The Reemergence of Pre-Linguistic Shamanism in Nietzsche and Fin de siecle Paris

This is a fantastic topic…

What we observe in the Western world at the onset of modernity is a chasm, or a vacuum — a political, social, existential, and religious hole in consciousness which allows for the return of, or the onset of the modern spiritual shamanic descent quest which is the basin and foundation of all human life and human history across all world historical cultures, civilizations, and tribes. This process of shamanic descent down into the unconscious, or the foundation or substratum of reality has been documented as far and wide as the ancient Vedic, to the Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian; Olmec traditions.

However, what we notice — as history progresses — is that this phenomenon is explained away religiously. As civilizations become more hyper-organized as the nature of colonialism and imperialism, domestic and democratic control through ideology vis-a-vis the religious vehicle actively discourages shamanic descent; the typically Dionysian and Osirian nature of communing with the unconscious, or the chthonic force of existence and creation — the jaguar which unifies creation and destruction; the upper and lower world realms. This is a naturalized, ritualized form of the creation of psychic wholeness via communion with the energetic straits of consciousness which emerge from the primal, chthonic source and force of existence proper — the force which unites man with nature proper.

This force becomes, with Marcuse, actively repressed via state control; religious control; ideological constructs which seek to create dominion over the human being as a function in the world, a being in the world with a static, or a stasis of being — so that human being can be weaponized toward cultural and empirical production as in capital. The human being then must be a subject — a fully formed piece of political material, educated into a doctrinal state; informed by a doctrinal name. And therein, religious adherence and obedience is required to stabilize the subject state. This allows for the necessary solidity to produce a unit of being within a cultural or civilizational catechism. This ‘faithfulness’ is the same over-dominance of solarity which leads to the necessary development of psychology as a practice in the Western world — a solarity which leads the leaders of the field necessarily to the same chthonic grounds once well traveled by their great ancestors in a way far more profound and somatic than language and grave, dissociative bedside method can provide.

This soma, as in somatics, is the truly world native project of the ensoulment of the human being — lost necessarily to modernity as a project of colonizing the individual into a unit, a number, a name — which is a prison of solarity; a strict enforcement of and against descent. This enforcement is well seen in the Soviet government’s relationship to Siberian shamans; in the colonial project of Spain in the former Olmec regions. This is a project of ideological conquering; the assertion of solar heroism without depth (this is a forgetfulness of the true function of Apollo, which is to bring the light of consciousness to the realm of Python) — which is, practically, as we observe, a project of mass murder, genocide, rape, and pillaging.

The historical function is to make light or bring light to the deep psychological function of the unconscious as the very political factor which brings about such events as the Crusades: holy wars fought entirely in the underground of consciousness, due to the fact that no such shamanic liberation has been achieved in a true somatic communion with the force of nature itself — long understood by mystics and shamans to be the force of god itself. The healing of this wound of separation vis-a-vis embodiment and somatics is the proprietary method of the shaman; the primary mechanism of this healing is a pre-linguistic experiential unity with the force of existence that draws the animals and plants around Orpheus — the illumination of the shared root, or the tantra, or the thread that is woven through all things. Just now, fields such as quantum mechanics and mass ecology are coming to similar understandings of the energetic function natively apprehended by the shamanic realm.

And this leads us, naturally, to Bataille, Acephale; the inheritance of Bataille which is and was Nietzsche’s project of the modern shaman — or the shaman who is weakly contextualized as poet or philosopher, as he is a shaman without a tribe or milieu. Nietzsche, at the turn of the 20th century, is not a madman, but rather an inheritor to the legacy of Heraclitus — a cosmological shaman, or as Nietzsche himself says, a doctor or a surgeon of civilization. He is incising actively into modernity using visionary consciousness to diagnose the same ills elucidated by his fellows Marx and Freud — who at root (this including Freud’s extensive collection of ancient spiritual artifacts) are performing the same function on the severed, dissociative Western consciousness. All three of these turn of the century Western figures are elucidating the same fundamental issue, or problem — which emerges immanently, somatically, through the mouths of the critical poets of the coming turn: Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud — the problem of the modernity’s banishment of shamanic descent; the colonization of the individual.

The prevention of descent is broken in Nietzsche’s West — which allows him, the shaman himself in Zarathustra , to see and elucidate through the cracks in the veil this critical spiritual, psychological, and cultural issue. And this crack emerges most fundamentally in the city of Paris; for multiple reasons. Conversion to state secularity via fracturing of the formerly unified Christian cosmology, Paris’ late century urban renewal project, mass class fragmentation, a culture of profound opium and hashish use (particularly among artists and writers), and the rise of transactional alienation due to the exponential rise of industrial production as described in Marx’s Grundrisse all provide valuable and essential components to understanding this critical moment of late century Paris’ creation of the vacuum of atomized consciousness and alienation through which the modern shaman can and does arise in the poetes maudites.

These contributing factors — perhaps most importantly the insertion of hashish and opium use as a substitute for the formerly structured transcendental and ritual structure of Christianity; the cosmology of late century French Catholicism which actively demonized and demonizes hell as a critical alchemical and psychological method of descent (a descent documented not only in Christ’s path but in the most important historical Christian vehicles such as Dante’s Purgatorio/Paradiso cycle) — create the absolutely critical atomic moment for the collapse of ideological, ritualistic dissociation of the human being into the language body — which is to say the symbolic, subjectified human being away from the primordial animal — which is the necessary gape for the onset of the modern shamanic consciousness in the West, exploding through the best available vehicle for such an emergence of consciousness: the poetic, written word.

Only poetry has room for the shamanic experience; last bastion for the communication of Dionysian experience in the sterilized modern Western world. As such, inheritors of the maudites like Artaud, fall increasingly away from structure into the ritualistic, primordial scream; the theatre and dance of the shamanic conjuring of the jaguar realm — the realm of bone and blood which has been exiled and sterilized by colonial subjection and the structures of dominance therein: industry and religion; as such, religious adherence to industrial production of cultural artifact of civilization as in the controlled, domesticated, corralled human body and psyche — chained to solarity as consciousness function; as such dissociated from the body, from the primordial self; as such alienated from nature; alienated from the experience of being alive. Thrown and shuttered into symbolic representation; created distance from the body, man is now not seeking god, he is seeking a return to actual somatic, sensual, embodied experience. Exiled not by birth, but by the colonization of civilizational culture: which is nothing more than a control mechanism born out of the enslavement of the colonial impulse — which is a direct intervention into the tribal, native shamanic state as a ritual cultural communal ground of meaning, being, and establishing human wholeness as a birthright.

This clash of modernity; the vacuum at the fin de siecle which emerges the poetes maudites from the grave of Dante as stripped of the ritual garment of Christianity — is the primal scream which echoes out from under the colonial carpet which flayed the Olmec ritual world, just as it silenced the Siberian shamanic communal practice, wherein we find the term ‘shaman’ today. It is a necessary opening, out from under the death of the chains of civilization — of the scream which is owned first and foremost by the world ancestral shamanic history of the project of human psychological and spiritual wholeness — unclaimable by modern medicine or psychology, or any other civilizational vessel or vehicle of condemnation, control, guilt, or language. It is the pre-linguistic, unformed, unconstituted essence of humanity, imminently a part of the great wave of creation — unchained from all presumption, name, and designation. As such, it exists, not as an animal, a creature, or a function, but a living, breathing, writhing heat that unifies man with jaguar, sun, panther, hawk, eagle, and molten core.

The resurrection and return of this form of utter, pre-linguistic, foundational consciousness is inevitable — because it cannot be extinguished — as it is the foundation of all of life and creation. It is at the root of all destruction, rubble, and ruin of empires past. The shaman keeps the eternal temple, the somatic temple of the root of creation, or the universal body manifest everywhere, in all things; in all times; as such travels and flies between them, like Odin’s crows. This is the sacred keep of true human knowledge, not civilizational information — information which only applies in the linguistic, symbolic currency that civilization takes from, steals from, and converts earth and fire into the industrial crucible of profits, titles, and designations. When civilizations collapse, the shaman rises.

And this is the great paradox and perhaps even beauty of modernity and the modern world. That there now exists, as in Nietzsche and Artaud — the creation of a new form of shaman — the world shaman, or the solo shaman, the shaman of humanity. The shaman without context, without tribe; as such, without cultural commune. And in this way, the modern shaman is not trained of controverted into the religious or spiritual order and cosmology of the tribe. The modern shaman creates. Creates the cosmology of all of life and humanity from the ashes, rubble, shards, and fragmentation of the collapsed and closed prelapsarian world before global modernity. From the shards of the world shamanic ancestry, there is a beautiful mosaic which tells the unified story of human creation; the creation of the world; the birth of the stars. And in this project, the modern shaman unifies the world — a central, existential repair at the root of humanity; what humanity has lost in modernity: living, somatic awareness, perception, incarnation, and embodiment of the immanence of the world soul. The ritualistic collapse of linguistics, language, symbol, and sign — into the direct fire of perception and lived, felt, feeling experience of the power and the passion of creation.

There is no human — there is only the blue, shamanic, tantric thread of eternal creation; eternal life. The fall of subjectivity; the fall of civilization — reveal the great inheritance which was always waiting from mankind — outside of the waking dream of symbolic currency; dissociative separation from the jaguaric root of the real.