Industrial Strength Shamanism

From the windows of trains speeding through rural Japan, you see that the hillsides are covered with forests. Some scars are visible -- areas cut down to the bare ground, or even where part of a hill has been covered in cement to prevent collapse -- but it looks as if Japan's strict development laws have done much to protect wilderness in such a crowded nation.

When I decided to hike into the woods near the Tekishin Zen center in Kameoka (just outside Kyoto), however, I was in for a shock. I found that what appeared to be forest was straight rows of trees, an artificially replanted area with no undergrowth. When I climbed a hill, instead of soil under my feet the rocky side had been covered in plastic netting to prevent erosion.

In the decades since World War II, Japan has undertaken a tremendous reforestation effort. This is a praise-worthy endeavor, and the rest of the world can learn much from their example. But the deforestation that made it necessary is a stark illustration of the toll that heedless industrialization can take on the landscape -- and on the culture. If this can happen in a place where the forest religions Shinto and Buddhism dominate, in a land where individual rocks and trees are seen as objects of veneration, what of Europe and America, inheritors of desert-religion Christianity that directs men to go and subdue nature?

The Industrial Revolution first got underway in England, and so it was England that first experienced the consequences, both positive and negative. It is no coincidence that England played a key role in the history of the modern Pagan movement.

The Revolution was both made possible by, and responsible for, deep changes in English society. These changes displaced millions of people, and made cheap labor available to the new industrialists. It brought into being a whole new chapter in human existence, a change that began about two and a half centuries ago. We are still living through this change, and -- assuming we survive it -- it will take centuries more to play out.

It is a change whose magnitude can be compared only to the Neolithic revolution, to the dawn of civilization itself, when we settled down from nomadic hunting and gathering to live in villages and towns to be farmers. From our perspective in the middle of the change it's hard to see clearly, to name it accurately, but we might call it the change from Man the Farmer to Industrial Man. And just as the establishment of farming communities created a new social structure that called for new religion, so this change will require a new spiritual outlook.

The story of this change begins in Europe, centuries before the start of the Industrial Revolution, with the end of the Middle Ages. To see how significant it was, we need to look not at the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, not at the intellectual life of rulers and artists and philosophers, but at the changes that had the greatest impact on the common people -- changes in farming production.

In medieval Europe, the basic unit of society and of economic production was the manor. In this system, peasant farmers worked their own strips of farmland, but they also had access to common areas of pastures and woodland. These common areas were vital to the system, allowing peasants to gather firewood and to provide grazing space for their animals.

At the close of the Middle Ages, English landlords began a practice of "land enclosure", in which these common areas were privatized. As a result it became difficult or impossible for many tenant farmers (and the village artisans who served them) to make a living. The result was the development of "cottage industry", the beginning of a large number of people being involved in labor other than farming.

During the eighteenth century, the industrialization of agriculture began, yields rose, fewer farmers were needed, and the process of enclosure accelerated greatly. Large numbers of people were displaced, and thus a body of cheap labor was made available for the first industrial mills.

What would the Industrial Revolution have looked like without a large body of people, made desperate by a political process favorable to the greed of landlords, for the industrialists to put to work? Might we have developed a more humane and less exploitative technology right from the start? We can only speculate.

The displaced crowded into cities looking for work, but the cities lacked the infrastructure to handle the influx. There were no sewers, the streets were unpaved, housing crowded and rickety.

And the work lacked any satisfaction: rather than craftsmen skillfully producing finished goods, or farmers proudly producing food to feed their families and their villages, workers were machine-tenders, engaged in repetitive, mind-numbing tasks, replaceable cogs in the industrial machine.

By 1850, half the population of Britain had moved from farming villages to industrialized cities.

This is remarkable because, up until this point, the entire history of human civilization revolves around agriculture!

We settled into permanent settlements that became villages and towns, specifically to work the land. This "Neolithic revolution", when we became farmers, was more than a change in how we produced food. It wrought huge changes in human culture, including religion.

Joseph Campbell noted that religious practices can be broadly categorized into the Paleolithic ("old stone age", hunter-gatherer), individualistic, shamanistic, paths of the forest and wilderness; and the Neolithic ("new stone age", agricultural), group-oriented, priestly, paths of the village.

In hunter-gatherer societies, there was no real specialization. There might be some division of labor by age and gender, but every member was a pretty much a full master of their culture and technology. Most significant to our purpose, religion was shamanistic and egalitarian -- anyone could go on a "vision quest", seek to be opened to new states of consciousness. Some might be more talented at it than others, just as some might be better hunters or better warriors, but the basic technique was available to all.

One obtained a vision or became a shaman not by apprenticeship or appointment, but through one's own experience of relationship with the gods or ancestors or spirits of the land. Because they are based on individual experience, while they have mythology, shamanic paths don't have much in the way of fixed dogma.

In contrast, as humanity settled into farming villages after the Neolithic revolution, life and society became much more complex. It wasn't possible for one person to know how to make all the tools, and know the methods of planting and harvesting and preparing all the crops, and breeding the animals, and how to build the buildings that defined a town -- and also know the skills for fighting the neighboring town who's inhabitants were always trying to raid your towns fields -- and know how to organize all the specialists who had all this knowledge and the laborers who did the grunt work. Specialization arose.

Campbell notes that it's around this time that complex geometric figures -- mandalas -- make their appearance in artwork, reflective of the geographic order of cultivated fields and of the social order of the village.

Religion became the domain of a designated class of priests, who came to their positions by the selection of other priests, not by their own experience. Ritual evolved from individual vision quests to elaborate group activity, consuming a large part of a society's energy. It became a way of binding the community together, of resolving the individual to his or her existence as a part of the whole rather than as a fully autonomous being.

As civilization developed, in some cultures the shamanic path of direct mystical experience was heavily suppressed. In others, some space was left available to it, but only within tightly defined social boundaries. For example, for centuries the Catholic Church has carefully confined people who had mystical inclinations to monasteries; the isolation of these institutions is not just to focus the meditations of monks, but to protect ordinary parishioners from the idea that they might directly experience God and put the priests out of work. (This is true also to some degree of convents and nuns, but clearly there are also gender politics at work.)

We previously encountered the question, if "religion" means "to reconnect", just to what are we reconnecting? Here we can see two different answers. In shamanistic cultures, the goal was to reconnect the individual to the "spirit world". In priestly cultures, the goal has mostly been to keep the individual bound to the community.

But the Neolithic social structure, the culture of the farming village, began to break apart with the Industrial Revolution. That cracking has accelerated and spread. Sometime in 2007, it is estimated, the human race as a whole passed the point that England reached around 1850. For the first time, more human beings lived in industrialized urban areas than in farming villages.

Agriculture is no longer the primary occupation and vocation of the human species. And so, agricultural religion, meant to tie a farming village together, is no longer enough.

What else have we got?

In priestly societies, people who wanted to experience and investigate spiritual issues firsthand would often have to leave town, head out into the forest or the desert, to get away from the priests and their socially regulated religious experience. It was in keeping with this model that the Buddha left his palace to enter the forest, that Jesus went out into the desert after his baptism by John, that Thoreau went to live in the woods by Walden Pond.

It's not deep wilderness or total isolation that is necessary -- Thoreau's cabin was just outside of town, and the Buddha spent time with local children during his stay under the Bo tree. While the presence of "natural" surroundings, of trees and wild animals, is helpful and pleasant, it's not strictly necessary to this part of the quest. What's needed is an environment that separates us from our social imprints. The "nature" that we are really seeking is our own unconditioned natures, apart from the expectations and pressures of our culture.

Taoist sages, for example, would often look for students in traveler's inns, seeking people whose separation from their home village made them open to considering new ideas. It's the same drive that sends so many of us on long journeys to "find ourselves": an change in environment makes possible a change of mind.

And just as travel helps break social imprints, so does rapid social change. As the Industrial Revolution radically altered the way of life in Europe and America, as the mandala began to crack, there were openings for new ideas. Among intellectuals and artists, there were three main threads of thought that emerged in reaction. We have Romanticism, particularly in poetry, looking to the past (in idealized form) for solutions; we have an increase in interest in the occult and in secret societies, trusting in hidden or untapped capabilities of humanity to see us through; and we have an interest in other cultures, particularly in Eastern religion and philosophy and in the societies of the American Indians.

These threads were not isolated from each other, but intertwined to a remarkable degree. At their best, together they pointed at an individual sort of spirituality, following more the way of the shaman than of the priest -- a sort of "industrial strength shamanism", that could draw from the understanding of the natural world that was the product of the Enlightenment but also connect with the most primal and ancient aspects of human existence, including the mystic sense.