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The Coming End of our Cycle… and the Beginning of the Next.
The North Wind arrived as I started writing this column, just as it did two years ago when I began to create these monthly narratives for the Meta Arts Magazine.
The presence of the North Wind is always propitious for me as it is the one the Navajo people refer to as the Dark Wind, the one many regard as the healing wind. Its spirit often reveals itself to me as a huge, dark form with myriad clusters of stars visible within its depths.
It is of interest that later in this same day, I taught an anthropology class at Sierra College in northern California. After class, one of my students who is clairvoyant reported to me that there was a dark giant in the room while I was lecturing, one with sprays of sparkling lights deep within it. When this spirit perceived that the woman could see it, it became very respectful, apologizing for any disharmony caused by its presence. It told her that it was there to look me over because there is another book I must write…
I share this with you, the reader, as this is part of what it means for me to walk on the shaman’s path. It is part of the given.
This month I would like to begin to talk with you about something that I have mentioned before—the fact that we appear to be coming to the end of our current cycle of ages. There is little doubt in my mind that the nature as well as the quality of our transition into the next cycle will be determined by how well we are prepared.
If we were to cast a well-informed look at how the world is doing right now, it could be observed that a crisis of monumental proportions is currently very much in progress.
What we actually have on our hands is a crisis of leadership—a leadership that is failing us at every level--political, corporate, military, and even religious.
Like all of you I have deep concerns about this, and yet this crisis may actually be a reflection of the fact that we are coming to the end of our cycle. In response, many have observed that Western Civilization is going into collapse phase.
I assume that most of my readers are aware of the significance of the year 2012—the year that many indigenous traditions such as the Maya, the Inca, the Aztecs, and the Hopi have predicted as the end time of our world.
The precise day has even been determined to be December 21 in the year 2012, the end of the long-count calendar of the Maya, and that’s only six years away now…
Authentic psychics and clairvoyants are well aware of the inherent dangers of making predictions and then nailing them down with specific dates and times. Most won’t do this because they know that the future exists as a cluster of probabilities that is in motion.
Yet there is a remarkable cross-cultural convergence on this 2012 date, and this is of great interest to me because of the prophetic nature of the visions I was given. The form that “the collapse” is likely to take, as well as the nature of the world that will come into being afterward, is discussed in detail in my books Spiritwalker, Medicinemaker, and Visionseeker.
In my researching of this all-important issue, here’s something that I stumbled across—something that is not in my trilogy.
Nicholas Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux medicine man and shaman who is most well known for the story he told an anthropologist named John Neihardt—an account that was published as a book titled Black Elk Speaks. In this small volume, Black Elk tells the story of his life, as well as a great prophetic vision that he was given in his childhood. An instant classic, this book has been in continuous print since its original release in 1932.
Less well known is Black Elk’s second book, told to another anthropologist named Joseph Espes Brown and titled The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. Originally published in 1953, it was in this second book that I came across something that may have great relevance for all of us over the next six years.
In the book’s beginning, Black Elk recounts the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman and of her gifting of the original sacred pipe to the people. At the end of the account, he relates that as the Holy Woman started to leave the lodge where this historical meeting took place, she turned and said this:
“Behold this pipe! Always remember how sacred it is and treat it as such, for it will take you to the end. Remember also that in me there are four ages… I am leaving now but I shall look back upon your people in every age… and at the end I shall return.”
According to Sioux philosophy, at the beginning of this cycle of four ages, a buffalo was placed in the west in order to hold back the waters. Every year the buffalo loses one hair and at the end of each age, he loses one leg. When all his hair and all four legs are gone, the Sioux believe that the waters will rush in once again and the cycle of ages will come to an end.
A striking parallel to this myth comes to us from the Hindu tradition where it is the bull (Dharma—the divine law) that has four legs, each of which represents an age in the cycle. During the course of these four ages (yugas), the true spirituality becomes increasingly obscured until the cycle (manvantara) closes with a catastrophe.
Both the Sioux and the Hindus are in accord that the buffalo and the bull are now standing on their last leg and the buffalo is very nearly bald. It is also known that several white buffalo have been born during the past ten years, with yet another just this past August (in 2006.) Many Native American people know that this is a clear sign that the cycle of ages is now coming to a close.
Both traditions also state that with the closing of this cycle, the primordial spirituality will reemerge and be restored, and the cycle of ages will begin once again.
This last statement is highly significant because the primordial spirituality is the shaman’s path, and interest in shamanism has increased dramatically over the last several decades as part of a wide spread spiritual reawakening—one that has two sides.
On one side, we find a resurgence of the religious fundamentalism that comes down to us from the Dark Ages, a perspective that proclaims this world to be the kingdom of a remote, transcendent authoritarian God, one who can be alternately beneficent and alternately wrathful.
In our own time, the fundamentalist view has been embraced by misguided religious zealots and self-righteous terrorists who have the fervor as well as the capacity to ensure that this world will be their God’s kingdom… or nothing.
On the other side exists the enlightened perspective of the secular humanists who perceive an immanent, omni-present Divine Presence or Power existing within all of creation, an impulse oriented toward furthering the greater good. In their view, this divine pantheistic presence expresses one emotion only—love.
This more highly evolved view is quietly and definitively gaining acceptance among increasing numbers of well-educated, well-informed, and well-connected individuals, many of whom are in professional and social positions from which they may influence the larger society's ideas and trends.
This view is also gaining ground within the general populus at large, creating a broad social movement that is intensely democratic--one that is cutting across socioeconomic levels of achievement and status, one that is transcending cultural, political, and ethnic boundaries as well.
The number of people who hold this view is not known with certainty, but 14 years of sociological research, conducted in the United States by demographer Paul H. Ray and his wife Sherry Ruth Anderson, has revealed that more than 50 million Americans may fall into this group, representing more than 26% of the adult population.
Ray and Anderson’s analysis, published in their book The Cultural Creatives, suggests that we Westerners have arrived at a point in our history in which our prevailing mythologies are not working any more.
The 50+ million among us know, without being told, that the time has come to create a new cultural mythos in which we synthesize a whole new set of ways of viewing ourselves and our society, our problems and our strengths, our communities and our world--a concern shared by another 80-90 million people in Europe.
These are not small numbers and they are growing.
Such a shift in the dominant cultural pattern happens only once or twice in a thousand years, and it is significant that this one is occurring during a period of ever-accelerating social change, enabled by a world-wide communication system and a high technology unlike any seen before.
Ray and Anderson’s survey reveals these citizens to be socially concerned, environmentally aware, and spiritually focused, creative people, who are carriers of more positive ideas and values than in any previous period in history.
These Cultural Creatives are the Transformational Community, and they know with absolute certainty that if we continue to do business as usual and fail to produce a new story, Western Civilization may well collapse, taking the rest of the world with it.
This awareness is producing an increasing sense of urgency, accompanied by a growing insistence on social, political, and economic reform that will benefit everyone, not just the powerful and the privileged.
Anthropologists might call this a new kind of cultural revitalization movement, one that is reaching toward the future rather than retreating into the past. A small book called The Spiritual Gyre by historian Richard Sellin reveals that this revitalization movement is happening right on schedule.
Sellin has suggested that our Western preoccupation with the linear development of our civilization is, in fact, a misconception, and that the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times embodied within the intellectual trends and moral values characteristic of any age or epoch, tends to express itself in cycles that repeat themselves on a regular basis.
If I draw on Sellin’s ideas and add some of my own, I could observe that the first cycle (of ages) was the longest, lasting perhaps 4000 years. Known as the Neolithic Period, this cycle began with the closure of the Stone Age and the end of hunting and gathering as our primary lifeway. The Neolithic Period was characterized by the rise of agriculture and animal domestication, and the establishment of the first permanent year-round villages and towns.
During this period, religious practice was animistic, expressing the belief that everything, both animate and inanimate, is invested with its own personal supernatural essence or soul. This belief implies that everything around us is both conscious and aware, at least to some degree, revealing an immanent intelligence within Nature with which all humans were once in constant, intimate relationship.
This was the primordial spirituality that came down to us from our Stone Age ancestors. During those times, Nature was God and the religious practitioner was the shaman.
This cycle came to an end with the emergence of the first socially stratified city-states about 5000 years ago among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, and during this time, a new form of spiritual expression emerged: Polytheism.
Polytheism affirms the existence of many high gods and goddesses existing above and beyond Nature. It is a stratified, hierarchical cosmological view, and its appearance reflected an entirely new perception of ourselves, one that developed once we began to live in stratified, hierarchical societies.
This new form of religion became the dominant spiritual focus for the next cycle—a period that included cultures such as the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Myceneans, the Phoenicians, the Minoans, the Greeks, the Etruscans, and of course, the Romans.
During this “Second Cycle of Ages”, lasting perhaps 3000 years, the first stratified religions emerged, managed and run by the first bureaucratized priesthoods. The various high gods and goddesses in these traditions came to symbolize aspects of the human psyche in a supernatural sense, as well as some aspect of the natural world in an ideological sense—like the Greek father god Zeus, associated with the elemental forces of lightning and thunder… and his brother, Poseidon, associated with the oceanic realm.
Among the Romans, these deities were known respectively as Jupiter and Neptune, and with the collapse of the Roman Empire almost 2000 years ago, that second cycle came to an end.
With its demise, a new religion came into being: monotheism.
Monotheism originated in the deserts of the Middle East and its three primary expressions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam--profess a belief in a single great god who created the universe and everything in it in a singular event, with lesser spiritual beings, angels and archangels, saints and prophets, ranked below it.
Once again, this belief system reflected a new perspective of ourselves, because as our societies had become more centralized and more stratified, with an executive director on top—the king or queen, emperor or president--so had our perception of the supernatural world.
The new religion—monotheism--reflected this by assigning an alternately wrathful, alternately beneficent ruler god, variously called YHWH, Jehovah, Allah, or simply God, as a supernatural executive director or CEO. This has been the dominant religion in the Western world for our current 2000 year cycle.
Sellin has proposed that our cycle began with a comparatively long Theocratic Phase in which society relied heavily on religious doctrine, and truth was determined by divine direction from the father god, operating through a bureaucratized and politically motivated priesthood. Any informed overview of Western History reveals that such has indeed been the case from the end of the Roman Era until the Renaissance, a period that lasted roughly 1400 years.
The spirit of the times changed considerably at this point. As the guilds gave rise to the infrastructure of the current corporate world-state, the rise of science and intellectualism contributed to the onset of the second stage of our cycle, a Secular Phase, in which the expansion of our geographical and intellectual horizons, as well as our economic power, occurred on an unprecedented scale.
In response, truth was redefined within a new mythology—science--and religion was generally discredited. This relatively shorter phase, dominated by scientific rationalism, has lasted for about 300 years. The current spiritual reawakening suggests that this phase has now drawn to a close.
With the dawning of the age of Aquarius, Sellin asserts that we are moving into the third and final stage of the 2000 year cycle, a Spiritual Phase, in which science and spirituality are being synthesized and integrated in an attempt to transcend both previous stages.
We will discuss this at greater length in future columns, but for now, we can observe that the sheer number of people involved reveals that the so-called New Age, or Modern Mystical Movement, is not a fad.
Rather, this broad social phenomenon heralds the emergence of an authentic Transformational Community, one whose beliefs, values, and trends are already shifting the cultural norms of Western Society.
This is why the Hopis have quietly observed that we, the ordinary people, are the ones we have been waiting for.
Not surprisingly, this current revitalizing impulse is associated with a new emerging spiritual complex, much in the same manner that Christianity took form as a new religion at the end of the last cycle.
And interestingly, this “new complex” is actually quite old. It is none other than the primordial spirituality that Black Elk prophesied would reemerge at the end of the current cycle of ages…
From this perspective, the resurgence of interest in shamans and their practice may in fact represent the seeds of the next religious tradition in the West—one that will determine much of the Western world’s spiritual focus and practice for the next 2000 years.
This is not to say that we are retreating into an archaic worldview and religious tradition. Quite the contrary. As the primordial spirituality is reemerging, it is being reworked and transformed into something quite new.
We will talk more about this next month. Until then, allow me to invoke the spirit of my great Hawaiian friend, the Kahuna Nui Hale Kealohalani Makua, and with his blessing, I extend to each of you the Light and the Love of the Ancestors, The Source of Life, rejoicing in the Power and the Peace, braided with the cords of Patience, revealing the tapestry of the strongest force in the Universe, your Aloha.
With warm thoughts—Dr Hank
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