Celebrating Spiritual Difference

Mike King
Centre for Postsecular Studies, London Metropolitan University

I sometimes joke that I am an Eastern mind trapped in a Western body, but I could as well say a Neolithic mind trapped in a modern body. By this I mean that I respond as readily to the spiritualities of the East and of ancient times as I do to the more recent invention of monotheism. In fact I do have a profound respect for the three religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), but, rather like the parent of a gifted but sometimes wilfully selfish child, I am compelled to urge restraint on the Abrahamic monotheisms. This is because their doctrines reject four out of the five key modalities of the spirit, these five being – in a sort of historical order – shamanism / animism, Goddess polytheism, warrior polytheism, monotheism, and the unitive/transcendent. The latter is well represented by a spiritual teacher like Eckhart and the Buddha, but it is the first three on my list that are of more interest here.

Christianity, inheriting the Judaic rejection of ‘idolatry,’ came to use the terms ‘pagan’ and ‘heathen’ to lump together and vilify earlier spiritualities, with the result that the secular mind is as much prejudiced against them as the Christian. At the same time we have forgotten that there was as much if not more spiritual difference between the earlier forms as between them and monotheism – there is a loss of richness. Hence I like to consider pre-monotheistic religions in three aspects as a way of beginning to restore that richness, and also to consider the painful transitions from one to another. Firstly the shamanic/animistic spirituality was that of the hunter-gatherer, and it saw all of existence as imbued with spirits – specific spirits (of animals, trees, mountains etc.). The key to living lay in negotiation with these spirits, including those of the ancestors: the shaman, whether man or woman, had a particular gift for this. As horticulture was discovered (approximately in the Bronze Age) spirituality moved into a new phase of Goddess polytheism, where the individual spirits became abstracted into deities representing aspects of the natural world – particularly those of fertility and renewal. With the so-called ‘Kurgan’ invasions from the North (approximating to the onset of the Iron Age), India and the Mediterranean shifted spiritual gear towards warrior polytheism, resulting in the move to patriarchy that we are only just witnessing the end of. The abstraction of specific and localised spirits progressed into universal principles or deities, particularly of war. (The singer Maria Callas beautifully portrays Medea in Pasolini’s film of the same name, representing the anguish of goddess spirituality displaced by the masculine principle.) 

Monotheism (in the West) took only the principle of a warrior ‘sky-god’ and elevated him to sole deity, along with a total rejection of the previous spiritualities. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” it says in Exodus 22:18, and the theme is reinforced a thousand times in the Old Testament, that the ancient gifts of spirit-conversation, divination, and healing were to be crushed out of existence. Yet, as the Earth now cries out against its betrayal, we desperately need the old skills to hear the voices of the spirits; the old sensibilities which were grounded in a world where all was alive, and where the ‘dead matter’ of science had not yet weighed on our hearts.

Mike Robertson, in his lovely article The Alfar of Our Faith, points to these ancient skills, and to the centrality of the spirits to the faith. I was on the last peak of the Rax in the Austrian Alps at Christmas, in a blizzard, and as I walked away up the valley to the train station the peak seemed to curiously maintain its towering presence. Dimly but clearly its spirit spoke to me: “do all in your power to make our voices heard, the ancient voices of the Earth.” So I do what I can do, which is to talk wherever I can about spiritual difference, and about celebrating it.