Three recommendations: paganism, Shugendō, and two hours with Zach Bush, MD (free post)
Two articles and a video/podcast
I recommend not one, but two fascinating articles from the latest Aeon/Psyche posting. Both pieces are worth our time (in my opinion, that is — but, then, I’m sympathetic with what both present for our reflections), and the titles and the short snippets quoted below are, I hope, enough to generate your interest.
The first, by Ed Simon, is simply entitled “A New Paganism.” Here are the snippets and the link:
To be clear, paganism need not be read literally here as referring to acolytes in the Temple of Artemis or pilgrims to Delphi (though it certainly doesn’t preclude those examples either). One could be a pagan Christian, a pagan Jew, a pagan Muslim, a pagan atheist. When I use the word ‘pagan’ in this context, it refers less to whatever arbitrary deity you supplicate before, or indeed if you bow towards any god at all, than it does to an approach of worshipfulness towards enchanted reality itself. In this regard, paganism is an approach to observable experience, a manner of psychologically re-enchanting materiality, physicality and nature with a divine significance. If scientific positivism and religious fundamentalism both find a concreteness in abstraction, by assuming a unitary reality, whether it’s God or physical law, then paganism rather finds abstraction in concreteness, seeing the very essence of spirit in the sound of a babbling brook, the moss on the side of a tree, or a sunset over Manhattan…
Today, where a crisis of faith manifests in those cursed siblings of meaningless nihilism and fervent fundamentalism, and humanity’s relationship to nature is so inequitable that our economy, technology and industry threatens ecological apocalypse, how useful would it be to have a pagan theology, a new expression of divinity and the sacred commensurate with our current ruptures and crises? Julian was felled in battle before his paganism could become a codified faith, but it’s still a goal worth working for. What would a pagan canon look like?…
You can read the rest by clicking here.
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As the brief bio accompanying the article says about him, Tim Bunting “is a yamabushi (mountain hermit) at the Dewa Sanzan Shrine in Japan. Born in New Zealand, he has more than 10 years of experience living beneath the three sacred peaks of Yamagata.” Here he describes and explains the Shugendō tradition of the yamabushi, comparing it to the Stoic tradition of the West. The emphasis is on radical acceptance.
However, unlike Stoicism, Shugendō is not easily explained. In fact, as yamabushi, we swear an oath of not sharing what happens on the mountain. This isn’t just to keep secret the mystery of our practices. Our time there represents our time in the womb before we were born, a time we have no recollection of. But the difficulty is not only because of our secrets. The editors of the book Defining Shugendō (2020) describe the tradition as ‘so intricate, complex, and diversified that it would be preposterous to pretend to cover every aspect of it in one single volume’. Part of that intricacy is because Shugendō is deeply syncretic, perhaps more than any other belief system in Japan – and that’s saying a lot in a nation of syncretic traditions. Shugendō developed from a combination of primitive folk practices, animism, Vajrayana or Esoteric Buddhism (known as Mikkyō in Japanese), Shintoism, and Taoism. But why did mountains become so important in this combination? As the Japanese folklorist Ichiro Hori explains it in Folk Religion in Japan (1968), the mountains in Japan were once ‘believed to be the world of the spirits and of the deities, buddhas, or bodhisattvas … where souls of the dead also must undergo initiation in order to enter paradise’. Hori believes that Shugendō was built on a set of ‘primitive but fundamental common beliefs in mountains’.
In the 6th and 7th centuries, these various beliefs, philosophies, doctrines and ritual systems are believed to have been organised into a single practice by En no Gyōja (En the Ascetic). As En no Gyōja spread Shugendō throughout Japan, a belief solidified that the mountains running down the nation’s spine were not only sources of profound and potentially dangerous spiritual power but fountains of wisdom. This is a form of wisdom that is beyond the realm of comprehension for us mere mortals. As such, it cannot be learned from books, conversations or lectures. It must be experienced…
The entire fascinating article can be read here.
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Finally, here is a two-hour video/podcast discussion with Zach Bush, MD, hosted by Rich Roll. It was recommended to me by a reader of my Substack, and I was impressed by the high quality of Bush’s insights (and they seem to me to dovetail rather well with the two articles above). As the program notes have it, the discussion is “about the many ways human biology and planetary health are connected—and how we can build a healthy future for all.” The key insight is that we have distanced ourselves, to our own and the earth’s grave detriment, from the nature of which we are a part — it’s our “original wound” — and we must rediscover ways to reconnect.
Have to admit I found Lovelock (who Simon commends) to be disappointing. Gaia would just as well kill you than be worshipped. The Biblical Sophia is, in my view, a needed upgrade. Forgive the self reference, but I tried to explain here “Wisdom offers all of the benefits of the Gaia hypothesis but none of its shortcomings.” https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-wisdom-hypothesis
I found the article on yamabushi especially interesting. Thank you for sharing these!