The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism –Part 5

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, most recently, Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at the 2010 meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society and will be included in a forthcoming volume on the subject.

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. –Rom. 11:18

The Shaman as Intracosmic Traveler

Those familiar with Voegelin’s concept of Metaxy can think of shamans as human beings whose lives are lived emphatically in the Metaxy, in permanent movement along the axis mundi, a concrete image of the Voegelinian philosophical concept of “tension.”

The mystic shamanic communication among the three realms is expressed in architectural structures such as ziggurats, but also in trees and bridges or the smoke-hole (and smoke) of a tipi or yurt.

Indeed the notion of a cosmic centre or omphalos, which Marie König found in the patterns and lines and cup-marks in the Fontainebleau rock-shelters, does not end with shamanism and the mystic cosmic flights of shamans but reappears as a millennial constant whatever the degree of compactness and differentiation of experience and symbolization.⁶⁷

Modernity and Secularization

According to Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age – Part 2

by Thierry Gontier 

M. Gontier is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, Université de Lyon Jean Moulin – Lyon III.  He has written extensively on Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes and Voegelin and is an editor of the forthcoming Eric Voegelin, Politique, Religion et Histoire, Paris, éd. du Cerf. A biographical sketch may be found HERE. This essay was originally read at the annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society in Seattle,  September  2011. It appears here in two parts.

Blumenberg's notion of historical progress is not born out of the secularization of Christian salvation, but out of the displacement of the question to which Christian theology had supplied an answer during the Middle Ages.

The question is no longer one of knowing how the constitutive evils of the human essence will find their ultimate meaning beyond the world (to put it simply, the question of salvation), but whether, and how, those evils, which are only relative to a fixed period in the history of mankind (and therefore contingent), will be, at least partially, reduced.

It is in this capacity that modernity constitutes for Hans Blumenberg, not a ‘relapse of Gnosticism’, in the way that Voegelin had written, but a movement beyond Gnosticism.⁷

from The Collected Works

Jesus and the Unknown God –Part 2

By the time of the Passion, it appears, the great secret of Caesarea Philippi, the so-called Messiasgeheimnis, has become a matter of public knowledge after all.

In order to explain this oddity, however, one must not accuse the disciples of loquacious disregard for the charge of silence, for between this episode and the Passion, Matthew lets Jesus be quite generous with barely veiled allusions to his status as both the Messiah and the Son of God.

Hence, the charge of the Sanhedrin that Jesus had proclaimed himself the Son of God was well founded.

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 5

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin. We present here in six parts his latest study, Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca (Machiavelli, or the Demonic Confusion), in a special English translation made available to VoegelinView.

Fleeing from Experience

Would it make sense to call this “Realism”?

When Lord Lawrence Arthur Burd writes that Machiavelli, like his companions, has abandoned Scholastic argumentation, choosing instead to attach himself to “experience," he adds that “unfortunately the peculiar character of their experience often led them to fallacious results, as is seen most clearly in Machavelli.”⁵²

However, Machiavelli’s shortcomings did not end there. Lord Burd’s paragraph shows that for Machiavelli and his companions, Divine Scripture, the sentences of philosophers and the laudable examples of princes had become dead letters–fixed doctrinal formulas beyond which they could not see any content of internal or external experience.

This is the same as saying that they did not understand them at all.

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 4

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, most recently, Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at the 2010 meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society and will be included in a forthcoming volume on the subject.

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. —Rom. 11:18

Dismissive Views of Shamanism

A generation ago anthropologists often dismissed shamanism as “a made-up, modern, Western category, an artful reification of disparate practices, snatches of folklore and overarching folklorizations, residues of long-established myths intermingled with the politics of academic departments, curricula, conferences, journal juries and articles, and funding agencies.”³⁷

The reason for this severe judgment seems to have been a close association of the term with doctrines of cultural evolution that most anthropologists no longer considered appropriate.

On the other hand, a few years later, the study of shamanism underwent a renaissance as a result of a new interest  in the study of altered states of consciousness,  an interest in shamanism as therapy, as well as in assorted New Age experiments in spirituality.