Land-without-Evil”.^[22] Urged on by visionary shamans, the tribes would wander off after signs and wonders, abandoning their fields and villages in defiance of the chiefs and elders, and often come to grief through starvation or enslavement by another tribe, or be turned back by impassable mountains or oceans. H. Clastres shows that these remarkable movements began well before any contact with Europe, and in fact took another form in the post-Contact era. Originally it appears that the migrations occurred as a result of a struggle between the shamans and the chiefs. Perhaps under the distant and indirect influence of the Incas or other High Civilizations, the chiefs were asserting more and more power within the tribes, upsetting the egalitarian and non-authoritarian structures of Tupi-Guarani society. The migrations involved leaving agriculture behind and “reverting” to hunting and gathering. The new nomadic way of life, which was far from normal for these people, was interpreted by the shamans as a shamanic quest involving the entire people, not just the shamans.

Chiefly power was disestablished simply by walking away from the chiefs. The Land-without-Evil was an image of the tribe as it should be and once was, according to proper right and custom. If the strategy failed because the Land-without-Evil could not be found (since it was an ideological construct and not a real place) , nevertheless the shamans succeeded for brief periods in revivifying the old autonomy and inspiring the people with visionary fervor. The quests occurred over and over again for generations and were still going on when the repercussions of the Conquest were beginning to be felt. Gradually the migrations assumed a new form in response to these different forces, and began to resemble the sort of millenarian movements familiar to the student of the colonial process. Shamans and others emerged as military leaders, and “primitive warfare” was added to shamanic power in uprisings and rebellions—all doomed to fail. The “Clastrian machine”, already out of balance in pre-Contact times, struggled against dissolution with drastic means, even with a kind of mass suicide—but against the money-economy and technology (and germs) of the Europeans these “embodied” forms of resistance were simply crushed.

But shamanism was not erased by colonization in South America—in fact, it has renewed itself again and again, and still persists today. Indeed, it may even be experiencing something of a renaissance. To understand how shamanism continues to serve as (at least) a conceptual space of resistance, even after “Contact” with monotheism and capitalism, we may turn for instruction to M. Taussig’s brilliant study of ayahuasca healing cults, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man.^[23] On the one hand, Taussig points out, the conquerors always regard the conquered (the “natives”) as radical Other, despised sub-humans, devoid of culture, better off dead, etc., etc. This is the daylight or conscious side of colonialist “racism”, so to speak. But it has a night side as well—because, on the other hand, the natives retain some advantages that the conquerors would rather not think about too clearly, lest their superiority should begin to appear to them as less than absolute. For instance, the conquerors are strangers in a strange land, but the natives are at home. They are “wild men”, but this implies a connection with locality that the colonialist cannot share. They know where to find animals and plants-often the early colonists would starve unless the natives fed them, and this momentary dependence still rankles in the collective memory of the colonial gentry [e.g., “Thanksgiving” as a festival of guilt in North America]. Above all the native knows the spirit of place and possesses a magic that appears uncanny, ambiguous, or even dangerous to the colonist—depending on degree of credulity, in part, but also on a general background of Christian imagery, fear of the unknown, and the genuine bad health of the colonists. Sooner or later the conquerors come to believe that for certain afflictions only the Natives possess a remedy. Catholicism, which is already open to “superstition” at the popular level, is perhaps more open to such influences than Protestantism. New England Puritans were not known to consult Algonkin medicine-men, but in South America such situations could arise more easily. In the case of the Ayahuasca cults, the natives possessed a distinct advantage in their knowledge of an “efficacious sacrament” in the form of an entheogenic plant mixture used in shamanic healing. Structurally and to some degree actually the cults pertain neither to the world of the pure-blood colonists nor the pure-blood forest Indians, but to the mixed-blood Mestizos who belong to both worlds and to neither, who are both a bridge and a chasm between cultures. But the axis of the cults, so to speak, tips toward the Forest, and traces itself to aboriginal shamanism. Here it is the Colonists who are outsiders—and yet the Colonists are among the enthusiastic patrons of the healing cults. (And nowadays the expanding Ayahuasca religions like Unio Vegetal are made up almost entirely of “Whites”.) The fact is that shamanism has effected a curious reversal of colonial energies, in which elite anxiety gradually turns into a kind of romanticism (“noble savages”, etc.) and then into an actual dependence on “native” sources of power. Perhaps no one thinks of this situation as “revolutionary”—and certainly Ayahuasca shamanism can do little to disestablish actual elite power—but it must be seen as a kind of mask for subtle forms of resistance.

Taussig’s thesis represents a major break-through in the consideration of shamanism as a system interacting with the whole world, and not as a “pristine”, remote, exotic, and self-enclosed object of analysis without any relevance outside the sphere of anthropology or the history of religions. In short, he has given us a politique of shamanism to match in importance Clastres’ politique of primitive warfare. The model of the hidden power of the oppressed, which is so frequently a shamanic power, prepares us to perceive even subtle models in which the overt signs of shamanism and resistance may be muted almost to the point of invisibility. In fact, since Taussig makes creative use of W. Benjamin in constructing his thesis, we might borrow and adapt Benjamin’s phrase “the utopian trace” and speak of a shamanic trace that may be present even in institutions or images lacking all open connection with shamanism per se. In the ayahuasca cults the links with "pristine" shamanism (assuming it exists as other than a structural model) are quite clear. But in other examples we might examine, the “trace” will be obscured to the point of unconsciousness, just as the trace of "utopia" is obscured by the advertisement in which it is embedded as an image of promise. The difference between utopian trace and shamanic trace is that the former is often deliberately “put into” the advertisement in order to exacerbate commodity fetishism by raising unconscious hopes that cannot be fulfilled; whereas the latter intrudes itself in certain phenomena, so to speak, as an unconscious welling-up or manifestation of “direct experience”. This authentic or valid or veridical experience is the keynote and sine qua non of shamanic reappearance. In this sense the shamanic trace is also “utopian”, since it may involve the desire for such experience rather than the experience itself The desire may take “perverse” forms but even at its most attenuated we can still recognize it as a movement of the “Clastrian machine”, and as a sign that autonomy and pleasure still claim their right and custom.

Shamanism, History, and the State, a collection of essays edited by N. Thomas and C. Humphrey, is dedicated to Taussig and is largely devoted to exploring the opening he has made to shamanism as a “political” form.^[24] On the back of the book a statement by Taussig himself appears, speaking of the ways in which “it shows 'shamanism' to be a multifarious and continually changing 'dialogue' or interaction with specific, local contexts. . . . This collection tries to demonstrate through 'case studies' just how different 'shamanism' becomes if seen through a lens sensitive to the history and the influence of institutions, such as the state, which seem far removed from it.” In the whole of this excellent volume, however, there is not one mention ofthe work of P. Clastres or H. Clastres. I cannot imagine why this should be so, unless perhaps a certain post-Marxist slant of the Taussig “school” has prejudiced it against Clastres, who was an anarchist, and polemicized against Marxist anthropology. Perhaps mistakenly, it seems to me that Taussig’s findings (and those of his "school") are complementary to those of Clastres. What Clastres demonstrated is that "primitive" society constructs for itself a “machine” (my term) to resist the emergence of the State. Taussig shows that one part of this machine, shamanism, goes on resisting the State even after the appearance and apparent triumph of separation and hierarchy. Shamanism, History and the State clarifies Taussig’s work in a number of ways. For example, Peter Gow in “River People: Shamanism and History in Western Amazonia,” examines certain ayahuasca healing cults (not the same ones discussed by Taussig) and finds that although they proclaim themselves to have originated with Forest Indians, in fact they were spread historically by Mestizos and geographically by the Christian missions and the rubber industry in the late 19th century. These cults too belong not to “the Forest” in reality but to the periphery or border between town and wilderness—and not so much to some “pristine” paganism as to resistance against official Christianity. It seems to me that Gow has nicely illustrated both Taussig’s thesis and Clastres’ thesis. On one hand the cults represent a turning-back or even a “reversion” (however romantic and unrealizable) to more primordial customs; on the other hand they represent a “going-forth”, a resistance, a demand for rights.

In an attempt to harmonize the two schools, we should look for examples that have not been treated by either, and attempt analyses based on both. The first theme I want to examine is “reversion”, and the example I’ve chosen has never (so far as I know) been discussed by anyone.

4. Emblematick Mounds

The idea of “reversion” is in the air, anthropologically speaking. In brief, the conviction is growing that many supposedly pristine examples of “primitive” societies studied by ethnographers may in fact be drop-outs from History—that is, they may have reverted to a more primitive state from a more “advanced” one at some point (usually unknown). In an evolutionist view of society this reversion must appear unnatural or perverse: why would anyone give up the benefits of, say, agriculture and revert to hunting and gathering? Or the benefits of rational monotheism for backward shamanic cults? Obviously such reversionary peoples must be inferior, unless they simply had no choice in the matter. But this old progressivist view is no longer so popular. The new orthodoxy implies that because of reversion all “primitivity” is suspect. The pristine ethnographic subject does not exist as an object of cognition. The neo-conservative version of this orthodoxy goes on, therefore, to critique all positive evaluations of “primitive” as mere romanticism or special pleading. The views of such anthropologists as Sahlins and Clastres are under attack as out-moded 60s hippie hot air. There are no “primitives” at all, much less “good” primitives. Any enthusiasm about the original leisure society, the economy of the Gift, or shamanic spirituality, is only a leftist illusion covering up the real reality of “eternal Market values” and the preordained triumph of technology, etc., etc.

A great deal of this new orthodoxy depends on certain presuppositions it makes about “reversion”. The old evolutionist prejudice is still at work, to the point where reversion can be seen as a nullification of all meaning. The word “reversion” is used to end a discourse that it should instead inaugurate. In Clastrian terms, reversion can be interpreted as a victory against the emergence of “higher” forms of separation and hierarchy.

To illustrate this contention I must first begin by describing the Effigy Mounds of Wisconsin. The following section consists of a number of quotations from my own unpublished field-notes, based on two summers (1993-94) during which I saw perhaps a hundred of these mounds.^[25]

The “Driftless Region” consists of a large chunk of Southern Wisconsin, with slivers in Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois. It’s called the “driftless” because during the last Ice Age (ironically known as the “Wisconsin Glaciation” since it was first studied by geologists in the northern part of the state) , the glaciers passed around this region, encircling it but not touching it, so that the earth was not flattened and stretched as in the rest of the northern part of the continent, but retained its primordial pre-Pleistocene form, gradually eroding into a landscape of “hidden valleys” and low hills, a mixture of prairie and climax forest. This region coincides precisely with the area in which the effigy mounds are found. The whole eastern half of North America is littered with mounds of various kinds, but most of them are architectural (temples, forts) or funerary tumuli. Effigy Mounds, by contrast, are built in shapes, mostly of birds or animals but also of humans and objects; they are very obviously neither military nor architectural, and only about half of them contain burials. Because they are so different from all other prehistoric American mounds, they remain baffling, mysterious, and even a little bit embarrassing to orthodox archaeology. As a result, they remain almost unknown outside the Drifcless region itself—no glossy coffee table books, no prestigious museum exhibits; they are ignored even by most afficionados of “Mysterious America”, UFOlogy, pre-Columbian contact theories, and the like. Since the 19th century, almost no interpretations of the Effigy Mounds have been propounded, either by archaeologists or occultists. In effect, the mounds have not yet “appeared” except as curiosities in a few state parks, or as the subject of a few obscure academic monographs.

This non-appearance of the mounds constitutes one of their great mysteries. Why are they not seen? Leaving aside the problem of interpretation, the immediate and most striking aspect of the mounds is their great beauty. Considered simply as “earth art” they assume at once a timeless and exquisite power; and the more one sees of them the more one realizes (despite the ravages of time, of agriculture, of archaeology, and of sheer wanton destruction, which have erased perhaps 80-90% of the mounds) that the entire Driftless region is a work of art, a worked geomantic landscape in which wilderness and culture have achieved a dialectical unity and aesthetic/spiritual cohesion. What does it all mean?—an interesting question—but not the essential question. First and foremost, the “meaning” of the mounds is not mysterious at all, but rather completely transparent:—the total enchantment of the landscape. This is not to say that the mound builders were “artists” in the modern sense—“mere artists”—or that the mounds have no other significance than the aesthetic impact of their actual physical presence. Indeed, if we consider the totality of the Effigy Mound “project” as a single art work, or as the transformation of the Driftless region itself into art, we must admit that aesthetics alone could not have animated such a vast vision. Spirituality, economics, and the “social” must have acted synergistically to create the “religion” or way of the Effigies, an entire culture (lasting from about 750 to 1800 AD) centered on mound creation as its primary expression.

As soon as we begin to investigate this culture with the epistemological tools of archaeology, however, the “mystery” of the Effigy Mounds deepens rather than dissipates—and this helps to explain the batffled silence or dull muttering of the academics in the face of such strange evidence. The Effigy Mound culture was preceded, surrounded, invaded, and superseded by “advanced” societies which practiced agriculture, metallurgy, warfare and social hierarchy, and yet the Effigy Mound culture rejected all of these. It apparently “reverted” to hunting/gathering; its archaeological remains offer no evidence of social violence or class structure; it largely refused the use of metal; and it apparently did all these things consciously and by choice. It deliberately refused the “death cult”, human sacrifice, cannibalism, warfare, kingship, aristocracy, and “high culture” of the Adena, Hopewell, and Temple Mound traditions which surrounded it in time and space. It chose an economy/technology which (according to the prejudices of social evolution and “progress”) represents a step backward in human development. It took this step, apparently, because it considered this the right thing to do.

“Ghost Eagle Nest”, Muscoda, surveyed 1886 by T.H. Lewis, re-surveyed 1993 by Jan Beaver, James P. Scherz, and the Wisconsin Winnebago Nation. Note Calumet pipe mound at lower right.

“Man Mound” near Baraboo, original etching and 1989 survey showing damage.

Above: Bear mounds at Iowa National Effigy Mounds Park.
Below: Monuments surveyed by Squier and Davis, 1848, no longer extant

Most archaeologists lose interest in Effigy Mound culture as soon as they realize this “reversion”. As grave robbers, they are disappointed by the poor or non-existent “grave goods” of the Effigy Mounds; and as civilized scientists, they are shocked and offended by the deliberate “primitivism” of a society that seems to have turned its back on the blessings of agriculture, architecture, work and war.

Since the 1960s, however, concepts have developed within anthropology which offer new epistemological tools for the interpretation of prehistoric archaeology. Marshall Sahlins, in his masterpiece Stone Age Economics, presented the first revisionist defense of hunter/gatherer societies as economies of excess (as opposed to the imposed scarcity of agricultural economics) and of immense “leisure” (as opposed to the endless work of the peasant). In the light of such an “anarchist epistemology” (to quote P. Feyerabend), we can now interpret hunter/gatherer cultures in the light of an actual resistance to social hierarchy and the emergence of “The State”. This dialectic was traced by the brilliant French post-Structuralist anthropologist P. Clastres in his classic Society Against the State, and in his unfinished (posthumous) essay on “primitive” warfare, The Archeology of Violence. The point made by Sahlins, Clastres, et at. is that Hunter/Gatherer societies know very well what “progress” implies for the victims of progress (as opposed to the winners, the priest-kings and their house-slaves)—and they reject it by means of their very social organization. Hunters know, for example, how to limit population to ecologically appropriate numbers, and they institutionalize this knowledge. Later the knowledge is deliberately suppressed by agriculturist “nobles” who desire more and more shit-workers and peasants to support them. Agriculture is not the result of any “population explosion”—it is the cause.

The Effigy Mounds apparently have something to say (that is, to show rather than to tell) about the proper technique for humans to relate to “Nature”, to the wild(er)ness, to the “Beauty Way”, as some Native Americans put it—the way of harmony and guardianship. As one sees more and more of the mounds, the initial appreciation of them as "art" broadens and deepens into more subtle and complex categories-not only aesthetic but also spiritual and even “political”. As these levels unfold, the “mystery” only intensifies, of course—and eventually evades all categorization.

The earliest commentators were so impressed by the Mounds of America that they invented an entire “mysterious race of Mound Builders” to account for them—people who couldn’t be Indians—because how could the wicked degenerate Indians have created such great monuments? This racist hogwash has long since been dissipated. Whoever the Builders were or weren’t they were certainly “Indians”, and the Effigy builders were clearly ancestors of such tribes as the Winnebago. But why did they build? What do the mounds mean? All this remains a mystery-so much so that almost no serious interpretive work has been done on the mounds—as if they constituted an embarassment to “Science”! (Is “Science” easily embarrassed? Well, I’ve seen no mention in any archaeological text of the very obvious phallic mounds. And at the Effigy Mounds National Monument Park Museum in Iowa we saw an astounding tablet carved out of red pipestone, the so-called “New Albin Tablet”, which has apparently never been published-because it depicts a shaman with an erection! (See page 97) This work is vital for our thesis—but scientific prudery has placed it on a high shelf, out of the view of children, and even adults have to stand on tip-toe to see it.)

Some “facts” about the Builders have been determined. They are said to constitute a recognizable culture or group of cultures, associated with distinctive pottery, tool-kit, grave-goods, etc. They built from around 500/600 AD to 1600/1800 AD, and flourished around 1000 AD. They were limited to the Driftless Region and a few outlying areas. They got the idea of mound-building from a culture which preceded theirs and overlapped with it in time, called “Hopewell”. The Hopewell mounds however are all conical burial mounds, not effigies. Moreover, the Hopewell was a highly stratified society which produced a lot of luxury items and buried them along with their aristo owners in a kind of death-potlach—an archaeologist’s delight. The Effigy Mound Builders however did not build their mounds only as burial sites, and did not indulge in "rich" burials at all. Many of the linear, compound, and effigy mounds contain no burials. The Builders seem to have adopted a consciously maintained lifeway of “voluntary poverty”, at least as far as technology was concerned. An egalitarian hunter/gatherer society by choice, they put their creative ability into the communal art of the mounds—not into luxury goods for an elite. However, they need not be seen as a “poor” people in terms of comfort. They inhabited an area which must have been a total paradise for hunter/gatherers—the whole region was their collective larder, and they moved around in it by season, hunting and feasting—and working on the mounds.

A. Clark Mallam, one of the few archaeologists to attempt an interpretation of the mounds, sees them as serving the function of border-markings and meeting-places between separate social groups, who thus symbolized their agreements to share the wealth of the Driftless Region. He calls the Mounds a system of social integration. He suggests that this thesis is supported by demonstrable differences in style among the various mound-complexes—i.e., that they were built by different groups. He believes that this kind of contractual behavior must account for the obvious peacefulness of the Builders’ society, the lack of evidence for slavery, cannibalism, social hierarchy, or any emphasis on war.

Stylistic variations within the Effigy Mound Culture as a whole are indeed discernable—but might also be accounted for by differences in function. Of course the Builders were divided into clans and phratries, secret societies, perhaps even language groups. But what if different mounds served different purposes? Would this account for some of the observable stylistic variation? I find Clark Mallam’s hypothesis thought-provoking but limited.^[26] It may be a grave error to think of the mounds as symbols of “ownership” of various territories defined by "boundaries". These are very European ideas. Utilization is not the same thing as "ownership". The Driftless Region was so rich in game and plants that the few thousand or so Builders could easily share. The Mounds undoubtedly served an integrative function, but I suggest that the integration could have gone much deeper than the level of mere contracts. I believe we’re looking at an integrated culture, sharing what may be called (for convenience) a “religion of Effigies”. No doubt this “religion” began and continued as a “congeries of cults” rather than a centrally-organized and dogmatic “Church”. This would help to account for the stylistic variation, just as it helps to account for stylistic variation in the temples of Taoism and Hinduism. The mound-complexes however were obviously not “temples”, not buildings where deities were worshipped, but something else altogether.

In terms of spatial orientation the mounds have a certain quality of “aboveness”—that is, they might best be appreciated from above, a bird’s-eye or spirit’s-eye view. Moreover many of them are placed high, typically on bluffs overlooking water. The Wyalusing and Effigy Mound National Monument complexes command vast views and far-distant lines of sight. (This would be more apparent in an old-growth forest setting or prairie where trees would have been farther apart than now, thus opening up more views. Moreover the Builders could easily have cleared away all view-obstructing vegetation using controlled fire or selective cutting, to create Mound-parks with tremendous vistas. Needless to say, this would not have been an exercise in “pure aesthetics”, but would have had specific ceremonial and spiritual purposes.) Some of the most severely eroded or plowed-under effigies have been rediscovered by aerial photography. Many mounds depict birds.

If the mounds are related to sky events then perhaps the most important such event is the shaman’s flight into the sky, or “cloud-walking”.

Clark Mallam makes a useful contribution by suggesting that the mound-complexes served as ceremonial and festal sites, linked to areas of intense seasonal hunting/gathering activities (where large groups could feast together on whatever was in season). It appears that people who died in the winters stayed unburied (as bundles of bone) until the clan arrived at one of the mound-complex meeting-places in the spring or summer. Perhaps the mounds were seen as doorways for the spirits of the dead to enter the Other World of the stars. Undoubtedly, however, life was served as well as death. Some of the complexes have been interpreted as initiatic sites. Contemporary Winnebago shamans, for example, have identified at least part of the “Ghost Eagle Nest” group (the mounds in the lower right-hand corner of the outline map) as the setting for a kind of initiatic procession, which would pass between the wings of the two parallel eagles in order to arrive at the calumet-pipe. (See figure, page 92.)

Some of the most convincing interpretations of the Effigy Mounds come from precisely the people whom one would expect to possess authentic knowledge about them, i.e., the real "locals", the original inhabitants of the mound area, the Winnebago—who in fact claim that their ancestors built the Effigies. Unfortunately, since they are no longer building mounds, the anthropologists (like P. Radin) have largely ignored their interpretations, which in any case are closely guarded as secrets by the tribal elders. Most archaeologists ignore the Winnebago for the same reason. Luckily, I was able to meet a Winnebago man of knowledge, Merlin Redcloud, who not only showed or directed me to many important and obscure sites, but also shared with me his interpretations to the extent he deemed possible, given his deep attachment to a tradition that cannot be fully revealed to outsiders. The following notes record our first meeting, at Lila’s Cafe in Muscoda, WI, with my friend Eddy Nix, and Merlin’s relative John Ward:

Merlin Redcloud gives us too much information! He goes through the Wisconsin atlas with us page by page pointing out unpublished sites. Merlin and his nephew John explain their commitment to Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) spiritual paths. John mentions a woman relative who had four religions including Christian, traditional, and Peyote (Native American church), and practiced each one in its own context. They believe that in order to get along they must “walk with one moccasin in each world.” They feel the Winnebago have a head start at this because they have never had a reservation. Lacking the cocoon, they went through their “white-ification” process early and learned how unsatisfactory it was....hence the enthusiastic return to tradition even among the young. The Winnebago who got a reservation in Nebraska have only one medicine bundle and appear to have forgotten most ritual. Jo Anne Funmaker, the tribal chairperson, bridges the gap between the elders—whom she respects and consults—and the official tribal government. (Her “reign” was apparently predicted by the elders.)

According to an interesting pamphlet by Chuck Kingswan, Ho-chunk History = A Glimpse: Notes to America = Words Straight From the Sources Mouth = From the Ice Age to the Nuclear: Thoughts for All Ages:^[27]

Ho-chunk are here to stay.

The Great Lakes region has hosted Ice Age glaciers no less than eight times in the past million years, each living glacier scouring and moulding the countryside, gouging fingerprints of giants as a legacy to fill the legends of people yet to come. As the ice fields fled north for the last time their tracks soon felt footprints of a people of that day. Where they came from, no-one knows. Where they went is hard to say, except that their kind went from the ice age to the future. However it may have been, Hochunk words today still echo of ice age days: The short faced bear, dead and gone for these 10,000 years, lives on in name, “hoonch ah se lech”. An archaic name for the Mississippi, draining the giant glacial lake far to the north, that once covered parts of what are today Minnesota, North Dakota, Ontario and Manitoba. And the equally archaic derivitive of that name, “nee goo sak hoo xhoon noomp”, given to the Wisconsin River, which means, “Swift Drain River #2,” maybe reflects that river’s history as a secondary route for glacial waters streaming the seas.

“Hoonch ah se lech, nee koo sak hoo xhoon”, “nee koo sak hoo xhoon noomp”, these names speak ties to when ice fields were recent and the lands were still fresh. Glaciers have come and gone. Hochunk names have come and stayed.

In other words, “Winnebago” language is coded with memories of the Ice Age.

The Elders apparently agree with some archaeologists on the dating of the mounds, 750 or 1000 AD up to 100 years ago, but I couldn’t get Merlin to discuss why they started and why they stopped; I got the distinct impression this was a “secret”. The Elders can interpret the mounds according to oral tradition, sometimes in great detail. Some mounds are historical markers (wars, treaties, migrations, etc. ...), some are maps of journeys, some are calendrical. (Merlin mentioned a Winnebago solar clock based on a 20 hour day, key to many alignments, he says.) The wonderful thing about the Elders’ interpretation is its complexity, which feels like a sign of its authenticity. Some single mounds are territory markers (clan hunting grounds). About 50% are funerary. Large groups of conicals often mark battle site burials. Effigy burials are often of high initiates, sitting position at heart or head of effigy. The “altars” may be fireplaces for sweat lodges to prepare the worker/artists. When I asked Merlin if mounds were exclusively the work of men (i.e. as opposed to women) he misunderstood me to mean “mortals” and said, “No, some were built by spirits.” (A shaman is told in vision that he will see such and such a spirit in person at such and such a place … goes there and finds newly built effigy.) Some mound groups are ceremonial, initiatic, celebratory (such as Eagles Nest near Muscoda) or agricultural (astro-alignments for planting) or downright magical. A “Religion of Effigies”, complex as any true religion, organic, accretionary, multivalent.
…
Despite the fact that it was still pouring rain we left the cafe and drove over the Wisconsin River bridge to Eagle Township where Merlin showed us the newly-discovered (by him and Adrian) Eagle mound, just inside a copse of woods near Eagle Mill Creek, near a mowed field. The mound was in excellent shape, but overgrown with trees which seem older than surrounding trees including a triple trunked tree on the head.

Very beautiful and moving in the rainy woods. We talked about eagle mounds and agreed that some could be actual sites for meditation/fasting to acquire “cloudwalking” power. He told some tales of cloudwalking in the old days (e.g. a war party with two shamans travels in two days to Southern Iowa; an 80 year old shaman arrives at the journey’s goal two days before the young men, etc....). He spoke of training others, including his own children, how to fast, how to “meditate” (my term) by inner spontaneous prayer, how to not get “scared half to death” by certain events, how to become fully adult, how to increase fasting period from two to four days on to longer periods, how to bear up under harsh conditions. (Merlin told a funny story of his own experience bitten by millions of gnats. I called it his “gnat quest!”) He spoke of trying to recover cloudwalking wisdom at Eagle’s Nest. I replied that even if the technique was lost, the vision of it was still alive.

[Note: the “Eagle’s Nest” is a group of mounds near Muscoda which is now the property of the Winnebago people, who hope to restore it and use it as a tribal center. An amazingly huge eroded eagle-mound was identified here by aerial photography. I was introduced to Eagle’s Nest—and to obsessive mound-viewing!—by Jan Beaver, a Native American woman who played an important role in publicizing the site, and who died in a tragic accident in 1993. The “Adrian" mentioned in the notes is her husband, the British artist Adrian Frost.]

The “silence of interpretation” that surrounds the Effigy Mounds owes something to embarrassment, since the 19th century indulged in orgies of speculation on the “mysterious Mound Builders” and propagated notions that now appear quite absurd. Interestingly, however, the old moundophiles showed very little interest in the Effigy Mounds, instead reserving their admiration for the architectural and funerary mounds of the Cahokian/Mississippian culture. An entertaining book on the history of 19th century mound-mania, R. Silverberg’s Mound Builders of Ancient America:—The Archaeology of a Myth,^[28] records that

A certain J. W. Foster, writing in 1873 about the ancient mounds of America, subscribed to the current theory that the “Red Man” had nothing to do with such monuments.

His character, since first known to the white man, has been signalized by treachery and cruelty. He repels all efforts to raise him from his degraded position: and whilst he has not the moral nature to adopt the virtues of civilization, his brutal instincts lead him to welcome its methodical labor; he dwells in temporary and movable habitations; he follows the game in their migrations; he imposed the drudgery of life on his squaw; he takes no heed for the future. To suppose that such a race threw up the string lines of circumvallation and the symmetrical mounds which crown so many of the river-terraces, is as preposterous, almost, as to suppose that they built the pyramids in Egypt.

The author of the official History of Richland Co. (1884) projected such proto-eugenicist attitudes onto the builders of the Effigy Mounds when he wrote,

The historian, looking back away down the dim corridor of time, perceives faintly in the mythical light of that far off, pre-historic period, before the red man’s foot had desecrated its soil, the traces of a race who evidently peopled these hills and valleys of Richland County; a race who lived in semi-barbaric civilization, akin to that of the Aztec that Cortez found on the plains of Mexico; a race who lived and died and left no trace of their existence except the mysterious mounds and ridges that they have built that mark the site of their ruined buildings; a race of whom no tradition even exists from which their history can be written; a people of mystery, and probably ever to remain so—the Toltecs or Mound-builders.

Silverberg does a good job of showing how the myth of the Mysterious Lost Race of Mound Builders was finally debunked and trashed by official Smithsonian archaeologists such as Cyrus Thomas. Silverberg also describes how a good deal of interesting bath water got thrown out along with the mysterious but bogus baby. Mound Builder mythology was not entirely or simply racist; it also embraced a plethora of “damned” facts and theories (as Charles Fort would say) some of which might have been worth saving.

Silverberg has a lot of fun with one William Pidgeon and his remarkable book: Traditions of De-coo-dah and Antiquarian Researches: Comprising Extensive Exploratiom, Surveys, and Excavatiom of the Wonderful and Mysterious Earthen Remains of the Mound Builders in America: the Tradition of the Last Prophet of the Elk Nation Relative to their Origin and Use; and the Evidences of an Ancient Population more Numerous than the Present Aborigines (1852). Pidgeon claims to have acquired a Native informant in the person of De-coo-dah, last of the Elk Nation, the original mound builders. A great deal of Pidgeon’s book can be dismissed as pure hooey; apparently he had a technique of measuring mounds with some kind of hallucinometer. As for De-coo-dah (if he existed) he clearly enjoyed a vivid dream life as well. However, however...Pidgeon’s eye is not always cocked. In Muscoda, for example, he spotted mounds, “some resembling redoubts or fortifications, others resembling the forms of gigantic men, beasts, birds wild reptiles among which may be found the eagle, the otter, the serpent, the alligator, and others pertaining to the deer, elk, and buffalo species.” Some of these mounds may have been missed by the (much more scientific) T.H. Lewis in his later survey of the region, and are only now being “re-discovered” again around the Ghost Eagle area. As for De-coo-dah, his technique of mound interpretation seems in some ways structurally similar to that of, let’s say, the Winnebago Elders quoted by Merlin Redcloud, even though the actual content of De-coo-dah’s versions may differ widely from any known Native traditions. For example:

“My great-grandfather,” De-coo-dah told Pidgeon, “had a great reverence for mounds; and said that a new mound was erected at each national festival; the national festivals were frequently attended and held in union by several nations; at the place appointed for these union festivals, each nation erected a national monument significant to their number and dignity.”

Pidgeon now sets forth, via De-coo-dah, a symbology of the mounds, that for all its incoherence has about it the fascination of lunacy, like some monstrous bridge constructed of toothpicks. The revelation begins with an account of the so-called Amalgamation Mound, on the Wisconsin River about fifty miles above its junction with the Mississippi. This, according to Pidgeon, is a group of effigy reliefs and conical mounds stretching several hundred feet, presenting in outline the forms of two gigantic beasts, together with a well-delineated human figure. It was constructed, he asserts, “as a national hieroglyphic record, to commemorate an important event in the history of two great nations. These nations, once great and powerful, had become greatly reduced in numbers and resources by the adverse fortunes of war against a common enemy. Being no longer in a condition to maintain separately their national existence they resolved to unite their forces, subject to one great head or Sovereign ruler. And this earth-work was constructed as the great seal and hieroglyphic record of their union and amalgamation.” De-coo-dah interprets the hieroglyphs. (“Horns appended to effigies represent warriors. One horn being longer than the other, shows one nation to have been the stronger of the two; and one horn having more prongs than the other, represents one nation having more celebrated chiefs than the other, while some prongs, being longer than the others, represent some of the greater and more distinguished chiefs.”) Truncated mounds were sacrificial altars; the figure pointing to the west symbolized the setting sun of the amalgamating nations; the human figure looking up at the noon sun stood for the greatness of the united powers. A stately oak firmly rooted in the bosom of the mound told Pidgeon that at least four centuries had gone by since its construction; but, he adds sourly, “The tree has since been removed and converted into shingles, and, in 1844, it formed a canopy over the drunken revels of Muscoda.”

According to De-coo-dah, one earthwork is a “mound of extinction,” marking the end of the nation symbolized by the buffalo effigy; for the Buffalo nation was uniting with the Elk nation when this mound was erected. The left forelimb of the buffalo is connected with the foot of the elk effigy. Nearby are “seven truncated mounds running east from the national mound.” They are “matrimonial memorials” recording the international marriages of seven chiefs, which occurred during the construction of the work. And so on, for many more pages of detail about amalgamation monuments, in which two or more animal effigies are joined. Three small mounds extending from the third matrimonial memorial denote the birth of three children; the great length of the arms of the human figure represent immense territorial domination; the even elevation of both arms signifies the equal status of the Buffalo and Elk nations in the merger. “Thus aided by tradition,” comments Pidgeon, “we read in the hieroglyphical mounds of the earth, the dignity and destiny of nations unknown to written history,” and he hopes that “a comparatively small portion of the funds expended in superficial surveys” of the mounds will go instead to “the acquisition of Indian traditions from the more secluded sons of the forest.”

There are those who would call Mr. Pidgeon the Carlos Castaneda of the 19th century (or Castaneda the Pidgeon of the 20th!). Both of them are practitioners of some kind of anthropo-mythopoesis. Let’s admit that Castaneda’s value is not for “science”, but for...something else. Perhaps then we can admit that some value can be salvageable even from Pidgeon and other “Mound Builder” theorists. Not every crackpot is an evil racist; the very word crackpot is a double-edged sword in hands such as ours. And a “crank” (as E. F. Schumacher used to say) is a small device that causes revolutions.

Like most science-fiction writers of the Old School, Silverberg fetishizes modern orthodox scientific dogma. Thus having cleared away the cobwebs of superstition in the first half of his book, he devotes the second half to the “actual facts” uncovered by “real” archaeologists. (As a writer of science-fiction, of course, Silverberg can’t help confessing to a “warm understanding” of the myth-makers [p. 337], even though he must sadly reject their work as mere “fantasy”.) In fact, his summary of the current (1968) theories of Adena/Hopewell/Temple Mound development is as clear and concise as anything I’ve seen ... a good deal more clear than most archaeology texts. Maybe too clear.

According to this view, at about the time of the emergence of the Effigy Mound culture in the Driftless region, the Hopewell/Temple Mound development had climaxed in a great “empire” which covered most of the southeastern portion of North America, including the Mississippi Valley as far north as Aztalan in Wisconsin (and possibly the Great Lakes copper mines). Mesoamerican influence can be felt clearly in the great artistic attainments of the Temple Mound culture, even though (according to Silverberg) very few specific Mexican motifs can actually be traced in North America. Many people experience a frisson of dark weirdness in contemplating Temple Mound art, a sensation akin to that evoked by a certain blood-thirsty formalism in Mayan and Aztec motifs. In effect, Mississippian culture seems to have devoted its entire creative energy to a potlatch of death in which a peasant class labored to produce vast amounts of art, including personal ornament, for the sole purpose of burying it all along with the corpses of kings and noble families in vast and elaborate conical mounds. Human sacrifice is strongly indicated, also cannibalism. Vast fortifications testify to the development of genuine (as opposed to “primitive”) warfare. Some archaeologists interpret all this as a religious movement, rather than as a political "empire", and call it the “Southern Death Cult”.

The Effigy Mound builders certainly inherited and learned a great deal from the Hopewell/Temple Mound culture. For one thing, they continued to build Hopewell style conical mounds, and to use at least some mounds (both conical and effigy) for burials.

However, if the Effigy Mound builders accepted and used some Mississippian concepts and motifs, we should remember how many things they refused. The Effigy Mounds reveal no archaeological evidence for agriculture, class hierarchy, human sacrifice, or even warfare. If the Effigy Mound people practiced warfare, it could only have been “primitive” low scale, almost playful, and (as Clastres points out) a “centrifugal” social force acting against the centralization and institutionalization of power.

Temple Mound warfare, by contrast, must be called true classical warfare, since it apparently involved the permanent subjugation of enemy people, and constituted a centripedal process of power centralization. No doubt it would be going too far to suggest that the “Religion of Effigies” represents a kind of “Protestant Reformation” in its relation to the “High Church” of the Hopewell or the Southern Death Cult. But it begins to appear that the Effigy Mound builders deliberately rejected the death obsession, cruelty, and oppression of the Temple Mound culture, in favor of a “return” to an “earlier” way of life, perhaps viewed as a “purification.” The Hopewell/Temple continuum demonstrates a religion based on “animal totems”; perhaps the Effigy builders proposed a radical return to such “roots”, to an “oldtime religion” that would appear utopian, egalitarian, and life-oriented by comparison with the “decadence” of the Southern Death Cult. Above all, the Effigy Mound religion would be a spirituality of wild(er)ness, as opposed to the civilization of Temple Mounds. It would thus constitute a return to “nature”.

Some remnants of the Southern Death Cult apparently survived into the “historical” (post-1492) period in America. Most notably (according to Silverberg) the Natchez of Mississippi:

The Natchez government was an absolute monarchy. At its head was a ruler called the Great Sun, who was considered divine and had total power over his subjects. “When he [the Great Sun] gives the leavings of his dinner to his brothers or any of his relatives,” wrote one of the French observers, “he pushes the dishes to them with his feet...The submissiveness of the savages to their chief, who commands them with the most despotic power, is extreme...if he demands the life of any one of them he [the victim] comes himself to present his head.”

The Great Sun’s foot never touched the bare earth. Clad in regal crown of swan feathers, he was carried everywhere on a litter, and when he had to walk, mats were spread before him. He and a few priests were the only ones permitted to enter the temple atop the mound, where an eternal fire burned, and the bones of previous Great Suns were kept. When a Great Sun died, his entire household—wife and slaves—was killed to accompany him in the afterlife.

The immediate relatives of the Great Sun were members of a privileged class called “Suns.” All of the important functionaries of the tribe were chosen from the ranks of the Suns, who were regarded with the greatest deference by the lower orders. Beneath the Suns in importance was a class called the “Nobles.” Beneath them were the “Honored Men,” and below them were a large body of despised and downtrodden commoners known by the uncomplimentary name of “Stinkards.” The class divisions were sharply drawn and there was no social mobility; once a Stinkard, always a Stinkard.

The unusual feature of this class system is the way it revolved from generation to generation. All Suns, induding the Great Sun himself, were required to chose their mates from the Stinkard class. Thus every Sun was the offspring of a Sun and a Stinkard. The children of female Suns married to Stinkards were Suns themselves, but the children of male Suns were demoted to the Noble class. The son of the Great Sun, therefore, could never succeed his father, for he would only be a Noble. The Great Sun’s successor was usually the son of one of his sisters, who, since Sun rank descended through the female line, had to belong to the highest caste.

The children of Nobles also had to marry Stinkards; the offspring of female Nobles were Nobles also; the children of male Nobles were demoted another class and became Honored Men. It worked the same way among them: the children of male Honored Men became Stinkards. Since there were always a great many more Stinkards than members of the three upper classes, most Stinkards married other Stinkards, and their children, of course, were Stinkards too. But a good many Stinkards were selected as mates for Suns, Nobles, and Honored Men, and so their children rose in class structure. The ones whose lot was least enviable were the Stinkard men who married Sun women. Although their children were Suns, these men had no power themselves, and were regarded simply as stud animals. They could not eat with their Sun wives, had to stand in their presence like servants, and might at any time be executed on a whim and replaced with another Stinkard.

As with many Indian tribes, the men ruled, but the power of descent was matrilineal. Female Suns elected the new Great Sun; females alone could transfer their rank to their children. It was an intricate and clever system which guaranteed a constant transfusion of new blood into each of the four classes. Whether this unusual arrangement was common to all Temple Mound peoples must forever remain unknown; but it seems safe to say that some sort of class system was found among them all, and probably an absolute monarchy as well. It could be that the Natchez, the last survivors, evolved this extremely specialized social structure independently, as a manifestation of a decadent culture’s last surge of creativity.

The Natchez rebelled against the French in 1729. In a prolonged and bloody campaign, they were nearly wiped out; the survivors were scattered among other Southeastern tribes, who looked upon them as gifted with mystic powers.

This gives, I imagine, a very clear picture of just what the Effigy Mound builders were refusing when they rejected the “High Civilization” of the Temple Mound culture. Perhaps the Effigy Religion can even be interpreted as a “revolt of the Stinkards”. Another way of tracing the “origins” of Effigy Mound culture might be to view it as the axial point of a meeting space between the vast spiritual sphere of Mesoamerican culture and that of “Arctic shamanism”. Until recently, orthodox archaeology has maintained that humans first arrived in the New World across the Bering Sea Land Bridge shortly after the end of the last Ice Age (about 12,000 BC). By now, however, this theory has begun to collapse under the weight of problems and contradictions. For instance, if the first incursion took place in Alaska, then Alaskan archaeological remains (such as the “fluted” flint arrowheads of the Paleo-Indian period) should be older than comparable material excavated to the south (such as the fluted arrowheads of California and the Southwest). Such, however, is not the case. In its way, the Bering Strait Theory is as “racist” as the old Mound Builder myth, since it implies, in effect, that the “Red Man” has only been here a few thousand years longer than the Europeans, and consequently has no better claim to “indigenous” status. (This theory usually also blames the Bering Strait immigrants for wiping out the megafauna of the New World, including the Mastodon, as if to say "these Indians were even worse ecologists than we Europeans!" Palpable nonsense, of course.) In The Quest for the Origins of the First Americans (1993), the Alaskan academic archeologist E. James Dixon proclaims his conversion to the revisionist theory: that the Bering Strait migration was the second-to-last arrival of humanity in the New World. The first arrivals probably came island hopping across the Pacific to South America and were here by 40-33,000 BC This theory is based on “hard” radio carbon dating and careful stratigraphical analysis from South American sites, evidence which has been unjustly ignored by North American orthodoxy. A rock shelter as far north as Pennsylvania has been dated to 17,000 BC The Bering Strait monopoly has been broken. Even the Hochunk Elders’ theory, that the Driftless Region was inhabited during the Ice Age, must be seriously reconsidered. The long chronology of American prehistory once championed by such 19th century “heretics” as F. W Putnam (see Silverberg pg. 197ff) must be re-envisioned.

Because Silverberg follows so closely the party line of American academic archaeology, it’s interesting to note his assessment of the Effigy Mounds, as opposed to the Hopewell/Temple Mound cultural artifacts he so much admires:

In some of these fringe areas of what is known as the Burial Mound II Period, mounds shaped in animal effigies and other odd forms were constructed. The link connecting these effigy-mound people to Hopewell is exceedingly tenuous. Most of the Northern effigy mounds which so excited Pidgeon were built quite late, maybe even in the Seventeenth or Eighteenth century, a thousand years or more after the end of Ohio Hopewell. They represent at best a distorted echo of the basic mound concept. These impoverished cultures, heaping earth together in low hillocks of curious shape, have little in common with the splendor of classic Hopewell.

In the first place, Silverberg is wrong about the dating of the Effigy Mounds, failing to grasp the nearly 1000-year span of the tradition. Second, he misinterprets the “poverty” of Effigy Mound culture as a sign of inferiority. The ill logic of this passage leads (unconsciously, I’m sure) back to cliches about “savage red men” who came “long after” the glorious “race” of Hopewell/Temple Mound Builders, and were able to produce only a few “odd forms” compared to the incomparable “splendor of classic Hopewell.” This was the official view in 1968, and it appears to remain the official view even today. The sheer lack of taste of orthodox archaeology (not to mention its lack of curiosity!) in relation to the Effigy Mound phenomenon constitutes one of the deepest of all the “mysteries” of Mysterious Wisconsin.

If we wish to pursue the hypothesis of the Effigy Mound culture as a “revolt” or back-to-Nature religious revival directed dialectically at the surrounding Civilization of Hopewell and Temple Mound, then obviously we need to know a great deal more about the “Empire of the Sun” throughout the entire Mississippi Valley and Eastern US—and especially the Spiro-Cahokia manifestation—and especially its colonial intrusion into the north at Aztalan. … Aztalan seems to represent a particularly ghoulish exaggeration of the Temple Mound Civilization, especially in the well-documented practice of cannibalism; see the endless dreary photos of human bones cracked for marrow and tossed into refuse heaps, in Ancient Aztalan by S.A. Barrett (1993). The Aztalanians apparently recruited or enslaved some local tribes, but their paranoid defense system shows that local resistance against the Sun King must have been constant and fierce. Presumably the “foreign chiefs” ate only slaves and captives—but curiously enough no cemetery has ever been found near Aztalan—maybe in the end they ate each other! It seems possible to me that the great fire which destroyed the city was set by the Effigy builders, and that the effigy mounds near Aztalan were later built by them to “hold down” the evil spirit of the place. Frank Joseph claims that when the Winnebago Elders were given an opportunity to view the enigmatic “Spirit Stone” of Aztalan (found wrapped in birch bark in a bark lined chamber beneath one of the mounds, and weighing 162.5 lbs.), the old men “recoiled in horror.”^[29] Of the few authenticated burials at Aztalan, one is a hunchback “princess” adorned in thousands of mother-of-pearl beads; one is a headless giant; and another consists of two little boys buried with a turtle shell. … Scherz has demonstrated that the “ceremonial poles” at Aztalan made up part of a very complex observatory (sun, moon, and stars), and that the inhabitants must have been obsessed by Time.

All this contrasts quite vividly with the archaeological profile of the Effigy-builders, who (as Ritzenthaler remarks somewhere) leave us an impression of ascetic nobility and a sense of powerful conviction about the right way to live—a way that included no extremes of wealth, no social hierarchy, no civilization, no cannibalism—and an emphasis on space rather than time. It would constitute the worst sort of error to believe that these “primitive” people of the Effigies (or indeed any “primitive” people) were simply too innocent or too stupid to grasp the advantages of Progress and Evolution and Development. Since the Neolithic, at least, we cannot assume that any hunter/gatherer group anywhere in the world has remained innocent (or ignorant) of the nature of the State. As Clastres shows, “primitive” tribes understand the centralization of power perfectly, but (unlike the agro-industrialists) they have actively rejected such hierarchy, and have designed their social institutions to resist it. Think of “counting coup” as a tactic of “primitive warfare” or think for that matter of the very temporary nature of “chief-ship” in most Plains and Woodlands Indian tribes. If the Effigy builders had been truly “primitive” and innocent of any threat to the harmony of Humanity and Nature, why would they bother to build the mounds at all? Why not just leave Nature untouched, as a perfectly adequate “symbol of itself”? The Effigies constitute a conscious and deliberate “sermon in earth”, a minimal but potent transformation of the landscape itself into a “message” about the right way to live, about “getting back into the cycle of Nature”, as Merlin Redcloud put it. The telluric geomantic ethereal energies of Earth herself are channelized in the Effigies, just as the Australians crystallized them as song-lines or the Chinese as feng-shui. The Effigies amount to a Wisdom-Teaching—about animals, birds, plants—about landscape and Earth—about dirt.

Pleasant it looked
this newly created world.
Along the entire length and breadth
of the Earth, our grandmother,
Extended the green reflection
of her covering
And the escaping odors
were pleasant to inhale.
(Winnebago song)

It is a mistake to imagine that Native Americans began to think of themselves as “guardians of the Wilderness” only after 1492, in a dialectical response to the European threat of destruction. They had already faced such a threat from within. They were already politically and ecologically conscious in 1492—they had deliberately chosen non-authoritarian society over the centralized State—and a hunting/gathering economy of leisure and excess over the Work of agriculture. They had deliberately overcome the “Rise of Civilization”. They had in fact burned Aztalan to the ground and chased the survivors all the way to Mexico, where they seem to have become the Aztecs (of course this is a “crackpot” theory...), the most civilized and cannibalistic of all New World cultures.

The Effigy “religion” holds power for us today—whether we be Ho-Chunk or Native or Euro-american. But I believe that this power and meaning do not derive from any “philosophy of defeat” at the hands of a State or a “Race” or a Civilization. The strength of the mounds lies in the fact that they represent a victory, not a defeat. Civilization has not always won all the battles, and has never successfully demonstrated the “inevitability” of its “march of Progress” as anything other than a myth of power.

When the first Europeans arrived in the New World, the old Sun-king/Death-cult civilization had nearly vanished from North America, leaving behind it thousands of architectural and funerary mounds to baffle such later savants as Thomas Jefferson. In a sense it would seem that the entire eastern half of “Turtle Island” had already refused the kind of development (or “progress”) involved in the Meso-American model, the pyramid of sacrifice. The northern tribes had, by and large, already rejected “Civilization” and reverted to gardening and/or hunting economies, non-authoritarian political structures, “democratic shamanism”, and the general way of life called “Woodlands” by the archaeologists. The “innocent savages”—who had no concept of “Nature” because they knew nothing that was not “Nature”—can no longer be allowed to dominate our view of North American “pre-History”. In 1492 the natives already possessed institutions that had developed dialectically out of a conflict with separation and hierarchy. They had discovered that wild(er)ness is something that can be restored—not as “innocence” but as conscious knowledge. The philosophy of harmony with Nature that animates Native-American religious revival today is not simply a reaction to European appropriation and immiseration. It is in fact based on a much earlier “critique” of separation, and a struggle with emergent hierarchy that had ended with victory for the “Clastrian machine”. Clear records of this dialectical struggle are difficult to trace, since it involved “reversion” to forms that evade the archaeologist. But one case at least left very clear traces. The Effigy Mound builders adopted the idea of the mound from Cahokian/Mississippian Civilization, but they changed the entire meaning of the mounds into a symbolic language that transpires both within Nature and about Nature simultaneously. If it were not for the ravages of time and the Wisconsin dairy industry, we would possess an entire “Koran”, as it were, of “waymarks on the horizons” of Nature—a “Bible” of lessons about the correct relations among humans, animals, plants, and spirits. Most of the “book” is missing and the rest in fragments—but those fragments lie before us openly on the ground. As “words” in a language of images, each Emblem seems to hold within itself the fractal image of the whole System, the entire emblematic landscape. If we offer tobacco, and receptive silence, they may still speak.

5. Real Donnybrook

In speaking of the Land-without-Evil, and the land of Effigy Mounds, we have remained so far on the borderland between pre-history and (written) history. Our next examples will come from an area that is also ambiguous, but at least presents us with some written texts—that is, popular history. Logically, if we search for the continued existence of the “Clastrian machine” in history, as opposed to pre-history, we must look first where we might well expect to find such traces—at the bottom of the social pyramid, the “zone of depletion”, created by hierarchy. Among the poor and marginalized we will discern areas where the rights and customs of autonomy and pleasure persist in manifestation. Luckily for us, the poor—who were voiceless in old-fashioned evolutionist “History”—have acquired some keen listeners in recent decades among the “new” historians. Bakhtin, Le Goff, Gurevich, Le Roy Ladurie, Ginzburg, C. Hill, C. P. Thompson ... with guides and interpreters like these, it should be possible to apply the anthropological model derived from Clastres and Taussig to some examples culled from popular history.

We can call the carnevalesque, as Bakhtin conceptualized it,^[30] shamanistic if not overtly shamanic; in any case, a carrier of the “shamanic trace”. Carnival after all has to do with direct experience, and moreover with non-ordinary consciousness—even if the experience concerns only a simple celebratory autonomy and the pleasure of the group, and even if the consciousness “arises” only from cakes and ale. Structurally the opposition between ordinary everydayness and the carnivalesque cuts deeper than the difference between a day of work and a day of leisure. This opposition can be traced in the symbolism of Breughel’s agonistic vision of “Carnival and Lent”:—it is a division in time itself between quantitative and qualitative, between separation and presence, between exchange and gift. The “holidays” are spaces missing from the pyramid of the year, areas where the “original” abundance and excess still appear.

Some famous carnivals such as the Saturnalia existed as literal holes in a calendrical cycle with “left-over days” at the ends of solar years. These days are exempt from the “progress” of time and still “take place” in the era of Saturnus, the golden age from whence derive all rights and customs. Saturnian time is smooth compared to the striated time of History—and it does not come to an end. The secret of carnival is that every crack in the time-structure of hierarchy will be (re)occupied by the flow of primordial time from “before” separation, before division, before “money”, before work. It’s often said that medieval Europe enjoyed 111 holidays a year. We can have little feeling, I believe, for the extent to which all our cognitive categories are contaminated by the deliberate erosion of carnival by mechanical/industrial time (the U.S. enjoys only twelve “legal” holidays a year). No doubt we have dismantled the pyramid of feudalism, but we have simply used the blocks in constructing a vaster edifice based on subtler forms of oppression.

The neo-conservative critique of Bakhtin is that he over-emphasized the rebellious nature of carnival. The fact that it occurs on a regular (calendrical) basis makes it appear that carnival is not so much opposed to measured time as complicit with it. Carnival “lets off steam” (according to the mechanistic model favored by such critics) and releases the pressure of work-disciplines, so that the people may return to their places, satisfied with their moment of “relaxation”. Carnival turns the world upside down only to "right" it again the next day.

Now obviously there’s some truth in this—otherwise the neo-conservatives would look pretty foolish—but it’s not the only truth. Nor is it true that carnival simply equals “rebellion” (nor did Bakhtin ever suggest anything so simple-minded). Obviously, if carnival is a periodic disruption then it is also a periodic renewal—and vice versa. The critique of Bakhtin is trivial. Carnival is both—and we may also say that it is neither. We can construct a much better model for carnival by reference to the “Clastrian machine”. Saturnalia is a time or space within history which has so far resisted enclosure by “History”, and where the old rights and customs have been successfully defended. A portion of the year has been lost—and a portion remains “free”;—the “holidays” are the parts of the year that have not been colonized by rational time. Within the “free” portion of time we can expect to find “holiday customs” based on all the original institutions of the “Clastrian machine”. The economy of the Gift comes into its own again, as does the economy of Excess. Shamanic symbols and practices appear as folk dance and music (e.g., Hungarian folk-music, with clear shamanic Central Asian roots), guising and mumming (ritual lycanthropy), consumption of psychotropics, appeasement of the Dead, mock sacrifice, mock healing (e.g., the figure of the “Doctor” in the Mummer’s Play), re-appearance of “pagan” figures and motifs, etc., etc. There exist entire religious systems that are both shamanistic and carnivalesque, as Jim Wafer points out in his anthropological study of Brazilian Candomblé.^[31] Religion may be the opium of the people, heart of a heartless world, in some cases—but in the case of the Afro-American syncretic cults religion has been a locus of resistance to power from the very beginning. Group possession in the presence of a congregation is a sort of democratized shamanism, since everyone either gets to be a spirit or to meet one. And for certain spirits, all time is festival-time.

Finally, mock warfare or ritual violence plays a major role in festival-time, and re-creates obvious patterns of “primitive” war. Authoritarian Venice, for example, was forced for centuries to put up with the “War of the Bridges”, which took place on holidays, in which “armies” of faction fighters engaged in huge pushing and shoving matches on the bridges between their rival neighborhoods. Serious injury was rare. The leaders were simply bold ne’er-do-wells who could lose all their “authority” with a single dunking in the canal. The combatants were all working-class, but the aristocracy took a strong fannish interest and gambled heavily on favorites. Even for Venice the fun became too extreme, and the outraged Doges finally managed to put an end to the custom.^[32] In modern America, “Halloween violence” serves very much the same function, and is viewed with very much the same cold eye by Authority. Letting off steam after all must not threaten lèse majesté; in the modern world, violence is the monopoly of the State—or of Capital. And the “commercialization” of holidays is nothing but an attempt to break the autonomy of the festal moment by colonizing it with money.^[33]

A fine example of holiday violence is the old Irish custom of the “Pattern” or “pardon” or (most correctly) “Patron”, as in “patron-saint”. On certain saints’ days people made local pilgrimages to Holy Wells often known for miraculous healing powers. William Carleton has left us an excellent account of the Pattern in pre-Famine (1848) days when the old customs still flourished. Vast numbers participated in services, ascetic practices like walking on knees or crawling, circumambulation of the well, and other paganish or shamanistic rites. Booths were set up, a fair was held, drinking and dancing, sparking and courting. Eventually and inevitably a faction-fight would occur:—rival gangs of men would engage in chaotic drunken brawls, using ash-sticks, black-thorns and shilaleaghs. Faction-fighting took place at fairs (e.g., Donnybrook) and other occasions as well, but the Pattern is interesting for its combination of magic spirituality and unbridled carnivalesque celebration with ritual violence.^[34]

Precisely the same structures can be found in folkloristic accounts of the ancient Celtic warbands—especially that of Finn MacCumhal and the Fena (or Fianna or Fenians). As they appear in such texts as the Dunaire Finn or the Colloquy of the Ancients, the Fena appear as something more than a simple männerbund but differently organized than an army.^[35] They are a sworn brotherhood of initiates (they must excel at druidic and bardic skills as well as war), led by a man who is both poet and battle-chief. Finn MacCumhal, a hero of semi-divine status, in turn owes fealty to the High King—but very significantly this “contract” only holds good for half the year. From Halloween to May Day—i. e., winter—the Fena must guard the throne and fight the King’s wars. But from May Day to Halloween—summer—they are free men, roaming through the green wood, hunting (mostly deer), feasting, drinking, brawling amongst themselves, pursuing love affairs, and experiencing countless adventures with the Sidh, the “fairy-folk” or Tuatha Dé Danaan who inhabit the old megalithic mounds. Ancient Indo-European shamanistic motifs abound in the Fenian material:—humans are transformed into animals, “poetic frenzy” is acquired by entheogenic substances such as magic berries (a clear parallel to the Vedic Soma Sacrifice, as I have argued elsewhere); magical flight, healing and hexing, trance music, poets wearing cloaks of birds’ feathers—the shamanic “survivals” are countless. May Day and Halloween, the “hinges” of the year, are cracks in the structure of time through which the Dead and the Spirits find direct access to the human world. But these holidays mark out a period when the Fena themselves enter the timeless world—the Forest, or “el Monte”, as the Cuban Santeros call it: the space of wild(er)ness, shamanic space. As J. Nagy points out in his excellent study of the Fenian material, this absence from Time makes Finn and his followers outlaws, very much like Robin Hood and his Merry Men.^[36] But for the other half of the year Finn enters Time and the World of Order, and is “loyal to the King” (although sometimes he quarrels with the King, and finally opposes him). Robin Hood too in season comes to the party of order. But it is not the party of unjust order (the Sheriff of Nottingham and King John), but the party of justice. The good king Richard Lionheart symbolizes this justice by donning the green garb of the Merry Men—by embracing the chaos of the forest and the outlaw code. The good king includes both chaos and order, and thereby does justice to the old rights and customs of the commons. Among the Fena, however, the transition is seasonal: half the year for chaos, half for order—or rather, half for holiday, half for work. The outlaw in-laws. Here we have a perfect image of the “Clastrian machine” as it approaches History, still intact, but already half-enclosed by the forces of separation. Finn is the “champion of the people” and of their old ways (hunting, shamanism, reciprocity), but he can preserve a space for these customs only by conceding power to the new ways of agriculture, priestcraft, and exchange. (The conflict with Christianity is boldly depicted in The Colloquy of the Ancients, when Finn’s son Oisín—last survivor of the pagan Fenameets St. Patrick and defends the "old ways" against the new morality.)

The Finn of folklore reflects patterns of Celtic social structure that can be recovered from old law tracts, annals, and from archaeological evidence,^[37] The petty kings of the Tuaths or tribal confederations (there may have been more than 100 of them in Ireland) lorded over nobles, free peasants, and “client tribes” (remnants of pre-Indo-European or pre-Celtic peoples), but a great many individuals fell out of the social net in various ways. Craftsmen were free to wander, as were bards and druids. Chief Bards were considered the equals of kings, and were followed by huge retinues. Nobles were obliged to provide hospitality to such free agents (and periodically also to their subjects and lords) on pain of being considered “ungenerous”—the worst sin in the Celtic book, to be sure. Each Tuath was obliged to maintain a free hostel for travelers (early Irish pilgrims to the Continent and Rome were shocked to discover hotels that charged money!), and more than one ruler was ruined by such rules. War—a seasonal affair-was largely limited to near-ritual cattle-rustling, such as the theft of a prize bull that sparks off the Irish Iliad, the Tain bo Culaigne. But violence was woven into the whole social fabric:—all ancient commentators emphasize the courage, amounting to blind foolhardiness, of the Celtic warrior. The orderly English (who are cruel rather than merely violent) are disgusted by this disorderly behavior. In its degenerate forms such as faction-fighting the violence comes to seem quite pointless, the turning-on-itself of a conquered and powerless people. But we should not let liberal values blind us to the fact that while we have given up our “right” of violence into the hands of the State, the Irish held on to it in the realization that violence is a means of creating freedom. The brawl at the Pattern was a device that marked it out as a “temporary autonomous zone”, a crack in the space/time of Order into which Rows (for a brief moment) the smooth Saturnian time of intimacy, transformation, and pleasure. The Fena enjoy the positive aspects of “outlawry” (which are nothing but the old rights and customs of “natural” freedom) because they are always prepared to defend their prerogatives by violence. In Fenian times the State has not yet grown potent enough to monopolize violence; although its power already defines the course of time, the shape of society, the State must still permit power to abandon it for “half the year”. The petty kingdoms of the Celtic period remained small enough that power was forced to the level of the personal, and obligated to the function of redistribution. And they retained this intimate scale because of the fissiparous violence of Celtic politics. No one seized a monopoly of power till Brian Boru, and he only succeeded because two centuries of Viking raids had shattered the fragile pattern of Celtic society. The Celts considered themselves a free and noble people, and they would have understood quite clearly Jefferson’s remark about the tree of Liberty needing a watering of blood every few years.

6. Unseen Tracks

In “Shamanism in Siberia: From Partnership in Supernature to Counter-power in Society”, R. N. Hamayon makes three structural points that are quite relevant to our present purposes:

1. Shamanism is only present as an all-embracing system in archaic, tribal, or noncentralized, societies. Therefore shamanism is generally considered to be elementary or primitive as a symbolic system or form of religion.

2. Shamanistic phenomena are also found in centralized societies, which points to the adaptive character of shamanism. However, though shamanism is primary in archaic societies, its manifestations in centralized societies are not only fragmentary and altered but peripheral or even opposed to the central authorities; this is a sign of the structural weakness of shamanism. Related to this simultaneously adaptive and vulnerable property of shamanism as a system is the latent availability of shamanic practices in all types of society; this availability becomes manifest especially in crisis periods, when such practices easily revive or emerge.

3. Whether in tribal or centralized societies, one encounters an absence of shamanistic clergy, doctrine, dogma, church, and so forth. Therefore shamanism is usually characterized as a politically and ideologically limited or deficient system. In other words, although shamanic phenomena are found in state societies and may even play a role in state formation, shamanism as such is not found in the position of a state religion.^[38]

Except for the suggestion that shamanism is “ideologically deficient”, I would agree with this. (I would prefer to say simply that shamanism is non-ideological.) Hamayon’s thesis certainly supports out notion of shamanism as a part of the “Clastrian machine”, especially in its “opposition to central authorities.” Elsewhere in Shamanism, History and the State, however, in C. Humphrey’s “Shamanic Practices and the State in Northern Asia: View from the Center and Periphery”, we are told of at least one example of a “shamanic state religion”—the strange case of Imperial Manchu Court shamanism. Till the end of the dynasty in 1911, the Manchu Court at Peking continued to celebrate the ancestral rites, clear variants of well-known Siberian and circum-Arctic shamanic practices. Is Hamayon’s thesis wrong then, or is Manchu shamanism the exception that proves the rule?

When the Manchus founded the Ching Dynasty they brought shamans with them-but the “great (amba) shamans” failed or refused to make the transition from wildness (the “raw”) to civilization (the “cooked”)—only the p’ogun or “family shamans” were to be found at Court.

The p’ogun samans rapidly became different from what Shirokogoroff calls “real shamans.” They did not undergo the psychic sickness and spiritual rebirth of shamanic initiation but were chosen mundanely by the clanchief (mokun-da) at clan meetings or else proposed themselves for service. The main one, the da saman, was elected annually at the autumn sacrifice. Almost all of them were unable to introduce the spirits into themselves in trance or to master any spirits. In effect, Shirokogoroff maintains, they became priests. At the court in Peking, they became a largely hereditary social class, responsible for maintaining the regular sacrifices for the well-being of the government and empire. The female shamans were the wives of court officials and ministers. By the mid-eighteenth century, if we are to believe what the Qianlong emperor Hongli wrote, the court shamans, who could hardly speak Manchu, had lost touch with earlier traditions and confined themselves to a ritualistic repetition of half-understood formulae. The members of the imperial family personally preferred other religions. At this point, Hongli launched his great project of “remembering,” that is, the researches to revivify Manchu cultural differences from the Chinese. Histories were written, or rewritten, to establish a direct relation between the present emperor’s clan, the Aisin Gioro, and the imperial clan of the Jurchen Jin, and to establish its ancestral claims over the sacred Changbaishan Mountain in northeast Manchuria. As part of this project, in 1778, the emperor issued his famous edict to renew shamanist ritual, together with some preliminary discourses about the need to transmit the correct forms to posterity.

The emperor wished to revitalize shamanism, and I suggest that a central motive for this was the renewing of the link between the imperial clan and the forces of regeneration and vitality. But we shall see that his edict in the long run probably had the opposite effect.

Shirokogoroff’s picture is tendentious. It is not so clear that the court ritual was much different from what I have termed patriarchal shamanism. In this sense we can talk of a kind of shamanic state religion until the end of the dynasty. Inspirational and performative elements were perhaps not totally absent. The shamans at the Manchu court, if they did not go into trance, certainly invoked the spirits and “invited the ancestor spirits to enter the sacred space,” and they used drums and other characteristic shamanic instuments. Prayers were distinguished from other kinds of more enraptured speech. In further sequences, with the light extinguished, the shamans “murmured in the dark” (forbure) and then prostrated themselves and sought “to appease the spirits and to attract their favour by flattering words (forobure).”

But whatever was inspirational in the new register of shamanism introduced by Hongli’s edict almost certainly atrophied thereafter. One of the aims of the emperor was not only to distinguish and petrify Manchu shamanism, (“If we do not take care things will gradually change,” he wrote), but to give it the civilized manners of Chinese Confucian ritual. The shamanic inspirational capacities of invention and imagination must have struggled under the weight of formally prescribed written prayers, decorous gestures, and delineated movements and sounds.

Only among the “raw” Manchus left living in the forests of the north was the culture preserved. Increasingly, the emperor came to see the clans and shamanism as the central features of Manchu identity.

The bureacratization of the Manchu state in the seventeenth century, the subordination of clans to the banner system, and the decorous idiom of court ritual expelled the great “wild” shamans from metropolitan religion and tamed the patriarchal clan shamans who remained. Nevertheless, in the discourse of ethnic exclusiveness that came to be seen as necessary for preserving the legitimacy of Manchu rule over a vast and rapidly expanding empire in the eighteenth century, shamanism had a key role. It was the context in which “pure” culture from the frontier revivified the center. Incorporation of external powers to the cult of ancestors provided a centralist ideology that was at the same time an identity for the Manchus. But the means chosen by the emperor, prescribed ritual and written liturgy, served only to negate the strength of shamanic practice, its ability to deal with new forms of power.^[39]

Inasmuch as the Manchu Court shamanistic revival was a failure, it clearly follows Hamayon’s thesis:—that shamanism and the State are incompatible. But after all the “failure” was extremely long-lived...perhaps “failure” is not quite the mot juste. I suggest that we have here a “strange” case of the operation of the “Clastrian machine” from within the very structure of hierarchy and separation. The Court’s nostalgia for the heroic and visionary life of the “periphery”, carried to the extreme of re-importing it to the “center”, indicates that aristocracies as well as "commons" can be touched by the movement of the “Clastrian machine”. But aristocracies transform “rights and customs” into privileges and laws. European nobility were also descended from barbarian steppe-nomads: their heraldry was also derived from shamanic imagery, and their customs (e.g., hunting) were prolongations of the free life of the nomad warriors within a world of hierarchy and appropriation: a Nietzschean notion of “freedom” as will to power.

The essence of shamanism is direct experience. As shamanism becomes aestheticized this experience is attenuated and more thoroughly mediated—but it does not disappear. As Lin Gui-Teng says in his essay on “Musical Instruments in the Manchurian Shamanic Sacrificial Rituals”,

In sacrificial rituals, shamans experience a change of identity from man to god and from god to man, that is, in sacrificial rituals, they go through such a process as inviting gods to come down, becoming gods incarnate, giving orders and directions in the identity of gods, and then becoming man again. When it is supposed that shamans have become gods incarnate, their behaviour becomes agitated. At the same time, waistbells and magic drums give off a burst of rapid and violent sounds, form a mystical, enchanting and heavenly atmosphere, in which shamans feel themselves possessed and controlled by an ineffable yet intense passion and rise involuntarily towards the heaven. This psychological experience of shamans is not to be confined to himself, but to be imparted to others through the sound of magic drums, waistbells, songs and dances. Shamans give directions in the identity of a god, and their assistants (called zailizi in Chinese) explain these directions to others, and complete this process of turning an individual experience into a social one.^[40]

A similar practice of attenuation from shamanic to aesthetic expression can be traced in the famous Nine Songs of ancient Chinese shamanism.^[41] The union between deity and shaman has become suffused with eroticism and disappointment—an aesthetic of intense longing for a direct experience that is vanishing. In a sense religious Taoism “saved” Chinese shamanism by adapting as its central praxis the direct experience of the shamans—complete with Registers of Spirits, trance, possession, ecstatic flight, and probably entheogenic substances as well (especially in the Taoism of Mao Shan, and the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove”). The origins of the Chuang Tzu in particular should be sought in such a complex; Chuang Tzu was in a sense the first “urban shaman”! Taoism was able to “save” Chinese shamanism because both were Chinese. But Manchu Court shamanism was the religion (or rather one of several religions) of a tiny elite of nobles and bannermen, far removed from their ethnic homeland—whereas their subjects were largely Han Chinese. Court shamanism never had a chance to transform itself or mutate into a popular religion like Taoism. Moreover, Taoism as a popular religion began with the peasant revolt and utopia of the Yellow Turbans of the third century AD, and Taoism remained a “repository” for many strains of resistance:—bohemian excess, egalitarian sentiment, “heresy”, deviant sexuality, and open revolution. Taoism was never popular at Court (except with a few unfortunate eccentrics), and maintained a “traditional” opposition to the Confucian ideals of the Bureaucracy. Above all, in its techniques of mysticism Taoism offered direct experience—an obvious danger in an Empire based on universal Imperial mediation. In all these respects, Taoism is a religion par excellence of the “Clastrian machine”; and this aspect of Taoism can be attributed to its “shamanic trace”. Manchu Court shamanism by contrast represents an attempt by hierarchy to appropriate and ideologize or petrify shamanic “power”. But religious Taoism also developed its Court Hierarchy of divinities and spirits (a mirror of traditional Chinese Court structures), its dogmas and “ideologies”, its authoritarian and apostolic “transmissions”—and the ritual aesthetics of Taoism and Manchu Court shamanism are not that different (at least in books, that is).

The ambiguity of Manchu shamanism—its confusion of centrifugality and centripetality—is revealed in the shamanic mythology of the Daur people, Mongolians who joined the Manchus as bannermen. They were partly civilized, therefore, but they also retained rural roots and maintained their “great” shamans. They believed in a composite or “multiple ancestor spirit” named

Holieli, often called Da Barkan (the “great deity”). People made images of this spirit, which they kept in a box in their houses. It consisted, in the best known example, of fifty-eight separate parts: bald monsters, nine-headed monsters, half-people, single legs, left-side cripples and right-side cripples, some different kinds of turtle and tortoise, a leather softener, nine fishes, a hunting gun, a dragon, and nine dancing boys and nine dancing girls.

There are many versions of the story of this spirit, and the components of the images also vary. In a story of the Nonni River Daurs, the Holieli ancestor is an antelope that emerged from a rock split asunder by lightning. It ran straight to Senyang, where it began to harass the people. The Manchu government had it seized, placed in a bag of cow leather, and thrown into the river. It drifted down the river till it met the flood dragon, where the bag burst on the dragon’s horn. The antelope pushed its way out of the bag, gained the bank, and once more began to harass the people. The Manchu court again had it seized, placed in a bag, loaded on a horse, and sent off. The horse followed its nose to the Amur River, where it was captured by a tribe of strange Tungus. They thought there must be something very nice in the bag and opened it. The antelope leapt out and took to the forests. It was chased by the lightning, which struck and struck, and many creatures were killed, but the deer escaped by sheer luck. It got to the Nonni River, near the Eyiler and Bitai villages. A man was ploughing. When the antelope spirit ran beside the man, there was a great crash of thunder, and everything was smashed into ninety-nine pieces. Since then, the antelope’s spirit and those of all the people and animals killed by lightning joined forces for haunting and possessing people. First, it was worshiped by the Tungus, and then it was recognized as a spirit by the Manchu court, people say.

In a shaman’s song for Holieli, the ancestor is smashed to pieces by lightning and becomes the half-people and crippled people. It starts from the end of the earth, which is at the source of the Ergune River. It is an old man, then it becomes a fish, traveling down the Jinchili River, gathering as it goes all the people of the clans and all kinds of animals. Its aim is the southern sea, the entourage of the Dalai Lama (dalai means ocean in Mongol). It raids the city of Peking and occupies the seat of orthodoxy. It is a loud voice yelling in the palace. It is given a jade throne, a pearl restingplace. From there it begins its journeys again, crossing all borders, passing through all boundaries; it reaches the Daur and becomes hidden in the plowblade of the farmer. Again it is honored by the people. It is in its original place. It is given a two-dragon throne on the western wall of the house and offerings—all kinds of silks, damasks, and satins. In a robe of grass, it tramples on the clean satins. Again it seems to set out on its metamorphic journey. The song continues:

Where the rivers flow together
Where they flow down is a dug-out canoe,
The Tungus who live in the dense forest
Kill the boar and are skilfull master-hunters.
[It is] the tracks they do not find,
The footprints they do not see,
The gold-colored tortoise,
The silver-colored frog,
A buzzing biting wasp,
A creeping spider,
The wriggling lizards and snakes,
The sound of a shaken bell,
A cuckoo calling loudly,
The leopard growling,
The huge and fearless wild boar…

The ancestor in a sense becomes the spirit-emperor, masterfully transcending the etiquette of the court and the boundaries of the empire. Effortlessly, it swims as a fish to the palace, where it yells; unhindered, it returns to the Daur. It cannot be pinned down: it is manifest both in the domestic sphere of the plough and the house and in the wilderness of the forests, where the best hunters cannot see it.

The ancestor Holieli has many powers because it has many transformations. It does not have all powers perhaps, because there are other spirits, with other metamorphoses. But specifically, it takes the power of the imperial ruler. Yet it seems that this is transcended by the idea of metamorphosis itself: the signs and marks of imperial rank are desecrated and abandoned as the spirit takes to the forest as a wasp, changes to a spider, and changes to the sound of a bell. In the practice of ordinary Daurs, the pacification of this spirit, which caused very great harm and mental illness, involved furnishing its representation with imperial imagery (silk, dragons, special wood for the carved models, and so on). Shamans used to order people who had costly embroidered or damask clothing, the very means of imitating the courtly Manchus in real life, to offer them to this spirit. The spirit seems both a violent rejection of and a homage to the imperial state.^[42]

Shamanism does not oppose the State as an ideology because shamanism is non-ideological. Shamanism makes a big noise in Peking, but it’s not clear who benefits thereby. Is “Peking” threatened or strengthened by this display? Perhaps both? In the end shamanism is not “for” or “against”—it fades into the sound of bells or the spoor of tigers. Nevertheless, in a secret temple within a secret palace within an entire “Hidden City”, weighted down with gold, silk, lacquer and jewels, clouded with centuries of incense and obfuscation, something persisted—“footprints one cannot see”—organic and authentic—a homeopathic trace of chaos—a memory of the possibility of authentic vision and the “direct tasting” of non-ordinary consciousness. The dialectic between presence and representation, both their “forms” and their “spectres”, is too complex to reduce to terms of simple opposition or recuperation. It might be more useful to think in terms of appearance, disappearance, and re-appearance. This process may be banal—as when a custom is simply defeated and erased—or bizarre, as when “wild” shamanism suddenly re-appears at the center of the most centralized, hierarchic and civilized State imaginable. “Good” king Richard embraces the chaos at the heart of the greenwood in order that order may be complete; the “good” emperor Hongli’s motives were no doubt similar. But perhaps chaos is that which cannot be “embraced”. Its organicism resists all mechanization (the “Clastrian machine” is an organic and uncentered entity, quite the opposite of the mechanical machine based on division and centralization). In effect, the shamanic trace does not resist—it simply escapes. And, as Hamayon points out, in “crisis” situations, it “easily revives or emerges”, i.e., it re-appears. The fatality of the shamanic trace, in the view of the “State”, is that it appears to be psychophysiologically inherent in the human species; it’s fated to occur. There may even be something “cyclic” about the process; the “logic” of institutions implies a certain inevitable periodicity of commitment and crisis. From this point of view the revival of interest in shamanism in the late 20th century might be seen as (or under) the sign of such a re-appearance. The Irish used to say that “England’s troubles are Ireland’s opportunities”—and by extension we could say that the crisis of the “State” is the moment of opportunity for the “Clastrian machine”. The crisis of the economy makes openings for violence; and the crisis in orthodoxy makes openings for shamanism—even in “Peking”.

7. Hidden Imam

However attenuated, Manchu Court shamanism is still recognizably shamanism. In order to see how shamanism re-appears as a trace within religions that have no apparent “historical links” with “primitive shamanism”, we should examine a case in which purely structural parallels can be discovered. Islam supposedly offers such a test case—but it is not certain that Islam has no historical connections with shamanism. Many writers have commented on the shamanic motifs of the Prophet Mohammad’s life story. He is prepared for his mission by spirits who split him open and wash his bones, just like a typical circum-Arctic shaman. The cave where he receives his first revelation is the haunt of the pagan Arab demon of dreams, Hiraa. He experiences “fits” similar to epileptic seizures when he recites, and is taken by some Meccans as a sha’er or poet, from whom such behavior was apparently expected. His Mir’aj or Night Ascension into a heaven of seven or nine layers certainly recalls the soul-flight of the shaman—and many more such parallels could be mentioned. There is nothing surprising or disturbing about all this from an Islamic point of view, since everyone knows there were 124,000 prophets before Mohammad, at least one for every people on Earth. In orthodox doctrine Mohammad is the “final” prophet, and this is taken to mean “last in a temporal series”; from an esoteric point of view, however, the last is also the highest or archetypal form, the “Mohammadan Light” or ray that emanates from pre-eternity and upon which all prophets and saints are situated. The historical Mohammad therefore recapitulates all possible prophetic forms and perfects them. According to sufism, this explains the esoteric parallels between Islam and other manifestations of the spirit. From this perspective one might almost say that Mohammad came not to destroy or suppress such manifestations (including Meccan paganism) but to rectify and realize them.

Be that as it may, the historian of religion must ask if Meccan paganism itself was not shamanistically structured to some degree, and therefore whether the Prophet’s actions and visions cannot be seen as “historically influenced” by shamanism. Perhaps so. But then the Koran and Hadith reveal links with Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, the “Sabaeans” (possibly the Harranian “star cult”) and probably other religions as well. No doubt all religions possess some “links” with shamanism, if we take “shamanism” to indicate the spirituality of the Paleolithic (and most of the Neolithic as well). Certainly when Islam came into contact with the world of the Turks and Central Asians, there were direct influences from historically attested shamanic cultures on Islamic institutions such as sufism (e.g., the Bektashi Order, or the Owaysiyya).^[43] But all these links, for Islam, are unconscious links. Islam as Islam recognizes no such “historical connections”. And therefore we may speak precisely of the shamanic trace.

If the shamanic trace re-appears most clearly in “crisis”, then we might well narrow our search to an examination of Shiism, which is a religion of permanent crisis. According to most political analyses of Shiism it is based on the “divine right” of the Family of the Prophet to rule Islamdom.^[44] But Mohammad’s family (with the brief exception of his son-in-law the Caliph Wi) were excluded from such rule from the very beginning of the Islamic State. This is the crisis. It turned Shiism from a form of authoritarian absolutism into a “permanent revolution”. Its revolutionary potential is most often veiled in quietism (“This time is not our time,” as the Sixth Imam put it)—but the revolutionary implications of its origins could never be effaced. The permanent nature of the crisis is revealed by the Shiites’ own belief that the first eleven of their Imams were “martyred” by Sunni Orthodoxy. But the real crisis occurred when the Twelfth Imam disappeared in the 9th century. The “Hidden Imam” is considered to be still living, but on a different plane than ours-in effect, as H. Corbin demonstrated, the Mundis Imaginalis or world of archetypes.^[45] Although he may appear to us in dreams, or visions, or even “in person” (making use of what the Theosophists would call an “astral body”), the Imam is literally out of this world, and can never rule it—until the End of Time. The present rule of the democracy in Iran is taken by some pious Shiites as a betrayal of this other-worldliness and millennial expectation, just as some pious Jews refuse to recognize Israel:—because it is not the “real Jerusalem” of perfected Time. Thus lack of power is a crisis for Shiism, but so is possession of power. And the existence of the Hidden Imam in a “heaven” that shares its position in Imaginal space with the “skies” of the ecstatic shaman, gives rise inevitably within Shiism to the re-appearance of the shamanic trace.

Similarly, since Shiism is inherently “revolutionary”, it has served historically as a focus for many different forms of resistance both to Orthodoxy and the State. Because Shiism is perpetually denied its “liberation”, we have the paradoxical situation of an authoritarian doctrine giving rise to a libertarian practice—and even to libertarian doctrine. In other words, as a site of resistance, Shiism becomes a repository for remnants of the “Clastrian machine”—which then re-assemble themselves into a force for decentralization, egalitarianism, social/economic justice, and direct experience of spiritual realization.

This “direct tasting” in Shiism always takes the form of direct experience of the Imam, who is directly situated on the ray of the Mohammadan Light, and thus actually embodies spiritual experiences—and this is true whether the body be corporeal or astral. In practical terms, however, for the Shiite mystic this encounter does not occur merely or even necessarily on the physical plane. Inasmuch as the Imam is a spiritual reality he exists also (or even primarily) in the heart of the individual believer, as the inmost “divine” nature of the creation. Corbin discussed this concept under the rubric of “the-Imam-of-one’s-own-being.” On the esoteric level this doctrine “democratizes the Imamate” in that each heart contains (or, in effect, is) the Imam. Now, within Orthodox Twelve-Imam Shiism, this “identity” remains on the esoteric level alone; the ‘ulema mediate between the people and the Hidden Imam. (Khomeini’s argument that this mediation justifies the Vilayat-i faqih or political rule of the ‘ulema was not accepted by other Ayatollahs, who argued that only the Twelfth Imam can rule—and that this rule will mark the end of profane Time.) But other more “heterodox” branches of Shiism have made much more radical applications of the doctrine of the Imam-of-one’s-own-being.

In 1164 the Ismailis or “Assassins” of Alamut in northwest Persia received a message from an Imam who was then hidden and unknown to them.^[46] It was relayed to them by their young leader, Hasan II (who did not claim to be the Imam himself, although that claim was made later), and it announced that profane Time had indeed come to an end. The “Resurrection” (Qiyamah) was declared, and “the chains of the Law were broken.” That is, the Islamic Law (Shariah) was to be abrogated because its inner esoteric meaning was now to be openly revealed. The inside would become the outside, the world turned upside down—heaven on earth. As in heaven all actions are permitted, so now at Alamut. The revolutionary and heretical potential of Shiism was realized in an absolute opposition to orthodoxy and power, based on the universalization (through the Da’wa, propaganda or the “Call”) of esoteric realization. The Ismaili techniques of resistance to the State had already been established by Hasan II’s predecessor and namesake Hasan-i Sabbah, who first liberated the Rock at Alamut and sent out his fanatical followers to assassinate any who opposed Ismaili autonomy. Under Hasan II assassination was almost abandoned in favor of mystical enthusiasm. His open broadcasting of Ismaili “secrets” drew the shocked attention of nearby Sunni rulers. Something had to be done about Hasan II; a “conservative” party within Alamut had him assassinated, and the Qiyamat same to a sudden end in Iran. However Hasan II had already sent his childhood friend Rashid Sinan to preach the Qiyamat in Syria. Sinan emulated Hasan-i Sabbah and liberated a network of remote castles, where he ruled as “Old Man of the Mountain.” Perhaps it was here that the Assassins acquired the reputation of using hashish in certain initiatic rites mentioned by early European travelers like Marco Polo. (Northwest Iran is not known as a center of hashish production, but the Lebanese mountains of Syria have produced it since remote antiquity.) Certainly Sinan exhibited other shamanic traits that struck both the local peasants and the European Crusaders as uncanny, terrifying, and wonderful. Sinan was known for his bilocation, precognition, ecstatic flight, inspired speech, and magical invulnerability. If some of his feats strike us as stage magic, this would not make him seem any less shamanistic. In one instance he is reported to have penetrated at night into the heavily-guarded sleeping quarters of the great generalissimo Saladdin, who was then engaged in besieging Sinan’s mountain fortress. Sinan left a dagger on Saladdin’s pillow along with a letter—and then vanished again. Whatever Sinan’s means, occult or natural, Saladdin raised the siege the next day and decamped-so much is recorded as sober fact.^[47]

To the “Five Pillars” of Sunni Islam (prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, tithe, and profession of belief) Shiite Islam adds a sixth: Social Justice. As the perennial opposition, Shiism has developed an incisive critique of the State, its usurpation of right, its oppressiveness, its tendency toward corruption, its “unholy” economic practices, its intolerance, etc. In openly revolutionary Shiism the demand for social justice takes truly radical forms. Here the mysticism of the Imam-of-one’s-own-being is exteriorized, so to speak, as a kind of collective messianism or eschatology of revolt. Just as the “Inner Light” Protestants of 17th century England arrived at the political position of the Levellers, the Diggers, or the Ranters, so too the revolutionary Shiites developed doctrines of mystical experience into theories of social revolution. The late Dr. Ali Shariati (probably martyred by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police) developed a system of Shiite Socialism based on the idea that the Imamate devolves upon the people as a whole. Traditional strictures on usury and unfair dealing were evolved by Shariati into a socialism of believers. His followers, the Mujahedeen, are persecuted today by the heirs of Khomeini—who believe that power rests with the ‘ulema—just as Shariati was persecuted by a State that believed power belonged to the saltanat or rule of kings.

The existence of the “perfect state” of classical Shiism, according to the orthodox doctrine of the rule of the Mahdi or “Hidden Imam” at the end of Time, i.e., outside Time, also implies that it is outside Space as well—that it is literally no-where (“Nakojabad”, the realm of Nowhere, or No-Place-Place, as the Illuminationist philosopher Suhravardi the “Murdered One” put it)—that it is u-topos and eu-topos, i.e., “Utopia”. Here we might begin to wonder about the possibility of a coincidence involving the shamanic trace and the utopian trace. If the threads are tangled we may find a way to follow them towards an unexpected pattern. For example, we could move from the shamanic trace in the utopia of revolutionary Shiite socialism, to the shamanic trace in the “Utopian Socialism” of 19th century Europe. In following this shamano-utopian trajectory we might pause over the figure of Robert Owen, who devoted the latter part of his life to an obsession with Spiritualism (surely a kind of urban shamanism as necromancy); or St.-Simon, whose followers founded a religion and vanished into the mysterious Orient in search of the Female Messiah. But of all the Utopian Socialists we should feel most drawn to Charles Fourier.^[48]

8. Nineteenth Century Escapism

Few people actually read Fourier nowadays. He is known mostly through one or two mild rebukes by Marx and some faint praise from Engels, or in severely bowdlerized anthologies like that of Charles Gide. To read Fourier in actual whole huge pieces (one can scarcely speak of such monsters as mere “books”) is to share a pleasure with A. Breton, for example, who recognized in Fourier a fellow revolutionary surrealist. Fourier’s political admirers tend to censor out his obsessions with bizarre sex, gourmet food, High Magic, and the most original visionary-hermetic cosmology of the 19th century. Elsewhere in this book I’ve dealt at some length with precisely these aspects of Fourier’s thought in an attempt to redress the balance and visualize Fourier as a whole, and not merely as a “precursor” of Scientific Socialism or the cooperative movement. His politics in fact cannot really be understood without a grasp of his cosmology, theory of Analogies, numerological mysticism, or hermetic illuminism. Here, however, I would like to concentrate not on Fourier’s own self-created uniqueness, but on his relation with a whole milieu and tradition. I have already referred to this tendency or movement as the “Hermetic Left”. It is here above all that we will find our “Clastrian machine” at work, combining shamanism, economic radicalism, and revolutionary strategy, into a system devoted (and devoted unstintedly!) to autonomy and pleasure.

When Fourier’s first works appeared in the early 1800s, they were greeted rapturously by certain Illuminés of France. They perceived him as one of their own, not just for his interesting discussion of “Androgynous Freemasonry” but for his entire system, which appeared closely related to their own and yet excitingly new. But Fourier was a relatively badly-educated man and constructed his system not on references to accepted knowledge (however arcane) but on “absolute doubt” and his own wild inspiration. He never betrayed any deep knowledge of Hermeticism and it is quite possible he developed his version of it almost entirely out of his own imagination.

The key to Fourier’s system is the notion that the whole universe is alive. This means that stars and planets are living sentient beings—and moreover, sexual beings. They “copulate” by means of aromal rays beamed through space from celestial body to celestial body. (Aromal rays are apparently polarized perfumes, as lasers are polarized light.) Since everything is alive and part of a single multiverse of life (life on countless planets, even on stars), then everything is related to everything in a complex system of categories that Fourier called “Analogies”. (One such category might contain, say, the Sun, the lion, the diamond, the color gold, frankincense, certain numbers, certain sexual acts, etc., etc.) The force that holds this complexity together is “Passion” or desire. Things are attracted erotically to things in their own “Series” of analogous forms. The primordial crisis for Fourier is that “Civilization” has literally knocked Earth “out of its orbit” in the universal complex or web of Aromal Passions. Unfructified by the exudation of the living stars, our world perishes for want of realization. Civilization can be cured only if the Passions are liberated. Desire is the only possible cohesive factor for social becoming. Without the free movement of desire, there can be no justice.

Now except for certain completely original touches (such as the “Aromal Rays”) this doctrine matches point by point the cosmological teachings of Hermeticism. That the universe is a living being or Macrocosm, that Earth is alive and “holy”, that the Sun is the “god of the world”, that stars are alive and bathe the Earth in astral influences—all this is sound hermetic opinion. That desire or passionate love is the force that moves the universe was taught by figures as diverse as Hesiod, Avicenna, Pico della Mirandola, and Jakob Boehme. That sexuality is sacred and can be channeled for spiritual ends was taught by Renaissance hermeticists and alchemists, sufis, tantrik hindus, Dionysian pagans and neo-platonists. For “Civilization” read “false consciousness”, and Fourier can be seen as an occult theorist in the grand old tradition of the Hermetic Left.

This tradition traces itself back to remotest antiquity—in fact to that Saturnian time depicted so beautifully in hermetic Emblem-books such as the Hypnerotomachia or the Atalanta Fugiens.^[49] In fact on some level we are prepared to accept an “origin” for this movement in the deepest Paleolithic, since we regard the Hermetic Left as a repository of the energies of the “Clastrian machine” in history. But the Hermeticists’ own explanation of the “transmission” of ancient wisdom—from mythical sages and pseudepigriphal books—interests us only as a symbol of something that persists and re-appears, no matter how “impurely”, and always with the same intentions and intensity. For the purposes of the present discussion we could begin with Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who was burned at the stake in Rome as a martyr to his cause. He believed in multiple inhabited worlds, a sun-centered planetary system, a round earth that was a living being, a system of magical correspondences or “analogies”, religious tolerance, and other radical and heretical notions. Bruno, who for some time even acted as a political agent against Vatican interests in England,^[50] left a legacy of occult resistance to power. The Rosicrucian Manifestoes of the early 1600s represent (as F. Yates demonstrated)^[51] a politique hermetique of resistance to Catholic and Protestant dogmatism in the name of tolerance and a universalization of direct spiritual experience by occult means. The Family of Love and other radical Protestant sects before and during the English Revolution were influenced by Hermeticism, Boehme, and Bruno. John Toland (d. 1724), radical freethinker, rogue Mason, Whig spy and propagandist, and self-proclaimed Celtic Druid, modeled his life on Bruno’s quite consciously.^[52] Leaving aside the vast influence of Masonry on revolutionary politics in 18th century America and Europe as too dark and vexed a subject, we could, however, mention the poet and artist William Blake, revolutionary, friend of Thomas Paine, visionary, hermeticist, and also a self-proclaimed Druid. Blake’s life overlapped with that of Fourier.

If we have learned to associate ceremonial magic with right-wing politics thanks to such figures as W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, we should learn to be more careful in our categorical assumptions. The idea of “tradition” was only hi-jacked by the Right in very recent times (and thanks in part to such “traditionalists” as Guénon, Evola, Jung, Eliade, or T. S. Eliot). Formerly the Left had its tradition as well, the “Good Old Cause” that combined unmediated autonomy and unmediated spirituality. While the traditionalist Right veers toward a dualism of good and evil, spirit and body, hierarchy and separation, the Hermetic Left emphasizes “ancient rights and customs” of freedom, equality, justice-and bodily pleasure (e.g., Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell). The Left is “radical monist”, Saturnian and Dionysian; the Right is “Gnostic”, authoritarian and Apollonian. Naturally these terms and categories get, mingled and confused, combined and recombined, in an excessive exfoliation of the strangest hybrids and freaks. The Right has its mystical revolutionaries, the Left has its Gnostic Dualists. But as generalizations or ideal models I believe that the rival traditions can be clearly distinguished. In this sense there exists a clear line of “transmission” between Bruno and Fourier—whether the latter had even heard of the former or not! The whole point of the history of ideas is that it is precisely not a history of detailed and documentable “influences” but of ideas that are “in the air” and “handed down” (from who-knows-where?)—a history of “diffusions”, or even of disappearances and re-appearances. This is what caused the shock of recognition that greeted Fourier’s work in certain (admittedly minuscule) circles of French occultists:—not his footnotes, but his “brilliance”. The fact that some of these occultists were already socialists added to their excitement over Fourier’s new synthesis.

One French occultist radical was the famous Abbé Constant, a.k.a. Eliphas Levi, who began as a deftocked priest and revolutionary agitator, moved on into journalism, and ended with the reputation of world’s leading expert in ceremonial magic. I have no evidence that he took an interest in Fourier—but his secretary certainly did. This was the remarkable Flora Tristan, mystic, active Fourieriste, pioneer feminist (Fourier may have invented the word “feminism”), and champion of Labor—a hermetic heroine little-remembered outside France today.^[53] Another famous radical magus was the poet Gérard de Nerval, who published some pieces in Fourierist magazines, including a long historical study of 19th-century radical French occultists, which someone ought to translate.^[54] His wonderful oriental tales, based on his adventurous travels, introduced some bits of genuine Sufi and Ismaili lore to his many readers—including highly dramatized accounts of magic and hashish.

The reader may object at this point that the “Shamanic trace” has become attenuated to the point of disappearance. The Hermetic tradition held no consciousness of shamanism, and traced itself back to religious models (such as ancient Egypt) that were anything but non-authoritarian! But this is not really entirely the case. Authentic information about shamanism was widespread in 18th-century Europe, the result of centuries of research in the New World and Russia. As Gloria Flaherty demonstrates in Shamanism in the Eighteenth Century, this information had a profound effect on philosophy, religion, the arts, etc.^[55] Early freethinkers seized on examples of “good” shamanism to emphasize that Christianity had no monopoly on truth. This positive view of shamanism influenced the occultists (who were also frequently freethinkers):—they adopted some shamanic lore into their own on-going syncretic project. Veneration was expressed for ancient Norse and Celtic shamans, who were understood to have been just like the medicine-men or wizards of 18th century America or Siberia. By Fourier’s time (thanks largely to Rousseau) the image of the “primitive” as natural humanity was commonplace in French culture and Europe in general. Fourier is already aware, for example, of what M. Sahlins would later call the “Aphrodisian” nature of Polynesian society (as opposed to the Dionysian/Apollonian split in Western culture);^[56] Fourier had nothing but praise for the erotic freedom enjoyed by such “savages”. Flaherty traces similar attitudes in Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau, Goethe’s Faust, and Mozart’s Masonic Magic Flute. Shamanism made a “hit” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe because the underground tradition of the Hermetic Left had prepared armchair travelers to understand and sympathize with spirituality as direct experience.

For Fourier the most direct expression of the cosmic plan for humanity was sexual pleasure. Unlike the paltry adherents of “Free Love” he did not limit sexual “health” to married heterosexuality. On the contrary, he banned marriage and permitted every sex “mania” from pederasty to flagellation (consensual, of course). Just as production could only organize itself by the complete liberation of all to choose “Attractive Labor” at will, so too society itself could not reach its true potential unless all desire were free. For Fourier sexuality sometimes takes on an orgiastic dimension not altogether different from de Sade’s, but without the cruelty (which resulted from displaced Passion, according to Fourier). Such institutions as a utopian Church of Love (and Fourier’s “Androgynous Masonry”) hover on the brink of outright sex-magic. Fourier would have agreed with any pagan peasant that it was “good for the crops”—after all, it was good for the entire universe! And in the Harmonial system, as outlined in his amazing charts of universal history, an unbroken line connects the aphrodisian mysteries of Tahitian shamanism and the great feasts and Love Congresses (all the foot-fetishists in the world congregate at Constantinople!) and the spontaneous erotic rituals of the Phalansteries. Fourier proposes a kind of occidental Tantra, a sophisticated version of the “original innocence” and polymorphous perversity of primordial humanity. Fourier does not call for a return to Saturnian time, but rather for its re-appearance on a higher plane, a further turn of the spiral. The magic power (there’s no other term for it) generated by Eros at this pitch of intensity will transform the world. The sea will turn to lemonade Gust as in the American hobo-utopia song of “Big Rock Candy Mountain”);^[57] people will live to 144 and grow tails with an extra hand and eye at the tip. On three hours of sleep and thirty meals a day, huge erotic “armies” will transform Earth simply in an excess of creative energy, changing the climate, making contact with other planets. To believe that God wishes for anything less attractive than this future is to believe that God is unjust or ungenerous, quod absurdum est, q.e.d. Fourier’s logic was impeccable.

Fourier’s magnum opus manuscript on sexuality, Le Nouveau monde amoreux, remained prudishly unpublished after his death—and appeared only in 1967,^[58] just in time for the events of May 1968, when rebels scrawled “All Power to the Imagination” on the walls of Paris. The Surrealists, who cherished every fragment of primitive and shamanic power—and who could understand a “Clastrian machine” if anyone can!—surely might have rejoiced at the synchronicity of these events. This is the kind of “historical link” our search affords us. The links are real, but perhaps largely in the Mundus Imaginalis—or only in the dreams of mad poets. In the end perhaps this is where the “Clastrian machine” finds its terminal incarnation, immortal because “unreal”. Are we reduced to seeking it out only in old books? Or does it still operate in the world of everyday life? In Surrealist terms this amounts to asking whether everyday life can still be penetrated by the marvelous. It is a very serious question.

9. The Hieroglyphic Map

The problem with Hermeticism, as loan Couliano pointed out,^[59] is that all its best techniques have been appropriated: first by “orthodox” science in the persons of Bacon, Newton, and other Royal Society types; then by the State (modern “intelligence” and cryptography were developed by John Dee, the original “007”, on behalf of Walsingham—Bruno worked for this outfit); then by Capitalism (the religious origin of money makes it a perfect subject for Gnostic speculation); and finally by the media. Couliano discusses advertising, PR, disinformation and brainwashing (by erotically-charged emblematic imagery) but he could have extended the analysis, for instance, to television and the internet as well. To understand how “Spectacle” and “simulation” work so effectively it is necessary to understand them as hermetic processes, or hermetic “perversions” in the literal sense of turning-aside-from-the-correct-path. Hermeticism was meant as an enchantment into liberation, since each adept would control the hermetic powers—not be controlled by them. In effect it was also a disenchantment, a throwing-off of conditioning, received opinion, “consensus hallucination”, false consciousness, and the “bad trance” of mere quotidian Civilization. Above all, it was an auto-co-divinization of humanity and nature-a process of mutual exaltation of matter and spirit. But once these techniques are appropriated by the power of separation and hierarchy, they “flip” or turn into their exact opposites. Since the individual no longer controls the powers but is controlled by them, they comprise an enchantment into alienation:—they are used to construct media that denigrate and disenchant the world of presence and difference, and exalt the world of absence and sameness. Nature and self are identified only to be denied full reality, since they are linked merely by their insignificance in the face of the monopoly of meaning epitomized by the commodity, or by money itself. Civilization is a trance-like state, and its content is bad consciousness.

Couliano’s death is a case in point. Thanks to his hermetic analysis of media he was able to predict the course of events in his native Romania in 1989-1991, where television was used to simulate a revolution. Under the sign of freedom the Romanian regime was overthrown and replaced by the same regime (minus the dictator and his wife), and the world was enchanted by the televised imagery of “liberation”. Reality was created through media, “action-at-a-distance”; the peoples’ desires were completely recuperated by Securitate, the secret police—or, if you like, by black magic. Couliano spoke too boldly from America, not really believing he could be touched and was martyred by a Romanian agent who shot him in the men’s room of his department at the University of Chicago, an action with traces of “ritual murder” clinging to it, a mystery that remains “unsolved”. Hermeticism is a double-edged sword.^[60]

The question is then: what becomes of the “Clastrian machine” when its own techniques and even its goals (so to speak) are subverted, appropriated, and turned against it?

As an example we might consider television and the internet, soon to meld and merge and become one vast and “final” medium that will enclose every last open field of discourse, and become the moderator and content of every dialogue. The sense of total despair that might overcome anyone who applied a “hermetic analysis” to this situation can only be diverted by an equally immense boredom. Such ennui and anomie provide masks for an anger that can have no object (or so it appears) other than “reality” itself—since reality is now exclusively that which appears in mediation. In the past few years (mostly since around 1989-91) many people have begun to speak of a certain encroaching numbness, a feeling that “nothing is happening,” or that “nothing will make any difference anyway.” In America and Europe, “activism” has itself virtually retreated into mediation, to such an extent that some people equate an appearance on the World Wide Web with political action, just as the activists of the 1960s were seduced by their “fifteen seconds of fame” on television. Out of 600 channels—the bright promise of the near future—surely one or two can be devoted to “revolution”, and a few more to other “alternate life-styles”. The old internet of techno-anarchy and “free information” will become just another channel on WWWTV, a kind of slum where the poor old original hackers can still congregate and fritter away the empty hours, while the great virtual City of Cyberspace grows up around them, dwarfing their pitiful huts and making a mockery of their “culture”. The anthropologists are probably already lining up for grants to study this quaint survival; affairs move quickly when both time and space have been abolished.

The Gulf War was the first signal of the new moral sloth. A few would-be antiwar protesters watched in stunned amazement (and fear) as millions of Americans apparently went into deep hypnosis in front of CNN and the networks—literally glassy-eyed. Bush said there was no “peace movement” against this war, which would forever wipe out the shame of our (don’t say the word!) defeat in Vietnam, and he was correct. Since the 60s a “peace movement” is something that appears in the media, and in 1991 no such appearance occurred. As 200,000 Iraqis died, and the USA’s own troops were infected with experimental drugs and uranium-depleted weaponry, the whole thing appeared as pure simulation. Baudrillard was right to say that the Gulf War “never took place,” and the proof came with the end of “Desert Storm” (the mini-series). The trance wore off, everyone snapped out of it, looked around, realized that all was lost—and immediately went back to sleep and voted for Clinton. The Gulf War was … meaningless. The “Hitler” Saddam Hussein is still in power and will probably end up back on the “most favored” list. The heroic Kuwaiti royal family… what happened to them anyway? Back in power, I suppose. The price of oil went up, or stabilized, or destabilized—according to plan, no doubt. A few “deranged veterans” were added to the rolls of those unfortunate and marginalized Americans whose slumber has been permanently disturbed by Late Capitalism. And that was it.

The War on Drugs is another fine example of hermeticism at work in the New World Order. Just as addiction itself is a kind of shamanism gone bad, so the sham assault on addiction is heavily compromised with the occult. The roots of this “crisis” go back to the CIA’s involvement in LSD research, in which they sought the holy grail of Intelligence, a magic elixir that would allow perfect control. (Needless to say the Renaissance mages and their occultist heirs had already done this research long ago.) Intelligence had been involved in heroin since at least 1945 and the post-WWII alliance with organized crime. Huge profits were made in Vietnam and the “Golden Triangle”, allowing for vast bureaucratic expansion. The spectacular campaign against marijuana in the 1930s was extended to other drugs because illegality made the trade more lucrative. Soon entire “dark” operations were being funded on heroin and cocaine. The pseudo-War on Drugs meanwhile created a vast boom in “security”, including private police (one out of every three armed police in the US is now private), private prisons, captive slave labor (chain gangs, etc.—actually a gigantic money-spinner, monopolized by a private company called UNICORP), contracts for hundreds of new prisons, whole new police and bureaucratic structures, jobs, prosperity for all. So what if we have the largest per capita prison population in the world, with half a million inside for marijuana alone? The War on Drugs is America’s number one business. Drugs will never be “legalized”, and especially not by a liberal stooge for the multinationals like Clinton. Drugs cannot be legalized because, as Malcolm Mclaren (I believe) once said, “Drugs are popular because only drugs can make you feel like the people in TV ads seem to feel.” In other words drugs, especially addictive drugs, are the perfect commodity. With heroin cheap and legal, who would buy soap-powder and soft drinks with their spurious claims to authentic ecstasy, their meager and pitiful “utopian trace”? As for psychotropic drugs such as hemp or the hallucinogens, inasmuch as they can be experienced under the proper conditions as “efficacious sacraments”, means of acquiring direct experience of non-ordinary consciousness, they must always remain suspect to a psychic regime based on total mediation and alienation. The War on Drugs as a pure simulation within the media has proven to be an admirable means of controlling the drifting middle class through terror, just as the rootless underclass is controlled through violence. Drug-imagery, with its shamanic and hermetic “load” of memes, makes an ideal content for the forms of media; television itself is a kind of fifth-rate heroin-the kind that prevents junk-sickness but never gets you “off”—never “anywhere—so long as it is out of this world.” When all pleasure and festivity have been perfectly mediated; when autonomy means the freedom to choose among 600 channels; when the Gift can no longer free itself from the market of exchange; when even violence has been taken “away into representation” and alienated from its “Clastrian” function; when nature has vanished into bioengineering, in which the human itself becomes its own commodity;-what then happens to our hermetic dialectic of re-enchantment? How does “urban shamanism” survive the compacting of all dimensions into the terminal flatness of virtuality? The screen, the omnipresent screen—it reminds one of nothing so much as Dr. Dee and his shady assistant Ned Kelly, peering into the sinister “obsidian mirror” wherein the angelic alphabet would appear. And it works! Cannot the media attain to the voice of angels? Why not?—since if any “real” angels exist outside that “heaven of glass”, they are silent-like God, or nature. So why should we too not be silent? The screen will speak for us—and for our boredom.

The triumph of the screen is “of one nature” (to use theological language) with the triumph of Capital itself. Since 1989-91 and the collapse of Communism, the grand movement of the Social has come to an end. The “End of History” so touted by neo-liberal ideology is already a done deal. Stalinism took everything down with it in a peevish Ragnarok of Leftish impotency, and left nothing—not even “Capitalism”—nothing but Capital itself as power on Earth. The Global Market is not driven by ideology but by its own totalitarian logic, the bottom line of eternal growth-and that which is eternal has no history. Released from its moorings in the mire of mere production, Capital has soared aloft into a numisphere (a numinous and numismatic realm) of pure transcendence. Over 90% of all existing money has no relation to any other form of wealth, but only to itself (currency exchange, arbitrage, speculation in debt, etc.), and circulates in a free sphere above Earth, never manifesting as cash or even as credit. Purely spiritual, and yet all-powerful in the material realm, money has achieved what God herself could never manage. Fewer than 400 people “control” half the money in this world-how can one speak any more of a “ruling class”? The CEO is a perfectly replaceable part—a matter of mere “wetware”, the human as prosthesis of the machine. Money itself makes all the decisions. There is nothing left for anyone to do. Perhaps a “bubble” stretched so thin as the numisphere will one day burst in that “final crisis” so often predicted by Marx, and so often postponed. But there will be no "working class" waiting in the wings for a smooth take-over of the means of production. Not in America or Europe anyway. The götterdämmerung of Capital would simply destroy the “West”, because there is no viable alternative to the rule of Capital. And the “West” nowadays includes all the zones of security (e.g., the “Pacific Rim”), all zones of comfort, health, education, jobs, etc.-and excludes only the zones of depletion, where life is presumed to be a matter of mere survival, not of “expression” or realization. On the one hand you can choose capitulation to Capital (if you’re lucky); on the other hand, you can choose opposition—and defeat. No wonder it feels like “nothing’s happening.” To allow oneself to feel what is happening is an impossible burden, a tragedy without katharsis, a labyrinth where every path leads to the minotaur—including the path we have marked with thread.

Now in such a situation, what could we expect of the “Clastrian machine”? For what could we hope (to use E. Bloch’s term) from such a primitive device, and moreover a device long since looted of its valuable parts? To speak of a re-appearance now—wouldn’t that be mere whistling in the graveyard? or a serious lapse in taste and good manners? Ethnography (which after all is what this text is supposed to concern) deals with the disappearing Other-the primitive, the “world we have lost”, the verge of extinction. How can this “machine” we have concocted (and only on paper to be sure) possess any relevance to our condition? Knowledge (or “data” as it’s usually called) may have value in and for itself—but knowledge is neither autonomy nor pleasure and as such may function only as another burden, another over-determined source of bitterness or boredom. We have been disenchanted of the “necessary illusion” (to quote Nietzsche) that some transcendent power fuels the device of our resistance. We have been “overcome”; we are the “last” humans.

This pessimism (emanating from such authors as the ex-fascist Cioran or the excommunist Baudrillard)—this all-too-fashionable post-modern pessimism—is it a critique of the world it appears to oppose, or merely a symptom? In other words, are we actually to believe in the image of the world created by Capital, in which alienation and hopelessness are the just desserts of those who cannot share in the “health of the Market”? Are we to believe philosophy when it tells us it has been defeated and absorbed into the ecstasy of pure speed and the disembodiment of virtuality? Are we to accept without question the vanishment of the primitive, of nature, of the human itself? It’s not a matter of “protest” nor the triviality of resentment; no one will care for our mere lamentation. Have we any evidence to the contrary?

In Orwell’s 1984 the little rooms of the workers are overseen by panopticonographic screens which broadcast, brainwash and simultaneously snoop on every citizen of the State; only one small corner of Winston Smith’s room escapes the beam/gaze of this pyramidal Eye. It is that corner we must now set out to explore.

Is the corner really so small? Metaphorically perhaps. But geographically perhaps not. In one corner of the corner, actual rebellion has broken out. If the movement of the Social is dead, the Zapatistas of Chiapas must represent either the last dying embers of the phoenix’s pyre, or else the first tenuous spark of its rebirth. Owing nothing to the “historical” Revolution, which certainly imploded in 1989-91, three years before the Zapatista uprising, the philosophers of the EZLN have developed a complete critique of global neo-liberalism’s meaning for the former “Third World” (how can there be a Third World when there is no second world?). The communiques of Subcommandante Marcos and other EZLN writers, which have certainly influenced my thinking in this essay, were developed in conjunction with the Mayan elders of the region, many of them practicing shamans.^[61] In many ways the Zapatista uprising has been a model demonstration of what we’ve called the “Clastrian machine” functioning in the “real world” of production, geography, and war. The goals of the uprising were defined as “empirical freedoms,” meaning effective autonomy, freedom from need (“In need freedom remains latent,” as Col. Qadaffi puts it), freedom from disease and induced ignorance, freedom to be different (to be Mayan). Ideological or merely political freedom-which is quite capable of co-existing with Capital of course—holds much less interest for these romantic pragmatists. Hence the renewed resonance of the old anarchist slogan “Tierra y Libertad!”—precisely at the moment when Earth and autonomy were supposed to go gently into the long good-night of the End of History. In particular, at the moment when Capital announces its unification of reality—the mall-ing and McDisneyfication of absolutely everything—the single world so long desired by Enlightenment Rationalism—just at the very triumphalist instant of Capital’s psychic and aesthetic hegemony of separation and sameness-the very worst “empirical” claim made by the EZLN, the most shocking and atavistic offense against the transparent daylight of “Market values” comes to light:—the claim to the right to be different, to be Mayan. Not to be “multi-cultural”. Not to be a folkloristic survival. But to be…primitive. In other words, from a certain point of view, the Zapatista uprising is a revolutionary reversion. Thus it meets our criteria. It is a working model of the “Clastrian machine”. So far (January 1997) it even looks mildly successful.

The remnants of the Left, which believed in Enlightenment Rationalism even more sincerely than the Capitalists, will no doubt find this reversionism of the EZLN difficult to accept. Homosexuals, women, oppressed minorities and the like are allowed to have “identities” only on condition that consciousness itself be homogenous and transparent. Tribalism is not progressive. Over-concern with the “sacredness” of Earth is incompatible with rational goals of economic growth. Shamanism is superstitious nonsense.

All this proves is that the Left is as moribund as the Right. The fact is that in opposition to Capital, every unassimilable difference must be considered potentially revolutionary. Some differences may result in mere reaction and “Conservative Revolution”, while others—non-hegemonic particularities—will lead to the kind of revolt we can appreciate, such as Zapatismo! The difference between differences is not to be measured so much in ideological terms but on an empirical basis. The key to judgment is that consciousness is not homogenous (never was, never will be), and that the hegemonic claims of Capital in this respect are illusory—just as our “hermetic critique” would lead us to expect. In fact the very success of Capital’s mediation is a function of its manipulation of consciousness, which is thereby shown to have an inner structure based on differentiation. That is: the fifth-rate trance state of commodity fetishism is no more to be identified with Enlightenment Rationality than with shamanic enthusiasmos. The supposed sameness of Capitalist consciousness is no more than a mask for its fragmentation and alienation. Revolutionary difference by contrast finds its own variegated cohesiveness—or “unity” if you like—on the basis of presence, i.e. the overcoming of separation. At such a feast, not even rationality need be turned away. (In fact, some real Enlightenment might be quite refreshing.)

We must doubt whether the “free peasant” aspect of Zapatismo can be adapted to the urban (or even post-urban) structure of America and Europe. It is true, however, that the former “developed world” has itself begun to undergo a “proletarianization of the zones” or the creation of “zones of depletion” within its own geographical and political space. The historic “deals” which bound the North’s working class to Capital’s interests since 1917 or 1945 have been revoked, since Capital no longer needs any allies in the battle against the Evil Empire. Labor finds itself plunged back toward the past; its vertiginous dégringolade has taken it down to at least 1886 or so, if not 1830. Migratory Capital can turn your neighborhood into a bit of Africa or Indonesia, just by going somewhere else—all according to “Market values”. Even in the North the gap between rich and poor spreads at a dizzying rate:—your class, your profession, your “sexual preference”, your attitude might be next in line for shoving over the edge. There may yet be some scope for “urban Zapatismo” even in the midst of our world of “plenty”. There is no doubt, however, that opposition to Capital in our part of the globe is at present theoretical and nugatory at best; no one ever starts a violent revolution out of mere boredom.

But even if the thoughts of the Mayan Elders remain for us no more than distant dreams, we should still derive some inspiration from the fact that the “Clastrian machine” can function at all in this world where Capital has supposedly had the last word. In fact I would offer as evidence the entire world neo-shamanic movement, by which I mean not merely the antics of the New Agers (which range from profound to suspect to silly to sheer commodity hype) but also the definite revival of shamanism among native peoples, including their urban descendants, in the New World, Siberia, and Africa.

I will go farther and predict that the “Clastrian machine” will exercise a profound influence on the structure of the opposition to Capital that must emerge in the very near future. As the 19th century ideologies of rationalist revolution have been discredited, leading to a crisis in the movement of the Social so severe as to amount to disappearance, I suspect that the old half-forgotten radicalism of “rights and customs” may re-appear in new forms of manifestation and expression. The articulated but organically complex parts of the “machine” we have identified will be recognizable in their new guises.

On the economic level, the “Clastrian machine” always opposes exchange and supports redistribution—but reserves its unqualified approval only for reciprocity. The machine, which is always shaky in its ideology (since it essentially has none) will probably not mount a rational critique of money—and this vagueness may prove to its great disadvantage. But one thing is “perfectly clear” (as Nixon used to say)—that the “Clastrian machine” of the new millennium will attack exchange itself, headlong and violently, in the name of the right of reciprocity and the morality of generosity. And it will settle for no less than redistribution (probably in some rough and empirical form of socialism).

In the realm of polemology (=war), a crisis occurred in 1945 with the realization that one can possess too much fire power. Instead of dealing with this problem in a logical way, the world military plunged deeper into the mire in a huge game of bluff based on “MAD” (mutual assured destruction). It was discovered that pure war (war devoid of actual conflict) was an excellent means of staving off the perennial crisis of over-production. The final monstrosity was the “Star Wars” scenario, probably the biggest boondoggle in the entire history of war—and an ongoing scandal. But due to the largely self-inflicted collapse of Communism (almost a suicide, really) the “West” was left suddenly devoid of any enemy—just as predicted by the notorious forgery Report from Iron Mountain so many years ago:—the “crisis of peace”. It seems that the “Clastrian machine” finds an opening here for its primitive tactic of war as the centrifugalization of power rather than its accumulation. The EZLN resorted to violence to expel power from its zone, not to seize it for themselves. And they did so knowing that the Mexican government would find it politically impossible to crush the revolt with superior firepower (or with US firepower), just as the US found it impossible to “nuke” Vietnam “back to the Stone Age”. In North America and Europe, of course, such political conditions are absent, and all violence—whether spontaneous or deliberate—can be instantly suppressed and recuperated (as “crime” or “terrorism” for example). But this situation could change. Zones of depletion within or between the borders of “developed nations” can be controlled militarily only at great political expense to the State or regime in power. It may be that the nations will have to give up control of the zones to the privatized armies of the zaibatzus—but of course, Capital much prefers to leave such unpleasant tasks of discipline to the State; and besides, there are no profits to be made in the zones of depletion. In effect, vacua of power may appear in the zones. Organized crime (or even humanitarian NGOs) may attempt to replace the State—but again, not without the promise of gain or power. At this point tactics of violence might begin to make some sense.

Whatever form the “Clastrian machine” takes, display of the shamanic trace is always its most obvious trait. It is this sign for example that differentiates Zapatismo from all the “vulgar materialist” revolutionary forms of the 19th and 20th centuries. (In other respects, Zapatismo owes a great deal to those systems, especially anarchism.) This visionary aspect of the machine is the most difficult part for heirs of the Enlightenment to grasp or respect. A stumbling-block...a scandal. It seems so...anthropological, so uncivilized. And “urban shamanism” is even worse: a hodgepodge of nostalgia, appropriation, and charlatanry. And yet somehow it seems that the “Clastrian machine” cannot operate or even survive without at least a trace of shamanism. I don’t need to protest that every branch of modern thought, from quantum mechanics to existentialism, has tended to heap doubt upon the shaky edifice of rationalism—and yet we treat it like the weather, always complaining and never doing anything about it. If we once felt the courage, not to plunge into some hideous maw of occult chaos, but to allow the emergence of a rationality of the marvelous, then we might be able to come to terms with the shamanic trace. I don’t know exactly what a rationality of the marvelous would consist of, but I suppose it to be something like the Surrealists’ penetration of everyday life by the marvelous. And I would maintain, without knowing what it is, that it happens every day—especially to those who work at a certain kind of openness. And I would also claim that everyone who reads this text already knows and has always known and knows at every moment (though not necessarily “consciously”) exactly and precisely what this “marvelous” is and how it enters into the rational and everyday life of body and mind. And on that wordless knowledge we must rest our case.

New York City
January 18, 1997

Bibliography

Adas, Michael (1979) Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Amir-Moezzi, M. A. (1994) The Divine Guide in Early Shi’ism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam, trans. D. Streight. Albany, NY: SUNY Press

Angell, Norman (1929) The Story of Money. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Anton, Ted (1996) Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press

Arjomand, Said Amir (1984) The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shi’ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Barclay, Harold (1982/1990) People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy. London: Kahn and Averill

Bataille, Georges (1988) The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. I Consumption, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books

Beecher, Jonathan (1986) Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley: University of California Press

Bossy, John (1991) Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair. New Haven: Yale University Press

Chu, Yuan (1973) The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China, trans. and ed. Arthur Waley. San Francisco: City Lights Books

Clastres, Helene (1995) The Land-Without-Evil: Tupi-Guarani Prophetism, trans. J. Grenez Brovender. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press

Clastres, Pierre (1977) Society against the State: the Leader as Servant and the Humane Uses of Power Among the Indians of the Americas, trans. R. Hurley with A. Stein. New York: Mole Editions, Urizen Books

—(1994) The Archaeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Semiotext(e)

Cohn, Norman (1970) The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Maurice Temple Smith

Corbin, H. (1977) Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean to Shi’ite Iran, trans. N. Pearson. Princeton: Princeton University Press

—(1978) Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, trans. N. Pearson. Boulder, CO: Shambhala

Couliano, Ioan (1987) Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. M. Cook. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Daftary, Farhad (1990) The Isma’ilis: Their History and Doctrines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Dalton, G., ed. (1968) Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi. Boston: Beacon Press

Davis, Robert C. (1994) The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late Renaissance Venice. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press

Desmonde, William (1962) Magic, Myth, and Money: The Origin of Money in Religious Ritual. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe

Dumezil, Georges (1969) Heur et malheur du guerrier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

EZLN (1994) Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia

Fadiman, Jeffrey A. (1982) An Oral History of Tribal Warfare: The Meru of Mt. Kenya. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press

Finlay, M. I. (1985) The Ancient Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press

Firas, Abu (1877) Fasl man al-Laft aI-sharif, in S. Guyard, “Un Grand Maitre des Assassins au temps de Saladin,” Journal Asiatique 7/9

Flaherty, Gloria (1992) Shamanism in the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Fourier, Charles (1967) Le Nouveau monde amoreaux, ed. Simone DeBout-Oleskiewicz. Paris: Editions Anthropos

Geddes, W. R. (1957) Nine Dyak Nights. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hamayon, R. N. in Thomas and Humphrey (1996), q. v.

Hobsbawn, Eric (1959) Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements. New York: W. W. Norton

Hurley, W. H. “The Late Woodland State: Effigy Mound Culture” in The Wisconsin Archaeologist 67:3-4

Joseph, Frank (1992) The Lost Pyramids of Rock Lake: Wisconsins Sunken Civilization. St. Paul, MN: Golden Press

The Journal of the Ancient Earthworks Society

Kim, Tae-gon, Mihály Hoppál et. al. (1995) Shamanism in Performing Arts. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó

Kingswan, Chuck (1990) Ho-Chunk History = A Glimpse: Notes to America = Word’s Straight From the Source’s Mouth = From the Ice Age to the Nuclear: Thoughts for All Ages. Self-published: RR 2, Box 384E, Neillsville WI 54456

Krader, Lawrence (1968) Formation of the State. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall

Lan, David (1985) Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. London: James Curry

Landauer, Gustav (1919/1978) On Socialism, trans. D. J. Parent. St. Louis: Telos Press

Lapham, Increase A. (1855) The Antiquities of Wisconsin as surveyed and described by I. A. Lapham on behalf of the American Antiquarian Society. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute

Lee, Richard B., and Irven Devore (1968) Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine Publishing Company

Le Goff, Jacques (1990) Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. P. Ranum. New York: Zone Books

Lewitsky, Anatole (1988) “Shamanism”, in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937-39, trans. B. Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Littleton, C. Scott (1966) The New Comparative Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press

MacNeill, E., ed. and trans. (1908) Duanaire Finn: The Book of the Lays of Fionn, Vol. I. London: Irish Text Society Vol. VII

Maier, Michael (1989) Atalanta Fugiens: An Edition of the Emblems, Fugues and Epigrams, trans. and ed. by Joscelyn Godwin. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks #22

Mair, Lucy (1962/1964) Primitive Government. Baltimore: Penguin Books

Mallam, R. Clark (1976) The Iowa effigy mound manifestation: an interpretive model. Iowa City: Office of the State Archaeologist, University of Iowa

—(1995) “Ideology from the Earth: Effigy Mounds in the Midwest” in Prehistoric Cultures of Iowa: A Brief Study. Harper’s Ferry, Iowa: Effigy Mounds National Monument

Martin, Joel W. (1991) Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press

Mauss, Marcel (1950/1980) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton

Merrifield, Ralph (1987) The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. New York: New Amsterdam Books

Mott, Wesley T., ed. (1996) Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press

Murphy, G., ed. and trans. (1933) Duanaire Finn, Vol. II. London: Irish Text Society Vol. XXVI-II

—(1953) Duanaire Finn, Vol. III. London: Irish Text Society Vol. XXVI-II

Nagy, Joseph Falaky (1985) The Wisdom of the Outlaw: The Boyhood Deeds of Finn in Gaelic Narrative Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press

de Nerval, Gérard (1832) Les Illuminés: récits et portraits. [Cover title: Les Illuminés, ou, les précurseurs du socialisme] Paris: V. Lecou

Ó Maitiú, Séamas (1995) The Humours of Donnybrook: Dublin’s Famous Fair and its Suppression. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, Maynooth Series in Local History No. 4

Patterson, Nerys Thomas (1994) Cattle-lords and Clansmen: The Social Structure of Early Ireland. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press

Proudhon, P.-J. (1888) System of Economic Contradiction, or, the Philosophy of Misery, Vol. I, trans. Benj. R. Tucker. Boston: Benj. R. Tucker

Rammel, Hal (1990) Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias. Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Sachedina, A. A. (1981) Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the Mahdi in Twelver Shi’ism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press

Sahlins, Marshall (1972) Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton

—(1985) Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Santino, Jack, ed. (1994) Halloween and other festivals of death and life. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press

Schmandt-Besserat, Denise (1992) Before Writing. Vol. I: From Counting to Cuneiform. Austin: University of Texas Press

Shell, Marc (1982) Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press

Silverberg, R. (1968) Mound Builders of Ancient America:— The Archaeology of a Myth. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society

Taussig, Michael (1980) The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

—(1987) Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

—(1997) The Magic of the State. New York and London: Routledge

Tawney, R. H. (1952) Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Thomas, N. and C. Humphrey (1996) Shamanism, History and the State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

Thompson, E. P. (1993) Customs in Common. New York: The New Press

Thrump, Sylvia L., ed. (1970) Millenial Dreams in Action: Studies in Revolutionary Religious Movements. New York: Schocken Books

Tristan, Flora (1983) The Worker’s Union, trans. Beverly Livingston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Wafer, Jim (1991) The Taste of Blood: Spirit Possession in Brazilian Candomblé. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press

Waldman, Anne and Andrew Schelling, eds. (1994) Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press

Weber, Max (1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

Wilson (1988) Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia

—(1993) Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam. San Francisco: City Lights Books

—(1996) “Shower of Stars”: Book & Dream: Initiatic Dreaming in Sufism and Taoism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia

Worsley, Peter (1968) The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia. New York: Schocken Books

Yates, Francis (1964) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

—(1966) The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

—(1972) The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

According to Wilson, “the Clastrian machine”, is a combination of primitive warfare, shamanism, and a society of the gift.

Every

Clastres makes a distinction between primitive warfare and classical warfare, arguing the former is centrifugal whereas the latter is centripetal.

Centrifugal, on the other hand. Given that the term “primitive” isn’t optimal, I propose calling this type of warfare “centrifugal warfare” inside of “primitive”. Honestly, you could call it heroic violence, but then people might get the wrong idea.

Every society must have a way to redistribute wealth, even if only for widows and orphans.

As for shamanism, well, that’s how the group’s sense of social cohesion is mediated in its mysterious and

basically the book/essay th