Barry Spector's Blog

Well, I thought I was done with this theme. But then I had an opportunity to attend the wonderful Bioneers conference, which has devoted much energy to the concerns and values of tribal people.

There, I attended a “council” workshop on cultural appropriation  and heard many of the points of view that I’ve already articulated.

The idea of council comes from the indigenous world. The process encourages all participants to speak from the heart with respect and concern for communal values as the talking stick passes around the circle. And although each speaker’s voice is supposed to have equal value, the reality is that the leader(s) of the conversation do invoke the privilege of speaking both as authorities and as participants.

In this council, and under these circumstances, one of the leaders offered an opinion that I found rich and provocative: “Good intentions are not enough.” She was implying that potential appropriators must go to great lengths to avoid harming or insulting the indigenous carriers of tradition. She was right, of course. But her statement was more than an opinion: it was a prescription: This is how you must act. And assertions about how we must act can result in our not acting at all.

In response, I thought of something I heard once from a drumming teacher: Bad drumming insults the ancestors. But I’d also heard a different teacher say: There are no drumming mistakes, only new rhythms. Together, they cover the whole cultural appropriation range, from the gatekeepers who hide esoteric forms from the public to those who actually ask Westerners to carry on dying traditions. The first drumming teacher may well have been accurate, but the second was kind and generous. I’ll go with the second.

And how about those good intentions? Linguist George Lakoff says that 95% of our motivations are unconscious. Most of the time we have no idea what our real motivations or agendas are or how many parts of ourselves are in conflict with our conscious ideals.

Recall this old saying – No good deed goes unpunished. Often our (personal and national) “good” deeds go punished (have unintended consequences) precisely because some or most of our unconscious motivations are in direct opposition to our conscious good intentions. It’s like driving with your parking brake engaged. Most of the time those conscious motivations are all we really know. We are – all of us – ambivalent (ambi-valent = “both strengths”) by nature. This is one of the most fundamental realizations of Greek Tragedy. Realizing this may be the first step to self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.

The tyranny of the ego assigns value only to those conscious motives. And that ego-tyrant is our internalized father-figure, who represents the authority of Jehovah/Allah, the mono-god of monotheism. But outside of our Judeo-Christian-Moslem tradition, almost all indigenous and tribal people practiced polytheistic ways that more accurately mirrored our complex psychology. Having a complicated pantheon of figures in one’s mythic imagination encourages one to ponder the equally broad range of internal voices, each of whom may well have their own agenda.

And that is one reason to take the leap into the unknown and engage in ritual. In my experience, ritual more than anything else can help us clarify those intentions, to learn the complex nature of who we are. Encouraged by religion, we think: I need this. Ritual asks: Really? How much do you need this? Do you need it or do you want it? What’s the difference? What will you sacrifice in order to attain it?

Every deed – every single thing we do – has unintended consequences. Now what? Do nothing that might possibly be tainted with cultural appropriation for fear that we might trigger someone?

A Hassidic story (yes, I’m appropriating it) told by Elie Wiesel addresses this dilemma:

When the Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews, he would go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire and say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished. Later, when his disciple, the Magid of Mezritch, needed for the same reason to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: ‘‘Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer,’’ and again he would have success. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Lieb of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: ‘‘I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place, and this must be sufficient.’’ It was sufficient. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting at home, his head in his hands, he addressed God: ‘‘I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is ask You to redeem us, and this must be sufficient.’’ And it was.

We will screw up. We will hurt someone’s feelings, period. But, as we really feel the terrifying reality of the political, environmental and spiritual conditions in this moment, I remember another old saying: The perfect is the enemy of the good.

We no longer have the privilege of hesitating because we might not be doing something perfectly. We must do what we are called to do (even as we clarify that sense of calling), knowing full well that our intentions can never be fully clear, that our actions – without exception – have consequences beyond our knowledge.

Right action means being willing to accept responsibility for those consequences. Only people (and nations) who are utterly invested in their own innocence act with no sense of consequences. Ultimately, this business of cultural appropriation is about waking up and clarifying the complex nature of who we are – our good intentions as well as our darker motives – accepting them and loving them. This willingness to acknowledge our fullness is a necessary precursor to self-forgiveness.

It All Comes Back To Me

Not willing to be vicious, I lost my voice.

Not wanting to be foolish, I lost my courage.

Averse to being led, I lost my way.

Unwilling to be like them, I forgot my name.

Remembering now is blessing enough.

Waking up groggy is still waking up.

– Victory Lee Schouten

I think I’ll just let the mystery be. – Iris Dement

A nuanced approach to these subjects can be a breath of fresh air in an intellectual environment where accusations and stances of purity (“The blood of Albion flows in these veins,” boasts one stalwart) seem to be the norm. And this obsession with doing things right leads me to certain conclusions.

First, my own reading of the anthropological literature indicates that no indigenous person in his or her right mind would choose to become a “shaman.” That life is a calling, and it often seems to be fraught with loneliness, poverty, suffering and often madness. It is a role performed for the community, not the individual, and lived on the outskirts.

Second, consider what second-century Christianity looked like – a branch of Judaism focused on love – and what it became by the end of the fourth century – the official, universal and only religion of the Roman Empire, dedicated to wiping out all competition. I’m not suggesting that Neopaganism will move in that direction, only that all its branches are very young and are still evolving.

But there is a huge difference. Christianity was born in a pagan world and took (appropriated) much of its symbolism and practice from those traditions that still were connected to nature (paganus: people of the hills). Neopaganism has been reconstructed in the mid-to-late 20^th century, after two millennia of Christian (and three millennia of monotheistic) thinking; that is, they and all modern people have all matured within and are all susceptible to literalized thinking.

We like to think that we can understand metaphors and tolerate nuance and ambiguity. To do this, however, is to resist a profoundly durable inheritance, and we easily slip into the default mode of literalism. James Hillman, speaking of American myth and culture, said that “…we are each… like it or not, children of the Biblical God. It is a fact, the essential American fact.” Our monotheistic heritage determines our thinking about identity, race, gender, body, war, time, sin, self and other. Historian Regina Schwartz wrote, “… if we do not think about the Bible, it will think (for) us.”

Since all modern people share this monotheistic consciousness to some degree, wrote Hillman, we are all “psychologically Christian.” He saw this even in the sophisticated world of psychotherapy: “Because a monotheistic psychology must be dedicated to unity, its psychopathology is intolerance of difference.” This is our American condition: our ego psychology mirrors our economics, with their common assumption of the “heroic, isolated ego in a hostile world.”

This is a heritage of large, state-sponsored religion, or ideology. In this monotheistic world such systems of thought allow no alternative viewpoints. Michael Meade has argued that ideologies (modern, literal thinking) force us to think the same idea, while myth invites us to have our own ideas about the same thing (indigenous, nuanced thinking).

Most of the time when we judge others as impure or not authentic enough, we are actually talking about identity – personal or group; we are struggling with the question of who we are, not who the outsider is.

Consider this analogy. It is quite literally true that what we see visually is the inside of our own eyeballs. Psychological projection works in essentially the same way. The Other inhabits our imagination to enable us to define the boundaries, and when those boundaries become particularly hard to know – as in our current politics – our concern about otherness rises into racism and xenophobia.

As I have written in Chapter One of my book, when we reduce things from the symbolic to the literal, we are inside a myth and don’t know it. Unconsciously enacting such a narrative (or several at once), we are in mythical thinking and repeat unsatisfying behavior without any positive change. We see others in one-dimensional images and we reduce multi-layered mystery to the simplistic dualisms of monotheism: whatever isn’t aligned with our god must necessarily follow his opposite. Here is a clue: if your people consider their story to be literally true and other people’s stories are “myths,” then you and your people are thinking mythically or literally. Other mono-words share the brittleness of one correct way: monopoly, monogamy, monolithic, monarchy, monotonous. This is what Joseph Campbell was implying when he spoke of our “demythologized world.”

If we reduce a symbol to a single meaning, if we confuse a myth with historical truth, or if we allow dogma to determine the effect the symbol is supposed to have, the symbol dies. Since monotheism rejects ambiguity and diversity, it requires belief, which implies not merely a single set of truths but also the obligation to convert – or eliminate – others. In this context, many of the gatekeeping statements can be read as monotheistic, “either-or” statements, such as this one, by Larisa Pole: “To become fully Asatru,” writes one must accept Asatru as their own belief system.”

Granted, she isn’t claiming that this is the only, right belief system, but it’s still about believing, and Americans believe things within a Protestant lexicon that has taken that word very far from its Old German meaning: rooted in love. Statements such as hers beg for anarchistic and humorous responses, and Hillman had one: “The Gods don’t require my belief for their existence, nor do I require belief for my experience of their existence.” Likewise, astrologer Caroline Casey encourages us to “believe nothing… entertain possibilities.”

Now of course, more than any spiritual approach to the Great Mystery, Neopagan thinking appreciates diversity, and it represents a long-overdue alternative to this heritage. The Goddess is returning! But here is where I found myself wondering about some of the basic, perhaps unconscious assumptions I saw throughout Talking about the Elephant, where the words paganism, shamanism and shamanist kept turning up along with religion, worship, belief systems – and most annoying to me, faith.

Those suffixes (word endings) – ism, ist – bother me. In Siberian villages, where the term “shaman” originated, it would never occur to anyone to add “ism” to it in order to imply a distinctive doctrine or theory with a clear set of beliefs and moral injunctions. In such places, as David Abram writes, a shaman is quite simply one who mediates between the world of the living, the world of nature and the realm of the unseen spirits and ancestors.

Similarly, why should we assume that any practice, spiritual or artistic, “belongs” to any one group? Again, it’s complicated. In my poetry world, the 14^th-century mystical Persian poet Hafez is nearly as popular as Rumi. There are many translations of his books, but the most popular are by Daniel Ladinsky, who does not speak Persian. Indeed, he claims that he has more or less channeled Hafez through his own original poetry, unlike Coleman Barks, who translates Rumi by rendering literal translations into American free verse.

Omid Safi is no prig. He actually likes Ladinsky’s poems. However, he insists that:

This is…spiritual colonialism…a matter of power, privilege and erasure…the world of culture is inseparable from the world of politics. So there is something sinister about keeping Muslims out of our borders while stealing their crown jewels and appropriating them not by translating them but simply as decor for poetry that bears no relationship to the original. Without equating the two, the dynamic here is reminiscent of white America’s endless fascination with Black culture and music while continuing to perpetuate systems and institutions that leave Black folk unable to breathe.

Or how about the case of Paul Simon, who in 1986 ignored a worldwide cultural boycott of South Africa, travelled there and hired local musicians to record his classic album Graceland? A huge debate ignited over the line between honoring an underrepresented population (in this case, putting a human face on apartheid) and appropriation of its culture. Some called Graceland a form of modern colonialism. Twenty-five years later, the controversy was documented in the film Under African Skies, in which Simon reunites with his collaborators and then meets one of his most outspoken critics. Each side presents their case without rancor or bitterness.

It’s complicated. Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

The real problem is that ownership is the wrong model. The arts flourished in the world’s traditional cultures without being conceptualized as “intellectual property”, and the traditional products and practices of a group – its songs and stories, even its secrets – are not made more useful by being tethered to their supposed origins. But vigorous corporate lobbying has helped the idea of intellectual property to conquer the world. To accept the notion of cultural appropriation is ultimately to buy into a regime where corporate entities, acting as cultural guardians, “own” a treasury of intellectual property and extract a toll when others make use of it.

Granted, we are running up against the limits of the English language here, but these words point toward ideologies, systems of thought, where we all too familiar with narratives in which the only ways to deal with the Other is either to convert him or to exterminate him.

As with early Christianity, any spiritual or artistic system can begin in reaction against an old, outmoded, calcified ideology, then become obsessed with identifying the impure, devolve into a new fundamentalism and end in tragedy as a crusade.

I stress these concerns because I and, I assume, most of my readers are white Americans, and of all peoples, we have a special responsibility to remember our old tendency to identify – and devalue – other people as impure and to deal with them with extreme prejudice. We are called to remember that America is still very much a Puritan nation, and that this has led us toward two extreme positions – hatred of our own bodies, and a rock-solid belief about the poor and the victims of capitalism, that their condition is their own fault. The first position makes us sick and the second keeps us innocent.

Am I being picky here, voicing my concerns about other people being picky? Again, the language itself channels us toward the old monotheistic assumptions. Why not utilize perfectly useful phrases such as “spiritual path,” or “tradition,” which Jenne Micale, with the humor I like to see, defines as “…we’ve done it for quite a while, and no one remembers when the first one was.”

In the long run – the very long run, and if we survive the environmental threats that our monotheistic, fundamentalist, disembodied ideologies have generated – the myths that undergird the myth of American innocence will have to collapse. And Neopaganism, with all its cultural appropriations, is precisely situated to be the environmentally-conscious tradition and set of practices that can facilitate this transition. But it must become conscious of its tendency toward monotheistic thinking. It must see through its own language and its own unconscious assumptions. It – we – must learn to see indigenous ways on their own terms, to stop appropriating them by viewing them through our own cultural prejudices, to stop making earth-based, radical ritual into High Church.

We can begin that work by accepting the mystery, by dropping our need to be right all the time, to realize that our judgments about the “purity” of other’s beliefs are really our own projections. So, for now, on my own pilgrimage through this marvelously fascinating world, I suggest that literalizing may well be the ultimate – if not the worst – form of cultural appropriation.

Part Seven (the conclusion) of this essay is here.

I naively thought that I’d covered the entire range of issues related to the subject of cultural appropriation in the first four parts. I dealt with common themes of authenticity, ownership, privilege, gatekeeping (who gets to decide?), reconstruction, permission, appreciation, calling and community. And: complexity. Here, I have few new concepts to introduce, mainly my own further marveling at how bloody complex this whole issue is, and in no particular order.

As I mentioned in Part Four, the Mexicas (Aztecs) had long celebrated their Days of the Dead in August, before the Spaniards required them to conform to the Catholic calendar. For nearly 500 years, Dia de Los Muertos has occurred on November 2^nd. But very recently, we are beginning to see Latinos in Southern California “re-appropriating” the holiday and moving it back to August.There is a huge debate about the difference between “Folklore” and “Fakelore,”defined as “inauthentic, manufactured folklore presented as if it were genuinely traditional.” This leads me to a rather stunning discovery about the “Apache Wedding Blessing,” sometimes known as the “Navajo Prayer.” Who hasn’t heard these words read at a wedding:

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other.

Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other.

Now there will be no loneliness, for each of you will be companion to the other.

Now you are two persons, but there is only one life before you.

May beauty surround you both in the journey ahead and through all the years.

May happiness be your companion and your days together be good and long upon the earth.

They are undeniably beautiful, evocative and moving – and, from an indigenous point of view, totally fake.

They are “traditionalesque,” a phrase coined by Rebecca Mead to describe any tradition invented or refurbished more for the purpose of creating a market than for carrying on a culture. The origins of the blessing are not Native American, but from the imagination of Elliot Arnold, author of the 1947 novel Blood Brothers, which later became the 1950 film Broken Arrow.

Since then, the fictional ceremony has appeared in countless wedding planning resources, “presented with the authoritative tone and use of the ahistorical past tense people use when they believe there is no one around to correct them.”

The poem does pass as Native American (as did Espera Oscar de Corti, known as “Iron Eyes Cody,” the Sicilian-American actor who portrayed the famous “crying Indian” in the environmentalist TV commercial).

Is this a reason to stop using it in weddings? Does it make us feel more deeply about the wedding because we think it is Native American? What characteristics do we associate with native people that make us feel this way? Authenticity? Tragedy? Simplicity? Childishness?

And, as usual, it gets complicated. Lia Falk writes

 What’s remarkable about this particular invented text is how far from the original it has metastasized, transposing it from fakelore to true folklore: it’s succeeded in masquerading as an authorless text for long enough that individual authors feel permitted to put their own touches on it. Of course, the Internet only speeds up such folk processing. I counted at least seven versions of “Apache Wedding Blessing” besides Arnold’s — it seems that every wedding officiant who’s used it has modified it to make it seem either more ancient and traditional or more palatable to the modern couple.

And as long as we’re talking about weddings, we have to acknowledge another painful aspect of this appropriation business in the Native American community itself. What term should we use to describe the worldwide process in which white Europeans imposed their literalized religious intolerance on the indigenous people they conquered? Cultural impropriation?

Traditional Diné (Navaho) people have always understood gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. Indeed, their language has terms for at least six genders. But after three centuries of contact with Christian fundamentalism, some Diné have absorbed the prejudices that  inevitably arise out of literalized, “either/or” thinking. Jolene Yazzie, who  has endured homophobia throughout her life, describes a young man named Rei who wanted to undergo a male puberty ceremony but had great difficulty finding a traditional healer willing to accept a transgender man. As for herself,

I identify as “bah” or dilbaa náhleeh (masculine woman)…I prefer a masculine gender role that doesn’t match my sex, but I continue to face bias over my gender expression… In September of 2017, (my partner and I) were determined to have a Navajo wedding and tried to find a traditional healer who would consider a marriage between two women. At one point, I found a medicine woman who supported same-sex marriages, but only if they were performed in a church or other non-Diné venue. She said that according to Navajo tradition, we couldn’t be blessed in the same way as a man and a woman, and she declined to perform the ceremony.

Eventually they found an in-law who held the ceremony, “But for people like Rei Yazzie, such a blessing may still be a long way off.”

These issues are not restricted to whites. Back to the folklore/fakelore conversation, we discover that it isn’t limited to Native Americans. Some argue that the ancient Hawaiian spiritual tradition – Ho’oponopono – was actually invented by a white man in 1935.

Now I’ll offer further complexity, and for a specific reason. When it comes to issues of spiritual belief and practice, we modern people, despite our claims to being comfortable with nuance, are actually obsessed with reducing complex issues to the sound bites of simplicity and literalization.

After completing the first four essays I came across a fascinating book: Talking About the Elephant: An Anthology of Neopagan Perspectives on Cultural Appropriation. The elephant, presumably, is the “elephant in the room” that no one will talk about. The editor brings together a dozen practitioners of various Neopagan paths to confront this issue and reveals some truly esoteric yet quite relevant debates within their communities.

One theme they all agree on is the inauthenticity of the large number of “Native American Tarot decks,”

which should remind us of the common projection of the “Noble Savage,” that “brave and self-sacrificing fellow” who originated not in the wilds of North America but in the imagination of French Romantic authors and colonialists. Kenaz Filan writes that the image

…combined the best of both worlds: they retained the innate decency of their primitive ancestors, combined with the best and most benevolent ideals of Christianity. They provided invaluable assistance to the colonists, and were content with their humble station. They were used to protest the expansionist social order, but also to reaffirm it.

There is a deep and justified anger here, and as I implied in earlier posts, it extends well into the area of modern appropriation. Several Native American websites warn (again, we ask, who decides?) against fraudulent teaching of their traditions – by both Indians and non-Indians:

http://www.newagefraud.org/

http://www.thepeoplespaths.net/articles/warlakot.htm

http://www.oocities.org/ourredearth/

http://www.hanksville.org/sand/intellect/newage.html

Indeed, the accusations and lists of frauds and “plastic shamans” are so long they remind us of those endless medieval lists of saints and devils. It all may boil down to the argument that true native people would never charge money for spiritual teachings, nor would they ever say that the teachings of a lifetime can be learned in a weekend seminar (And yet, how does one survive in America without an income? It’s complicated).

This position boils down even further, to a decidedly non-native way of thinking: the Anglo emphasis on purity and sin. Complicated: for every accusation there seems to be a denial.

Caveat: I am in no way criticizing the Native American contributors to these websites, only pondering some broader temptations that white Americans often fall prey to, which I will address in Part Six. As always, I’m more interested in how myth determines motivation and action – and also in the old American tradition of con-men masking as religious leaders.

Meanwhile, the book brings up other issues. Neopagan reconstructionists, for example, struggle with the question of whether it’s even possible to appropriate ancient cultural forms that no longer exist (hint: some of them do think so). Some writers claim that even some Native American and indigenous Siberian (the only group, strictly speaking, who are entitled to use the word “Shaman”) people are consciously reconstructing their own traditions after the devastations of Christianity, capitalism and communism.

Many practitioners of Asatru, the reconstructed, “heathen” worship of the old gods of pre-Christian northern Europe, adamantly claim that admittance into their religion should be strictly limited to those with genealogical proof of Nordic or Teutonic “blood.” Similar groups have adopted Odinist phrases like “Faith, Family, and Folk.”

This is not the first time that those who would revive a Teutonic, Pagan imagination have flirted with authoritarianism. It happened in early 20^th-century Germany. More recently, some have taken their obsession with purity to the illogical extreme of white supremacism, appropriating old Norse symbols such as Thor’s hammer as they marched through Charlottesville in the “Unite the Right” rally of 2017, attacked the Capitol in 2021 and participated in many other violent actions.  

Most recently, the mainstream of the Republican Party has unapologetically welcomed the most extreme of the extreme, symbolized by the “Othala Rune,” with its unmistakable connection to German Nazism. 

This is America in all its glorious contradictions: on the one hand, people making lots of money from the latest flirtation with spirituality and on the other, accusations of fraud and charlatanism. After the Native Americans, the “Celticists” seem to be making the most noise, and perhaps rightly so. Phillip Berhnadt-House, who is both a pagan and a Celtic academic, gives as an example a person who gives workshops on “Druidry and Celtic Shamanism” and who calls himself an “ollamah” (note the spelling); then he notes the actual qualifications that such people needed to attain in ancient Ireland:

An ollamh is supposed to be the son of a poet for three generations, undergoing a period of scholarly training and practice for many years, knowing 350 compositions at the pinnacle of ascent through the seven grades of poet.

And how about Wiccans and the well-known “Celtic Wheel of the Year,” the system of major holidays (sabbats) falling on the solstices, equinoxes and the four calendar dates exactly in between them? For example, Samhain/Halloween is halfway between the autumn equinox and winter solstice.

Thea Faye writes that they celebrate a pattern of the annual “death and rebirth of the God in conjunction with the fertility and life cycle of the Goddess.”

Most practitioners now seem to have accepted the scholarly consensus that the tradition was more or less invented around 1940 by Gerald Gardner, who gave a strongly British cultural accent to it. So much so, in fact, that some argue that there is little historical evidence of connection to the broader Celtic heritage of continental Europe.

All well and good; but the Wheel and its holidays, as Gardner reconstructed them, are all very specifically shaped by the natural, historical and mythic worlds of the British Isles, at their northern latitude. So, asks Faye, what happens when Wiccans in the southern hemisphere want to celebrate the Wheel? Shouldn’t they simply “spin the Wheel on its head” and reverse the order of the sabbats? Why not observe Samhain, the Celtic New Year, on April 30^th/May 1^st? She doesn’t think so: “…stating that the veil is thin on a particular date when it clearly is not is a road to nowhere.” Instead, she recommends knowing – really knowing – the world you live in: “…the beauty of a Nature based spirituality is that it is possible to adapt it to whatever your local environment has to offer.”

Part Six of this essay is here.

So, have Maya and I been engaging in cultural appropriation all these years? And which cultural forms are we making use of? The terms we need to make peace with are calling, permission, authenticity and community.

After participating in several Dagara (West African) grief rituals led by Malidoma Some´at men’s conferences in the 1990s, it was quite clear to me that I was called to this important work. Maya speaks of her calling here.

By the way, even then, Malidoma was incorporating elements of grief work from other cultures that some of us were suggesting! Permission? Malidoma specifically blessed us and told us to take the work into our communities.

Next comes the question of authenticity, the issue over which our friend was challenging us. Like us, she’d been to Mexico, and clearly, to call our event a “Day of the Dead Ritual” was not entirely accurate. To respond, we have to speak of the fourth term, community.

Malidoma, whose elders had sent him to the West, and whose name means “”He who makes friends with the strangers,” taught us, no community without ritual and no ritual without community. In America who among us really has community – people who actually live near each other – willing to engage in these rituals? It’s a conundrum that, if followed literally, is a recipe for fumbling and indecisiveness. As Kenn Day writes in Part Three of this blog, tribal rituals are for healing the entire group. And although traditional Dagara grief rituals require the participation of the entire community and take three full days to complete, Malidoma was clear that neither of those factors should inhibit our attempts to offer the work to the public. It was simply too important to split hairs over.

In that context, Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in Mexico also lasts for several days. And it is intimately associated with (Mexican) Catholicism. The dead visit their old homes, but the living spend the central night of the festival at their grave sites on consecrated ground. And it is a festival! The grieving is fundamental but not at all the sole emotion, as the people also party with their dead as only Mexicans can. Certainly there is no way to make a relatively short (one-day) event in a public hall for a group of non-Catholics, most of whom have never met each other, into a truly authentic Dia de los Muertos.

So first of all, we remember Michael Meade’s insight: To be honest, we never have real community in the old meaning of the term. The best we can do in this demythologized world is to invite like-minded people of deep intention to come together in brief periods of what he calls “ sudden community.” At our rituals, we encourage everyone to act (and speak) as if – as if we all really were members of a tribe who’d known each other all our lives. We make community for a few hours.

Many indigenous cultures knew the importance of setting aside a period during the year for inviting the dead to return, with terminology that translated as their own Days of the Dead. And they understood that certain liminal times were most appropriate. Cultures that use lunar calendars had (and in the far East, still have) these rituals a half year from the Lunar New Year (first full moon after the winter solstice): often on the first full moon in August. This is what the Mexicas (as the Aztecs called themselves) did. Their holiday lasted for twenty days, beginning on approximately August 8^th with Micailhuitontli (Small Feast of the Dead), to honor their deceased children, and ending with Huey Micailhuitl (Great Feast of the Dead), in which they honored those who died as adults.

Again, this appropriation business gets really complicated. Once the padres finally realized that they couldn’t extinguish the ancient rites, scandalous as they were, they forced the Mexicas to change the date of their festival from August to early November, the time of the Catholic festivals of All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day. But these festivals in turn had been created in the 10^th and 11^th centuries, when the (Roman Catholic) Church finally decided that it couldn’t wipe out the immensely old Celtic (primarily Irish) days of the dead.

Samhaim, the Celtic term, had always fallen on that liminal point in the solar calendar precisely between equinox and solstice. This was the day when the light half of the year switched to the dark half of the year and the veil between the worlds was the thinnest, when the boundaries between the seen and unseen worlds became permeable, and the spirits of the dead walked briefly among the living to eat the foods they loved when they were alive. To contemporary Neo-Pagans these are still times for loving remembrance. They are also sacred times, when great things are possible.

And they are dangerous times, since some spirits are hungry for more than physical food. Indigenous cultures from Bali to Guatemala agree that there is a reciprocal relationship between the worlds. What is damaged in one world can be repaired by the beings in the other. Such cultures affirm that many of our problems actually arise because we have not allowed the spirits of the dead to move completely to their final homes by not grieving them fully.

Maya and I had also been attending Spiral Dance,  San Francisco’s “Witch’s New Year,” at this time of year, because the Neo-Pagan calendar celebrations seemed to embody our sense that it was critical to attend to these times of transition.

Spiral Dance

Spiral Dance, now in its 31^st year, is both a grief ritual that attends to the dead who briefly return to this side of the veil and a party that welcomes in both the darkness itself and the imagination necessary to move forward.

We’d also been marching in the Day of the Dead Procession.  Latinos in the Mission District had introduced this tradition back in the 1970s, but it soon grew into one of San Francisco’s major events, with thousands of participants, mostly young white artists and college students.

Talk about cultural appropriation/appreciation! Critics (who may not have ever been to Mexico) see it as another excuse for a public party before the rainy season drives everyone indoors, with its drumming, samba dancers and political slogans. But each year the procession passes many front-porch shrines and then concludes at a park where people have lovingly created dozens of illuminated shrines to their dead, and the mood shifts from party to profound mourning.

At each shrine, its creators seem to be saying, “Look, I have sustained a deep loss. I must speak of it. I need you to see me. Come weep with me.” Appropriation? I don’t think so.

On the other hand, they do things differently down in Los Angeles (established by the Spanish as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, and previously known to the native Chumash as Yaanga, or “Poison Oak Place.”) For twenty years the Hollywood Forever Cemetery has hosted a massive Dia De Los Muertos celebration, with dozens of beautiful and thoughtful ofrendas. All well and good. But this is L.A., where everything invites commercialization. In 2017 Netflix built not one but five of these shrines to honor fictional characters who’d died that year. Appropriation? I think so.

It gets crazier. In 2013, the Disney Corporation attempted to trademark the phrases “Día de los Muertos” and “Day of the Dead”. The Latino community responded with a petition featuring a ferocious poster advertising “Muerto Mouse” and quickly gathered over 20,000 signatures. Disney, to its credit, backed down and even hired the poster’s creator Lalo Alcaraz as a creative consultant on the film Coco, which with his help turned out to be culturally accurate.

Anyway, Maya and I couldn’t help but notice that Celtic New Year and Day of the Dead had far more in common than differences, and that both were completely consistent with the Dagara ritual imagination. How, I asked Malidoma, do people acknowledge seasonal transitions in an equatorial country such as his (Burkina Faso), where there is no difference between the light and dark halves of the year? He answered that the Dagara take note of daily transitional times, dawn and dusk, which are also fraught with significance.

We had also been learning some of Martín Prechtel’s teachings from Guatemala, where the ancestors require two basic things from us: beauty and our tears. The fullness of our grief, expressed in colorful, poetic, communal celebrations, feeds the dead when they visit, so that when they return to the other world they can be of help to us who remain in this one. And by feeding them with our grief, we may drop some of the emotional load we all carry simply by living in these times. The ancestors can aid the living.

But they need our help to complete their transitions. Without enough people weeping for it on this side, say the Tzutujil Maya, a soul is forced to turn back. Taking up residence in the body of a youth, it may ruin his life through violence and alcoholism, until the community completes the appropriate rites. This is the essential teaching: when we starve the spirits by not dying to our false selves and embodying our authentic selves, the spirits take literal death as a substitute.

Here was yet another indigenous custom that seemed completely consistent with what we were doing. By the time we were able to travel to Bali and witness a traditional village cremation ritual, we were hardly surprised to see the cross-cultural parallels.

Balinese cremation ritual

It made perfect sense to us to respectfully incorporate them all into our rituals.

We recall Lupa Greenwolf’s words from Part Three:

So I very carefully reviewed what my practice entailed, did my best to claim that which I created myself while also being honest about how other cultures’ practices inspired me, and that’s where I drew my line, where I would back up no farther.

This is a good time to mention that David Chethlahe Palladin had an authoritative opinion on this issue. He was a legitimate shaman and one of the best-known Native American artists of his generation (read about his extraordinary life story here). As a painter, he mixed images from world mythology with traditional Navaho themes and wrote:

There may be times in our personal evolution when we become aware of archetypal themes that exist within the universal consciousness, and we draw upon them, regardless of their cultural or tribal origin.

Pagan thinking appreciates diversity and encourages us to imagine. Myth is truth precisely because it refuses to reduce reality to one single perspective. We came to entertain the possibility that if there is such a thing as truth, it resides in many places. And we felt called to appreciate the wisdom from many indigenous cultures, rather than to follow one path exclusively.

Besides, we felt that the times are too painful and the need too strong to reject anything authentic. We have proceeded on the basic assumption that we need all the help we can get. Even Malidoma used to begin his invocations with a prayer to the ancestors acknowledging that so much wisdom had already been lost, that he was clumsily trying his best and hoping that the spirits would reciprocate.

Curiously, we also came to realize that whenever we encounter people of serious intention who are also attempting to revive a truly indigenous imagination on American soil, they seem to intuitively understand the basic principles of ritual. Radical ritual, that is:

1 – We all carry immense loads of unexpressed grief. This is unfinished business and it keeps us from being present or from focusing on future goals.

2 – Beings on the other side of the veil call to us continually, but it is our responsibility to approach them through ritual, and this often implies creating beautiful shrines that visually represent that other side.

3 – Radical ritual implies creating a strong container, clarifying intentions, inviting the spirits to enter and not predicting the outcome. Radical ritual is by nature unpredictable. It is not liturgical but emotional.

4 – Radical ritual is always communal work.

5 – The purpose of radical ritual is always to restore balance.

6 – We must move the emotions. When ritual involves the body, the soul (and the ancestors) take notice. We dance our grief. Spontaneous, strong feeling indicates the presence of spirit.

7 – Ritual involves sacrifice. We attempt to release whatever holds us back, sabotages our relationships or keeps us stuck in unproductive patterns. In this imagination, the ancestors are eager for signs of our commitment and sincerity. What appears toxic to us, that which we wish to sacrifice becomes food to them, and they gladly feast upon both our tears and our beauty.

When we meet people with similar interests from other parts of the country, either we find that they have already intuited the same basic principles or are quite willing to learn them.

And – when we hear about what some other ritual teachers are offering, we can’t fail to notice the expensive rates they charge. Are we – who never refuse admission to our grief rituals to anyone for lack of funds – to judge them for their avaricious practices? Well, this is America after all, and perhaps such people are making a curious gesture of veneration for their Protestant ancestors! Perhaps Americans simply don’t value things if they don’t cost a lot. Indeed, as a ceramicist tells us, “When my pots don’t sell, I simply raise the price.”

Moral inventory or self-justification?

In summary, after researching this appropriation/appreciation dispute, we feel that our work and our terminology – a Day of the Dead Grief Ritual – fall squarely on the side of deep appreciation, with emphasis on calling, permission, authenticity and community. May the ancestors hear our cry and bless our endeavors. What do you think?

Part Five of this essay is here.

When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Dharma will come to the land of the red faces. – Tibetan Prophecy

S0 – What about those emissaries from Tibet and countless other cultures who have relocated to America and Western Europe specifically for the purpose of teaching their ways? All those Yogis and Sufis and shamans and Taoists and ayahuasca priests and Zen masters and gurus (the word “guru” is now used so commonly in American English that most people probably don’t realize its Hindu origin)?

All those who came to teach Tai Chi, Aikido, Judo, Kung Fu, Jujitso, acupuncture, Chinese herbalism, Qi Gung, Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Capoeira, I Ching, Vodoun, Santeria, Candomble, bagpipe, gamelan, didgeridoo, tango, hora, carnival, samba, klezmer, nigun, rebetika, kirtan, raga, sitar, koto, oud, ney, kalimba, belly dance, hula, slack key guitar, ho’oponopono, mariarchi, Cuban Jazz, Balkan choral chant, Flamenco, West African dance, drum and divination, Irish fiddle, Tuvan throat singing, Roma violin, Aztec dance, Oaxacan weaving, Greek dance, Andean pan pipe? How about all that fashion? Those exotic crafts and jewelry? All that food?

Is America really a “melting pot” or is it more of a mosaic? And in the other direction: what about all that enthusiasm for American Jazz in France, or Blues societies in Japan? And, yes, Americans traveling to India to teach meditation?

Or how about the curious case of the Mardi Gras Indians, those African-Americans who have been creating and dancing in astonishingly creative yet seemingly caricature “Indian” outfits in New Orleans since the 1880s? Is this not the most depressing depth of cultural appropriation? 

Are they any different from sports mascots such as “Cleveland Indians” or “Washington Redskins”? Or from the American tradition of all-white fraternal orders appropriating any foreign (like the “Shriners”, also known as the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine),  or native (such as the “Improved Order of Red Men”, which claimed to have a million members in the 1930s). ) artifacts? The Order of Red Men, by the way, had a women’s auxiliary group, the “Degree of Pocahontas.” 

Humor may be our best way out of this. In 2002 a mixed-race intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado called themselves the Fightin’ Whities and raised $100,000 on t-shirt sales. 

It turns out that the Mardi Gras Indians have given long and deep thought to the meaning and origins of their masking. They named themselves after Native Americans in appreciation for their historic willingness to assist, protect and often intermarry with escaped slaves. Ronald Lewis, former Council Chief of the Choctaw Hunters and curator of New Orleans’ “House of Dance and Feathers,” writes:

Coming out of slavery, being African American wasn’t socially acceptable. By masking like Native Americans, it created an identity of strength. Native Americans under all the pressure and duress would not concede. These people were almost driven into extinction, and the same kind of feeling came out of slavery, “You’re not going to give us a place here in society, we’ll create our own.” In masking, they paid respect and homage to the Native American by using their identity and making a social statement that despite the odds, they’re not going to stop.

The difference between thistradition and those condescending sports mascots returns us to questions of power and privilege, billionaire owners of sports teams vs. two equally disenfranchised ethnic minorities. 

And this example gets more complicated. The tale is told that Allison “Tootie” Montana, the oldest and most famous of the New Orleans Indian maskers, came to New York City to view an exhibition of ancient West African ceremonial art. He exclaimed that it looked exactly like many of the costumes his people had been designing for years, that the Africans had been copying him! Perhaps Montana, who had never been exposed to the art of his ancestors across the water, had intuited these art forms directly from the collective unconscious.

Tootie Montana (1922-2005)

Congolese king in regalia

Back to the Tibetans, etc: Aren’t these teachers asking for Americans to appropriate/appreciate their spiritual traditions? And what about those many teachers who have come here because they know that if Americans don’t help introduce those ways into our culture, then – as Martin Prechtel’s teacher told him – those traditions would disappear in their indigenous lands?

Or, like the Kogi people of Colombia, who teach that if modern people don’t learn their ways, the whole world might not survive? As one wise friend tells me in an ironic twist on the old missionary statement, “We must live among them in order to save them!”

Part Four of this essay is here.

The alternative to cultural appropriation is cultural appreciation: learning about another culture with respect and courtesy. Some prefer the term “cultural exchange.” It is appreciating a certain culture enough to take time to learn about it, interact (or study with) with members of its community, and receive a certain blessing to carry its wisdom forward. The operative word here is permission.

Universalist-Unitarians, who proudly but sensitively use many cultural forms, offer us a poem (appropriated from an unknown author) on their website:

Our first task in approaching
Another people, another culture, another religion
Is to take off our shoes
For the place we are approaching is holy.
Else we find ourselves treading on another’s dream.
More serious still, we may forget…that God
Was there before our arrival.

The site suggests questions that “borrowers” need to ask themselves:

1 – How much do I know about this particular tradition; how do I respect it and not misrepresent it?

2 – What do I know of the history and experience of the people from whom I am borrowing?

3 – Is this borrowing distorting, watering down, or misinterpreting the tradition?

4 – Is the meaning changed?

5 – Is this overgeneralizing this culture?

6 – What is the motivation for cultural borrowing? What is being sought and why?

7 – How do the “owners” of the tradition feel about pieces of the tradition being borrowed?

8 – If artifacts and/or rituals are being sold, who profits?

9 – Is this really spiritually healthy for Unitarian Universalists?

10 – How can we acknowledge rather than exploit the contributions of all people?

Chrystal Blanton writes:

As the frameworks of culture continue to evolve and change, so does the black and white definition of what constitutes appropriation. The context of how something is regarded, shared, explored or used may vary within different cultures and different time frames. This means there is not a clear definition of what is and is not an acceptable with regards to the use of elements from another culture. Context is everything.

She quotes three persons who’ve struggled deeply with these questions. The first is anthropologist Sabina Magliocco:

… while on paper one can try to distinguish appropriation from exchange, in practice, it’s much more complicated…Think of cultural exchange as a crossroads. In folklore, the crossroads is a liminal place of magic, but it’s also a dangerous place, a place where death and destruction can happen. Crossroads deities are tricky (Eshu, Loki, Odin) and fierce (Hekate). Yet from that destruction and trickery, new life arises. It’s kind of the same with cultural contact and exchange.

Usually, when defining cultural exchange, the premise is that the two cultures entering into the exchange are on equal terms: neither is more powerful than the other. Cultural material — narratives, verbal lore, music, material culture, foodways, magical techniques — are shared as part of the process of intercultural contact.

Appropriation happens when one culture conquers another, destroys or damages their culture and substitutes its own as the dominant culture, then borrows elements of the subjugated culture, re-contextualizing them for their symbolic value…avoiding blatant cultural appropriation is about respecting the feelings and rights of other cultures with which you co-exist. It’s about recognizing when there’s a history of power-over, exploitation, and cultural destruction, and being mindful of that…

Lupa Greenwolf, author and artist, speaks of her shamanic path:

…in the U.S. at least, there is no established shamanic path in the dominant culture, and so people who come from that culture (like me) have to choose either to try to shoehorn ourselves into an indigenous culture that we may not be welcome in let alone be trained in, or research cultures of our genetic ancestors and find that we are no more “culturally” German, or Slavic, or Russian than we are Cherokee or Dine’. Or we take a third road, which is to try to piece together from scratch some tradition that carries the same basic function as a shamanic practice in another culture, but which is informed by our own experiences growing up in the culture we happened to be born into.

I think the biggest problem is when non-indigenous people wholesale take indigenous practices, and then claim to be indigenous themselves. That’s part of what makes it tougher for people who are genuinely trying to create a practice for themselves while remaining as culturally sensitive as possible, because we get lumped in with those who outright lie about who they are. So you need to be honest and clear about where your practices come from and what inspired them…

I’ve had people tell me everything from “You shouldn’t use the word ‘shaman’” to “You shouldn’t use a drum with a real hide head” to “You shouldn’t work with hides and bones at all”, all because I’m a European mutt. For a while I kept backing up and backing up and acquiescing to whoever criticized me –and then I realized that if I gave in to every criticism, I’d have no practice left at all. So I very carefully reviewed what my practice entailed, did my best to claim that which I created myself while also being honest about how other cultures’ practices inspired me, and that’s where I drew my line, where I would back up no farther.

Kenn Day, author of several books on post-tribal shamanism, adds another factor: American individualism:

… the term “post-tribal shamanism”…differentiate(s) between the teachings I received and those of tribal cultures. However, many people make the assumption that, if you are practicing ceremony with ancestor spirits, then you have taken your practice from a native tradition…The call to practice shamanism is found in every culture. Just like everything else, it appears differently in each culture, yet it is still recognizable. The most important difference I see between the shamanism practiced in tribal cultures and what I teach and practice is that the tribal practices are focused on supporting, healing and maintaining the most import unit of that culture: the tribe itself. Our situation is dramatically different, in that the most important unit of our culture is the individual. This is where our practices need to be directed. Too many traditional practices are simply not appropriate for use with individuals, just as what I do would not be appropriate for tribal people.

It’s useful to think of Americans as the tribe of those who have no tribe. What does it mean to have no tribe, to not have ancestors of countless generations whose bones enrich the actual soil that we stand upon? Is there any relation between our lack of rootedness, our desperate need to keep moving around, our habits of overrunning other nations and our addiction to genocidal violence?

Part Three of this essay is here.

When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found. — West Africa

Over the years I have written extensively about grief: cross-cultural grieving traditions, the lack of such rituals in American life, the consequences of our inability to grieve and the absolute necessity of restoring  an apprenticeship with sorrow. I have addressed this critical subject in previous blogs here, here and here.

For many years I led grief rituals at men’s conferences, and for twenty years my wife Maya and I led similar events at the beginning of November, in what we call our annual Day of the Dead Ritual. So, we were bewildered when a good friend challenged us: had we been engaging in “cultural appropriation” in referencing the Mexican holiday but not celebrating it in precisely the way Mexicans do, and of course, by not being Mexican ourselves?

Fair enough. It’s an important question, and in the interest of getting as clear as possible about what we do and why (indeed, I define “radical ritual” as, in part, the clarification of intention), I discovered that there is a vast debate on this topic.

Susan Scafidi, author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, defines cultural appropriation as

Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission…(including the)…unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.

Cultural Appropriation occurs when members of a dominant culture use aesthetic forms or artifacts from other cultures – or worse, profit from them – but don’t show any respect for their deeper meaning. In its extreme, it is a form of racism that perpetuates the old message that Third-World cultures are free for the taking.

“By dressing up as a fake Indian”, one Native American told white students, “you are asserting your power over us, and continuing to oppress us.” It comes down to yet another aspect of (white or economic) privilege.

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of cultural appropriation is an imbalance of power. When people from privileged cultures or backgrounds attempt to dictate what is and is not cultural appropriation, they are reinforcing the imbalance of power that has continued to steal the voice from people of color throughout history.

And it gets complicated. Tamara Winfrey Harris writes:

 A Japanese teen wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a big American company is not the same as Madonna sporting a bindi as part of her latest reinvention. The difference is history and power. Colonization has made Western Anglo culture supreme – powerful and coveted. It is understood in its diversity and nuance as other cultures can only hope to be.

Very complicated. The African-American community itself struggles with these questions. Is it cultural appropriation for an American Black person to wear a dashiki? Some native Africans think so. And, apparently, some South Asians have accused East Africans of appropriating some of their cultural traditions.

Even contemporary, eclectic Neo-Paganism (a pretty good description of my views) is full of argument about what they may be appropriating, to which John Halstead answers, “We’re all appropriating dead pagan cultures.”

So it all comes down to permission, right? Well, it gets even more complicated. Kenan Malik asks, what does it mean for knowledge or an object to “belong” to a culture? Who gives permission for someone from another culture to use that knowledge and those objects? And what authority has given them permission to announce themselves as gatekeepers?

After all, to suggest that it is “authentic” for blacks to wear locks, or for Native Americans to wear a headdress, but not for whites to do so, is itself to stereotype those cultures…The history of culture is the history of cultural appropriation – of cultures borrowing, stealing, changing, transforming. Nor does preventing whites from wearing locks or practicing yoga challenge racism in any meaningful way. What the campaigns against cultural appropriation reveal is the disintegration of the meaning of “anti-racism”. Once it meant to struggle for equal treatment for all. Now it means defining the correct etiquette for a plural society. The campaign against cultural appropriation is about policing manners rather than transforming society.

Indeed, those who attempt to keep their own culture “pure” and free of any borrowed elements may well fall into a kind of cultural – and political – fascism, something that appears to be developing among certain kinds of right-wing, nationalist Paganisms in Eastern Europe, Russia and Britain, as we’ll see below.

In America religion, business and empire have been intertwined almost since the beginning. This situation created a longing for authentic spiritual traditions among a minority who were attracted to the first wave of Eastern teachers and a much larger population who rediscovered Native American religion in the 1960s. The New Age was born, and along with many authentic teachers and movements have come the usual crop of con-men, who see the possibilities in appropriation and take it to its logical extreme.

“Selling the Sacred: Get Your Master’s in Native American Shamanism?” – The Native American journal Indian Country, complains of

…what New Agers are doing in Indian country…they have made a popular culture of the sacred invisible, and are selling it to the highest bidder. A case in point is the Divine Blessings Academy, which objectifies and quantifies spirituality as a product for sale. Though an Internet outcry quickly forced the academy to take down its “Native American Shaman” program from its website, it had offered a four-year degree, a master’s program, and post graduate degree in Native American Shamanism.

A perusal of the course catalogue, which was obtained before it was deleted, shows that Divine Blessings Academy offers courses in: The Hopi Prophecy Stone, Smudging and Basic Tools, Finding Your Power Animal, A Form of Reiki Using Native American Principles, Creating and Using Feather Fans, Native American Mantras and Prayers, receiving a Magikal name, and dozens more. Graduation entitles the student to join the Native American Shamanism Society and to receive “a personalized full-color certificate, which will be mailed directly to the student’s home.” (Where else would they mail it?)…All of these courses are offered through downloadable PDF files.

Part Two of this essay is here.

¡Bienvenudo al Mundo Tercero! Driving south from Texas in a huge SUV with my friend Michael who is on his way to do anthropology field work in Belize. Me, I’m simply escaping an unbearable emotional crisis at home, the breakdown of my marriage and all I had ever thought of as normal. All is illusion, Maya.

We have great conversations as I grieve inwardly – Jazz on the tape deck – tiny, thatched huts – transition from desert to semi-tropics, from cacti to palm trees – cornfields, distant volcanoes – town drunks, – sixteenth-century churches, grinding poverty. Macho truck drivers passing each other on dangerous curves, challenging la muerte.

Our first night out, in our motel we are awakened at 4:00 AM by the screams of a pig being slaughtered outside our window – beach resorts – watching baseball games with chickens wandering through the outfield – flowering papaya trees – men on horses and burros – sugar cane – short, tired women with ubiquitous pregnant bellies – giant speed bumps (topes) at the entrance to each town force us to slow down, where we are quickly surrounded by kids begging or selling Chicklets. Colossal Olmec stone heads.

Burning cane fields: yellow flames, grey smoke, impossibly green grass, with brilliantly white egrets feasting on insects at the edge of each fire – fruit stands with huge bunches of bananas – shrines to the dead everywhere on the sides of the highway – open trucks full of farmworkers – pineapple plantations – everyone in the towns selling something – cantinas/whorehouses.

Faithful to one woman for eighteen years, I want to make a ritual gesture of separation. However, as The People’s Guide to Mexico says, “A visit to a brothel that caters to campesinos and local businessmen is funny and surrealistic rather than erotic.” The gesture will have to wait.

Oil towns – moneychangers – plastic “crafts” – campesinos walking in the dark near a VW dealership – a bridge next to the road, crossing nothing – pollo en mole con arroz – platanos fritos, pescados murrader (with the dreaded jabanero pepper known as “El Chernobilito”), liquados, corn on the cob stands on three-wheel bicycles – cattle ranches – RV caravans driven by fat Texans– a happy madness – passeos in the zocalos – theme from Exodus wafting out of a craft shop – local merchants patiently letting me try to bargain in primitive Spanish, then switching to English for the credit card transaction – swimming at a beautiful natural spring with friendly locals, then returning to the SUV with anti-gringo curses written in the dust caked on the vehicle – the exuberance and complexity of the visual/auditory/olfactory world competing with, almost mirroring, the loopy turmoil of my inner world.

A bizarre but common sight: local police or military standing with shotguns in front of every bank or public building in every town, no matter how small – guarding what? From whom? These peasants? Who is the freer, more advanced population? We Norteamericanos who (after eight years of Ronald Reagan) don’t need to have the dominant paradigms of power prominently displayed or shoved down our throats, because we have utterly internalized them – or these people, heirs to a living history of resistance? Indeed, a mere five years later, in towns not so far from here, the Zapatista rebellion would begin.

Sensory overload in the towns – heat and traffic in Tuxpan, smelly Tampico, Coatzacoalas, Cardenas, Olmec ruins at La Venta, Mayan ruins at Xpujil, Villa Hermosa, Escarcega – then the vast cultural complex and psychedelic Mecca of Palenque, with its hoards of tall, blonde European tourists, the young women dressed scandalously in this conservatively Catholic region – the further south we go, the more we see signs saying “Maya” this, “Maya” that, on every billboard or bus – the slanting facial profiles of the tiny, barefoot indigenas selling souvenirs exactly matching those on the ancient sculptures.

All along, we have been seeing gigantic trucks bearing “dichos” (mottos or proverbs) on their front fenders. Many are muy macho; others are self-mocking, sad or philosophical: Rambo, El Chillero, El Timido, Zorro, Casi un Angel, Corre Caminos (Road Runner), El Puma, Dios me Permitte Regresso, Cruz Azul, Christo Negro – Casi Siempre, Don Juan, No Vale la Pena, Super Galan, Angel Salvage – Vagabudo – Ama sin Dueno – Coronel Javiercito – En el Nombrese de Dios – Christo Rey, Comanche, Bonanza, Creo en Ti, Senor, Bandolero, Huevitos, Lo Siento por Ti, Quien como Dios? (For more, see Grant La Farge’s delightful book, Faith in God and Full Speed Ahead!: Fe En Dios Y Adelante : Dichos from the Trucks and Buses of Mexico and Latin America).

The SUV breaks down twice, but each time it restarts after cooling off. Approaching Vera Cruz, we encounter the gigantic Pemex petroleum refinery, stretching for vast distances along the highway, with dozens of 100-foot-tall steel towers and smokestacks, miles of interconnecting pipes, steam, noise – a surreal, futuristic scene, yet evoking images of Hindu temples, Spanish cathedrals, Cape Canaveral, sci-fi cityscapes, the place as much a shrine to the gods of technology as the other buildings are to theirs.

Then trouble: the SUV stalls out yet again. We pull over and open the hood, waiting for the engine to cool down again. I get out and take some photos of this bizarre scene directly across the highway from us, then return to the SUV. Soon, we see two jeep loads of soldiers approaching – to help us repair the truck? ¡Pero no! Turning to my right, I encounter the muzzles of two M-16 rifles inches from my face! I think this is rather funny, until Michael jabs me in the side with his elbow, informing me that my irreverence is somewhat inappropriate.

Courteously but firmly, the commanding officer informs us that we (did I mention that both of us are long-haired and unshaven?) look like terroristas, and that it is forbidden to photograph the oil refinery. After reviewing our identification, he demands my camera so as to expose my role of film (remember film?), when Michael explains in his excellent Spanish that he’s an anthropologist and that we’d only been photographing ruins and cultural sights (true enough) before seeing the refinery, the photos of which were at the end of the film roll.

El teniente is flattered, polite, if somewhat lax in security terms; he possesses that Hispanic quality of extreme honor and dignity known as pundonor. Taking us at our word, deciding that we are harmless, he gallantly exposes only the last pictures on the roll and hands it back to me with the remaining frames intact. He offers us his compliments, wishes us buen viaje, collects his troops and drives off – without offering any assistance with our SUV, which eventually starts up on its own. We depart from that mysterious place, unaware that 27 years later a massive explosion there will kill 24 workers.

A few hours later we stall yet again after gassing up at a rural gas station that has no services. We watch some more baseball for a while, but it still won’t restart. Eventually, some bored guys who’d been waiting for a bus approach us and offer to help. They tell us the local gasoline is muy malo and often clogs fuel filters, resulting in that double entendre, No hay tigre en el tanque.

We have extra filters, but no wrench to remove the old one. No problemo, they respond, and ask for a large screwdriver and a hammer, which we do have. One of them climbs onto the engine, whacks the screwdriver with the hammer, drives it all the way through the fuel filter, grabs both ends of the screwdriver and turns it until he has unscrewed and removed the filter! They call their method El estilo Mexicano: use whatever you have on hand to get the job done. They refuse cash payment but do accept several beers, which we share in the heat. The SUV starts up, we embrace our new friends and move on.

Vera Cruz on a weekend: thousands of partiers, soldiers, gringo tourists, police, children, musicians, Indians, food carts, teenagers and prostitutes. And, in front of every small mercado, postcard stands with five-cent pictures of the same Pemex refinery, from every angle, the same photos we’d almost been shot for taking! ¡El estilo Mexicano! ¡Como Mexico no hay dos!

More of my articles about Mexico:

Mexico’s Mother Goddess

Protest, Grief and Memory in Mexico

The Prince of Flowers

The Weeping Woman

How powerful are the words we use? How have they influenced the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves? To really understand, we need to know how Christianity arose.

Only monotheistic thinking, with its simplistic dualisms, sees difference as a threat to be eliminated; whatever isn’t aligned with our god must necessarily follow his opposite. Here is a clue: if your people consider their story to be literally true and other people’s stories are “myths,” then you and your people are thinking mythically or literally. Other mono-words share the brittleness of one correct way: monopoly, monogamy, monolithic, monarchy, monotonous.

By the time of Jesus the idea that humans are alienated from God was firmly in place (Genesis 6: 5-6). And so was the idea that the children of light must forever confront the children of darkness. God forbade men to create “graven images,” which were central to indigenous spirituality. Later Christians would fight brutal wars over this question. This was the birth of monotheism’s assault upon the imagination.

Word One: Hamartia

Greek mythmakers had long told stories of tragic heroes. Aristotle used the word hamartia (“error” or “missing the mark,” a term from archery) to describe the hero’s inevitably fatal flaw, the wound that connected him to his potential. It was, paradoxically, the very thing that made him unique. In both the Greek and the Celtic worlds, if sin had any meaning at all, it meant “failure,” and – this is critical – potentially any failure can be reversed. Christians, however, interpreted hamartia as inherent and inescapable sinfulness, mankind’s literal inheritance from Adam’s original mythic transgression. From this thinking came the doctrine of original sin. Men needed discipline and moral purification to control their darker side.

The change in the meaning of hamartia is an historical marker that drags us into a fearsome new world in which every single person is tainted from birth with the mark of evil. By this logic, children are corrupt by nature and must be kept from polluting adults through baptism (“to dip, steep, dye, color”) very soon after birth. It was a toxic mimic of indigenous initiation ritual.

Word Two: Daimon

Another factor in the solidification of Christian dogma (originally, “opinion”) was the rational and ascetic Greek philosophical tradition. The Church turned Plato’s notion of a realm of pure ideas into the afterlife, which was a higher, better place than the sensual world. Another old word took on new meaning. Plato wrote that before birth each soul receives a unique soul-companion or daimon that selects a pattern for it to live on earth. James Hillman explains, “The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and…is the carrier of your destiny.” It was known as genius (related to gene, generate) by the Romans and jinn or genie by the Arabs.

Like hamartia, daimon was connected to the universal notion of purpose. Older traditions understood the vast complexity of the human soul, but Greek dualism marked a clear boundary between good from evil. In the second century B.C.E., the seventy men who translated the Hebrew Bible into a Greek book (the Septuagint) used daimonion to denote evil or unclean spirits.

Thus, with two linguistic shifts, western man gradually lost both his guiding spirits and his sense of his innate purpose in life. Eventually, one’s intuition, if it disputed church dogma, would express only the voice of the demonic, and the pagan gods, archetypal images of human and cosmic potential, became demons.

Changes in language signaled changes in cult practice. The breakdown of ritual eventually led to a condition in which human urges that were once hallowed to the gods became acts of evil. The church repressed them into the personal and collective unconscious and blamed all suffering upon human sinfulness. Orphism had taught that the soul (derived from Dionysus) was potentially good; but the body (from the ashes of the Titans) was its prison, where it remained until all guilt had been expiated. This led, writes E. R. Dodds, to “a horror of the body and a revulsion against the life of the senses.” The Orphics themselves had written: “Pleasure is in all circumstances bad; for we came here to be punished.”

As the age of mythological thinking neared its end, it became more difficult to think in terms of the symbolic processes of initiation and rebirth. The holy text that emerged out of this period omitted the few metaphors of the sacred Earth that had been allowed into Hebrew scripture. As a result, writes Paul Shepard, the New Testament is “one of the world’s most antiorganic and antisensuous masterpieces of abstract ideology.”

All these factors were rolled into the messianic tradition. Pagan cults had expressed a longing for the return of the king or the divine child who was reborn in the hearts of the initiates. But as mythological thinking declined, the Jews longed for a literal messiah (“the anointed”, Khristos in Greek). They witnessed the quick passing of many such figures, including the historic Jesus. After his death, however, he became “The Christ,” a concept, writes Arthur Evans, that was molded by traditions that had “…nothing to do with his life, applied by people who never knew him, recorded in a language he never used.”

Word Three: Apocalypse

At first, the Roman world welcomed the new god. Their cosmos was still marked by epiphany, the continual manifestation of spirit in the world. Paganism never needed to create structures of belief. Celebration of multiple divine images was one of its most essential characteristics.

But it was precisely this animating connection between cosmos, Earth and individual that Christianity sought to replace. Its transcendent god could only enter the world through revelation, which led to dogma and reduced a world of possibilities to one of dreadful certainties. This god was kept alive through belief, not through sacrifices. Saint John of Patmos interpreted his apocalyptic dream vision not as an internal initiation experience, a “lifting of the veils,” but as universal destruction. His Book of Revelation is ecstatic poetry. Interpreted literally, however, it is the very definition of – and a prescription for – madness. To Puritans obsessed with judgment and evil it became the Bible’s most important section. Later, they would invent the Antichrist to embody the world’s resistance to the Word, who “…became flesh and resided among us.”

Word Four: Pagan

For generations, the new belief (a word that has long lost its etymological connection to “love”) system was primarily urban. Everywhere across Europe, rural people were the last to be forcefully converted (some not until the 14^th century), since they lived closer to the natural and still magical world that had been served by the older cults. Christians called them “country dwellers” (paganus). Eventually the term Pagan became so thoroughly defamed that today’s English language can barely describe it in value-neutral terms. Common dictionary definitions include “an irreligious or hedonistic person.” For millennia these people had gratefully accepted the mysterious bounty of the earth in the form of Dionysus’ wine and Demeter’s bread. The Eucharist (“thanksgiving, gratitude”) ritual eventually expressed this same mystery, after having removed both Dionysus and Demeter.

In the late fourth century the Church set the Christian canon (“measuring line, rule”), which excluded much writing that posed alternatives to the new orthodoxy (“right, true, straight”). It declared that Jesus had been born on December 25th. Now, his birth coincided with the rebirth of the sun, and the symbolism of his light conquering darkness matched a common theme in ancient hero myths. Other old beliefs, such as reincarnation, died slowly. Early theologians had embraced it, but eventually the church opposed it because it promoted the idea that men could find the truth for themselves, without intercession by religion. It wasn’t until 543, however, that they declared it anathema (“devoted to evil”).

Absolutely nothing attributed to Jesus in the Gospels suggested anything about his death as a sacrifice. Saint Paul, however, changed Christianity’s central image from the birth of the Divine Child to his death and resurrection. An invitation to immanence became an excuse for transcendence. A religion of love became an obsession with suffering. It taught that Christ’s sacrifice had occurred once, not as part of an unending cycle. Emphasis on this single event and the progression from creation to salvation solidified our concept of linear time and led to the invention of clocks, which eventually contributed to the regulation of social behavior for the purpose of production (the word “calendar” came from the Latin calends, the first day of the month, when business accounts had to be settled). The western world understood myth literally, as actual history. Jesus, unlike Dionysus, had died not to symbolize the cycle of creation but as a payment for humanity’s bad behavior.

In the indigenous world men had always understood the necessity of symbolically killing the child-nature in their boys to invite their full participation in the adult world. But the crushing of paganism produced a different narrative, the actual sacrifice of a child for the glory of his father. Fanatics emulated this god, and Europe feasted on the bodies of its young in constant warfare.

Word Five: Martyr

Jesus was now the suffering god, but not the ecstatic, bisexual destroyer of boundaries, and no longer a Prince of Peace. Worshipers beheld his stern figure, the Pantocrator (“ruler of all”), glaring down from church ceilings, amid horrifying scenes of the Last Judgment. “Because a monotheistic psychology must be dedicated to unity,” writes Hillman, “its psychopathology is intolerance of difference.” For centuries, white men would rape and pillage to hasten the coming of the Prince of Peace. The meaning of the word martyr gradually changed. Abraham’s knife became a soldier’s sword in Christian iconography. Dying as Christ (around 100AD) became dying for Christ (500), which became killing for Christ (1000).

Word Six: Breath

Dualistic thinking and misogyny were interlinked in language. Men identified with mind and spirit and associated women with nature and the body. We can follow the linguistic shift. The Old Testament Hebrew word ruah (spirit/breath) is feminine. Translated to Greek it became pneuma, which is neuter. But Saint Paul elevated pneuma to the Trinity as the Holy Ghost, which became the masculine spiritus in Latin. In a long, mysterious process, spirit would become an Alchemical term, a substance that unites the fixed and volatile elements of the philosopher’s stone, and eventually the essence of distilled alcohol.

Word Seven: Evil

As I mentioned in Part One, the Aramaic word used by Jesus and translated into Greek as diabolos and into English as “evil” actually means “unripe.” An unripe person is not evil; he is simply immature, or in ritual terms, uninitiated. His antisocial behavior may be nothing more than a cry for help. The classic Hero doesn’t overcome evil, not even an evil part of himself, but his own “unripeness.” Through the corruption of the term hamartia, however, the Church made it clear that no one was unripe; everyone was inherently evil.

Word Eight: Devil

The Holy Ghost required an evil twin. In Hebrew myth, Satan was originally an adversary of humans and enforcer of Jehovah’s will. His meaning gradually changed from “opponent” into a personality whose nature is to obstruct, a rebellious prince in eternal opposition to the divine will. The Septuagint used the Greek word diabolikos (accuser, slanderer, “to throw across”), which became the English “devil.” Hebrew myths of the fallen angel (Lucifer, or “light-bringer”) added to the image of this eternal opposition: “How thou art fallen, oh day-star…” (Isaiah 14:12).

This established the foundations for European racism. Light/white became synonymous with spirit/goodness, while dark/black represented the material and sensual world. The New Testament solidified the image; Barnabus described Satan as the “Black One.” Saint Jerome linked blackness with sex; the Devil’s strength was “in his loins.” Augustine (himself a North African) claimed that everyone is black until he accepts Christ.

The choice was now clear and unambiguous. If one wasn’t an observant Christian, he followed the dark prince. In this form, writes Jacob Needleman, the Devil becomes irredeemably evil: “All the truly terrifying images of the devil are in one way or another rooted in the diabolical.”

As early as the second century, Clement of Alexandria declared that the gods of all other religions were demons. Since their mere existence placed in doubt the belief in one true God, they could only be in league with Satan. The church now had an “Other” to justify its Catholic (“universally accepted”) self-perception – and justification for its genocidal crusades.

Scholars disagree as to how Satan received his popular image. Some claim that the earliest model was the lecherous goat-god Pan. Early Christians feared Pan because of his shameless sexuality and his association with the wilderness, where hostile spirits lay in wait. He caused panic. They depicted Satan with Pan’s hooves, oversized phallus and horns, which carry a potent ambiguity, writes historian Jeffrey Russell. They symbolize Satan’s power and evoke the “mysterious, frightening otherness of animals…not only fertility but also night, darkness and death.”

Some link Satan with the European Horned God, consort of many Goddesses, especially those worshipped on the island of Crete. These images evoked the ambiguous mix of fertility and death (not evil) that indigenous people still understand, but which the modern mind splits into two figures.

Others connected Satan with Hades, ruler of the underworld, but the Greeks also knew Hades as Pluto (“wealth,” root of “plutocrat”). Here is as sharp a divide as we can find between monotheism and Pagan thinking, which perceives a wealth of possibilities both under the ground and in the psychological underworld. The Western world would not begin to imagine these possibilities until the late 19^th century, when Freud “discovered” the unconscious, although he admitted, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”

Word Nine: Heretic

The paranoid imagination created enemies within to match those without. More dangerous than pagans were Satan’s followers who took the form of schismatics who divided the community with false doctrines, and heretics (“able to choose”).

Word Ten: Hell

When Christians assigned Satan a realm to administer, they named it after Hella, Nordic goddess of the underworld, sister of the wolf who threatens to emerge and wreck vengeance upon the gods of the upper world. Greece, however, has retained indigenous associations. There, the lord of Hell is still Charon, the ferryman of the river Styx (“the hateful”), and rural Greeks still place coins over a dead person’s eyes to pay for the journey. If Hades (as Pluto/wealth) is forgotten, his ferryman still makes a tidy profit.

Part of the work of bringing soul back into the world is learning to address each other with beautiful, complex, multi-faceted, nuanced (slight difference, shade of color, mist, vapor, cloud) language (tongue; Spanish: lengua), and to know how our words have evolved over many centuries from their original Greek, Latin, Germanic or other meanings.

So here is a very incomplete list of English words with surprising (related to comprehend) roots, original meanings and connections to other common words.

I invite you to bookmark an etymology dictionary on your computer. Get into the habit of wondering, “Hey, what does that word mean? Is it related to this other one? Why?”

Adolescence             – Becoming adult; related to nourish, old

Adulate                      – To wag the tail

Aggravate                  – To make heavier; related to grief

Agony                         – A struggle for victory; related to protagonist, act, antagonize

Alcatraz                     – Large web-footed sea bird, related to albatross

Alcohol                       – To stain; related to kohl, powder used to darken the eyelids

Amateur                     – One who loves; related to amor

Ambition                    – A going around to solicit votes.

Ambivalent                – Both strengths; related to valiant

Amnesia                    – Loss of memory (the goddess Mnemosyne); related to mind

Analyze                      – From Dionysus “the Loosener”; related to catalyst, release, lose, solve

Anesthetic                 – Lack of sensation (to pleasure or pain), loss of beauty

Anger                         – Tight, painfully constricted, narrow, to squeeze; related to anxious

Animate                     – To give life to, from anima (“life, soul, breath”), related to animal

Anthology                  – Gathering of flowers

Anxiety                       – Tight, constricted; possibly from Ananke, goddess of Necessity

Apocalypse               – To lift the veil; related to Calypso

Apprentice                 – Someone learning; related to apprehend

Arena                         – Sandy place to soak up blood in Roman or Spanish amphitheaters

Arctic                          – The Bear constellation

Assassin                    – Related to hashish

Assist                         – To take a stand; related to resist

Asterisk                      – Little star

Astound                     – To thunder, deafen, related to astonish

Astronaut                   – Sailor of the stars

Atone                         – To be at one

Auspicious                 – Divination by observing the flight of birds; related to augur, auspices

Author                        – One who causes to grow; related to authority, augment

Average                     – Financial loss incurred through damage to goods in transit

Ballet                          – To throw one’s body; related to ball, diabolic, parable, devil, metabolize

Barbarian                  – Unintelligible speech of foreigners

Believe                       – Related to love, libido, lovely

Bible                           – From Byblos, the port that exported papyrus; related to bibliography

Bless                          – Blood sprinkling on pagan altars; possibly related to wound

Boil                             – Related to bull (Papal edict)

Book                           – A beechwood tablet on which runes were inscribed

Boulevard                  – Top surface of a military rampart; related to bulwark

Bowel                         – Sausage; related to botulism

Bugger                       – A Bulgarian

Caesar                       – Leader who has long hair; related to Kaiser, czar, caesarian

Calendar                    – Calends, the first day of the Roman month, when debts fell due

Canard                       – To half-sell ducks

Cancer                       – Crab-shaped; related to canker

Capital                       – Pertaining to the head; related to capitalism, capo (Mafia), decapitate

Capitol                       – From temple of Jupiter on Rome’s Capitoline Hill

Carnival                     – To temporarily stop eating meat; related to carnage, incarnation

Casino                       – Little house

Cataclysm                 – To wash down; related to cloaca

Catastrophe             – To turn downward

Catholic                     – Universally accepted; related to whole

Cereal                         – From the Roman Goddess of agriculture, Ceres (Greek: Demeter)

Chattel                       – Property, goods; related to cattle

Checkmate                – The King is dead

Chemical                   – From alchemy, that which is poured out

Chivalry                     – Horsemen; related to cavalier, cavalry

Chlorine                     – From the goddess Chloris/Chloe; related to chlorophyll, chloroplast

Chorus                       – A dance in a circle, enclosed dancing floor; related to choreography

Circle                          – Related to circus, circumstance, cycle, chakra, zodiac, Circe

Collude                      – To play with

Combat                     – To beat together; related to battle, batter

Comet                        – Long-haired star

Communicate           – To make common

Companion               – Bread mate; related to accompany

Compassion             – To suffer together

Compete                    – To petition the gods together; related to competent

Complain                   – To strike, beat the breast; related to plague

Complicate                – To fold together; related to complicit

Compost                    – To place together; related to compote, position, posit

Comrade                   – Sharing the same room or bed; related to camera, chamber

Condescend             – To go down together

Condolence             – To suffer together; related to doleful

Condom                     – A glove

Conflagration            – Burning together; related to flagrant, bleach (v.)

Conflict                      – To strike together; related to afflict

Confound                  – To pour together

Congregate               – To collect in a flock, related to gregarious, aggregate

Conjugal                    – To yoke together, related to jugular, conjugate

Conjure                      – With the law

Conspire                    – To breathe together

Consider                    – With the stars; related to desire

Conscious                 – To be mutually aware; related to conscience, science

Constipate                 – To pack or cram together; related to stiff

Contagion                  – Touch closely; related to contact

Converse                   – To turn about with

Convince                   – Related to conquer, victory, invincible

Cosmetic                   – Good order; related to cosmos, cosmic

Courage                    – Heart; related to discord, record

Create                        – Arise, grow; related to crescent

Crisis                          – Turning point in a disease, indicating recovery or death

Culture                       – Tend, guard, cultivate; related to colony

Cure                           – Take care of; related to curate, accurate, curious

Curfew                       – Ringing of a bell in the evening hour; signal to cover the fires

Currency                    – Value of herd animals that run; related to car, career, cargo

Custom                      – Related to costume

Cynic                         – Dog-faced; related to canine, canary

Damn                         – Damage, harm; loss, injury; a penalty; related to indemnity

Danger                       – Power of a lord or master; related to domain, dominate, domestic

Decadent                   – To fall apart; related to accident, cadaver, casualty

Decimate                   – Killing one prisoner in ten at random

Delight                       – Related to dilettante, delicious

Debate                       – To beat down

Decrepit                     – To crack, creak; related to raven

Dilapidate                  – To throw stones at; related to lapidary

Deliberate                  – To weigh in scales; related to Libra

Deluded                     – Out of the game

Demon                       – Related to daemon, jinn, genie (genius)

Deprecate                 – To pray against; related to postulate, prayer, precarious

Desire                        – Await what the stars will bring; related to consider

Despair                      – To lose hope (French: espoir), related to desperate, desperado

Destroy                      – Un-build; related to structure

Diabolic                      – To throw across; related to ballistic, devil, ball, ballet, ballad

Dilettante                   – Related to delight

Dinosaur                    – Terrible lizard (from Deinos, son of Ares), related to dire

Disaster                     – Against the stars

Discourse                  – A running about

Divide                         – Related to widow, with

Doctor                        – Make to appear right; related to decent

Economy                   – Ordering of the household

Educate                     – To bring forth what is within, to lead; related to Duke

Electric                       – Resembling amber

Elude                         – Out of the game

Emotion                     – To move out, remove, agitate

Empathy                    – Feeling suffering, related to pathos, pathetic, empathic, sympathy

Employ                       – Entangle, enfold; related to implicate, ply, imply, deploy

Encyclopedia            – Training in a circle

Entertain                    – To hold together

Enthusiastic             – Filled with a god

Epidemic                   – Among the people

Eskimo                       – Eater of raw meat, or snowshoe-netter

Excruciating              – Related to crucify, cross

Exhilarate                  – To make cheerful; related to hilarious

Exonerate                  – To remove a burden; related to onus, onerous

Experiment                – Try, risk; related to experience, peril

Explain                       – To flatten or limit

Explore                      – To weep, cry out; related to deplore

Extort                         – To twist or wrench out; related to torque

Extravagant             – To wander outside

Exuberant                  – Overflowing; related to udder

Family                        – Servants of a household

Fan                             – Inspired by a god (fanatic); related to feast, fancy, festival

Fascinate                  – Amulet in the form of a phallus

Fate                            – Spoken by the gods; related to fame, fable

Fatal Flaw                 – To miss the mark in archery

Feminine                   – She who suckles; related to fecund, affiliate, fennel, fetus, fawn

Flesh                          – From German fleisch (pork, bacon)

Forest                         – Outside; related to foreign, door

Fornicate                   – Arch, vaulted chamber or opening; related to furnace, thermal

Fortune                      – From Roman goddess of luck Fortuna

Fragment                   – A piece broken off; related to fraction

Gamble                      – Related to game, gamey

Gargoyle                    – Waterspout, from French for throat, related to gargle

Gasket                       – Young girl; whore, harlot, concubine; related to garcon

Genius                       – Guardian deity watching over one from birth; related to genie, genial

Gentle                        – High-born; related to gentry, gentrify, gentleman, genus, genteel

Ghetto                        – The iron foundry (getto) in Venice where the Jews had to live

Glamor                       – Female enchantment, occult knowledge; related to grammar

Glaucoma                  – Owl, “Gray-eyed Athena”, related to glaucous

Grotesque                 – Of a cave; related to grotto

Grow                          – Related to grass, green

Guru                           – Heavy, weighty; related to grave

Happy                        – Good luck, prosperous; related to happen

Harmony                    – Means of joining; Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite

Hell                             – Norse goddess, one who covers up or hides something

Heretic                       – One who is able to choose freely

Hermetic                    – Dealing with the occult; from Greek god Hermes

Hierarchy                   – Rule by a high priest

Host                            – Related to hospitality, hospital

Humiliate                   – Related to humus, humor, humble, human, humid, posthumous

Hypnotic                    – From Hypnos, Greek god of sleep

Hypocrite                   – Stage actor; deciding under; related to crisis

Hysterical                  – Of the womb, related to hysterectomy

Idiot                            – One who will not participate in public affairs

Illusion                       – In the game, to play with; related to ludicrous

Imbue                         – To keep wet; to soak, saturate; related to imbibe

Immolate                   – To sprinkle with corn meal as sacrifice; to grind; related to mallet

Impeccable               – Not capable of sin

Impetuous                 – Done or given with a rush of force; related to impetus, petition

Impudent                   – Unashamed; related to pudenda

Inaugurate                 – To divine the future, related to augur, augment, contemplate

Incense                      – That which is burnt; related to incendiary

Infantry                      – Unable to speak; related to infant, infantile

Infatuate                    – To make a fool of

Infinity                        – Not ending; related to finish, fix

Ink                               – To burn in; related to caustic

Inspire                        – Fill the heart with grace; related to spirit (breath of a god)

Initiate                        – To begin, enter

Innocent                    – Related to noxious

Instruct                       – To pile on, related to construct, structure

Intelligence                – To choose, read; related to lecture

Inter                            – Into the earth, related to territory, turmeric, Mediterranean

Interested                  – To be between

Intrigue                      – To entangle; related to intricate

Investigate                – Related to footprint

Jumbo                        – Elephant (Bantu)

King                            – Leader of the people; related to kin, kind, child, kindergarten

Laconic                      – To speak concisely, as did the Laconians (Spartans)

Laxative                     – Loosen; related to lax

Left (side)                  – Related to sinister

Liberty                        – From Liber (Dionysus), related to liberate, liberal

Library                        – The inner bark of trees; related to leaf

Limit                           – Threshold; related to liminal, preliminary, eliminate

Lucifer                        – Light carrier; related to lucid, infer, transfer, refer

Lunacy                       – Insanity, triggered by the moon’s cycle

Magic                         – Of the learned and priestly caste (Magi)

Malaria                       – Bad air

Mania                         – Related to mind and maenad (a female follower of Dionysus)

Manure                      – Work with the hands, cultivate; related to maneuver, manage

Masturbate                – To defile/stupefy by hand; related to manual, stupid

Materialism               – From mater (“mother”)

Melancholy                – An excess of black bile; related to cholera

Mellifluous                 – Honey flowing; related to fluent, fluid

Menstruate                – Monthly; related to moon, measure, metric

Mentor                        – Athena in disguise; one who thinks; related to mind, mania

Mercury                     – Roman god of tradesmen Mercurius; related to market, mercy

Metaphor                   – To carry over, to bear children

Migrate                       – Related to mutate

Mile                             – 1,000 double paces

Miracle                       – Smiling

Monster                     – Divine omen, portent; to warn; related to mental, mind, mantra

Morphine                   – From Morpheus, the Roman god of dreams

Move                          – Related to moment, momentum

Muscle                       – Little mouse

Museum                     – Shrine of the Muses; related to amuse, bemuse

Mystery                      – To close, shut; related to mute

Narcissism                – Related to narcissus and narcotic

Negotiate                   – To clear a hedge, fence, or obstacle on horseback; related to deny

Noble                         – One who knows him- or herself; related to Gnosticism, narrate

Nice                            – Ignorant, unaware

Nomad                       – Wandering with flocks; related to nemesis, numerical, nimble

Normal                       – Made from a carpenter’s square

Nostalgia                   – Longing for another place (not time); desire for homecoming

Nuanced                    – Slight difference, shade of color, mist, vapor, cloud

Number                      – Related to nemesis

Nun                            – A term of address to elderly persons; related to nanny.

Obey                          – Listen to, pay attention, related to audience

Oblivion                     – Rubbed smooth, ground down; related to obliterate

Opportunity               – Entrance or passage through, related to port, pore, report

Orchid                        – Testicle

Orgy                           – A secret rite, dedicated originally to Dionysus

Ostracize                  – To banish by voting with pottery fragments; related to bone

Pagan                        – Country dweller

Panacea                    – Cure-all; related to iatrogenic (illness caused in a hospital)

Pandemonium          – Related to pancreas, panorama, pantheist, pantheon, pantomime

Panic                          – Of the god Pan, who caused frightening sounds in the woods

Panzer tank               – Armor for the belly; related to paunch

Parable                      – Comparison, throwing beside; related to parley, parlance

Paradise                    – A walled garden

Paraphernalia           – A woman’s property besides her dowry

Passion                      – Suffering, enduring; related to patience

Pastor                        – Shepherd (of souls); related to pasture, pastoral

Pardon                       – To give wholeheartedly; related to donate

Peculiar                      – Property in cattle; related to pecuniary

Penetrate                  – To access the innermost part of a temple or store of food

Perfume                     – To smoke through; related to fume, fumigate

Personality                – From persona, to speak through a theatrical mask

Pharmacist                – Related to scapegoat, the drug that cures what it caused

Philadelphia             – City of brotherly love (“from the same womb”)

Philosophy                – Love of knowledge

Photograph               – Light-writing

Planet                         – Wandering star

Plutocracy                 – Rule by the wealthy (Pluto, god of wealth), overflowing

Pneumatic                – Of spirit, spiritual

Politics                       – Citizens, city

Pomegranate            – Apple with seeds, Pomona (Goddess of fruit); related to grenade

Pompous                   – Solemn procession (Hermes psychopomp, guide to the underworld)

Pontiff                         – To make a bridge; related to pontificate, pontoon, punt

Posse                         – Body of men, power; related to potent

Preposterous            – Before-behind

Privilege                     – Law applying to one person, related to private

Problem                     – Thing put forward, thrown; related to ballistics, dance

Profane                      – Out in front of the temple

Profound                    – Proceeding from the bottom or floor; related to fund

Promethean              – To see or think ahead

Propaganda             – Doing Catholic missionary work; related to propagate.

Providence                – Foreknowledge; related to provide

Provoke                     – To call forth; related to vocation, vocal, voice, evoke, invoke

Prurient                      – Itching

Psyche                       – Invisible animating principle; Greek for “butterfly”

Pudendum                – Thing to be ashamed of

Pumpernickel            – To break wind

Pundit                         – A learned Hindu

Quarantine                – Forty days and nights

Radical                       – Root part of a word; related to radish

Rape                          – To be carried away, related to rapid, raptor, ravish and rapture

Reconcile                  – To make friendly again; related to council

Record                       – To learn by heart; related to courage

Redeem                     – To buy back

Regret                        – To weep

Rehearse                  – To rake over; related to hearse, hirsute

Religion                     – To bind fast, related to rely; or: to read again, related to lecture

Remember                – To be mindful of; related to memoir, mourn

Remorse                    – To bite back; related to mordant

Renegade                 – Christian turned Muslim; related to renege

Repent                       – Related to penal, penalty, Pentheus (“man of sorrow”)

Resilience                 – To jump again

Respiration                – To breathe again, from spiritus (breath of a god)

Respect                     – To look at again

Rhapsody                  – To stitch songs together

Rhythm                      – To flow; related to rheumatism, maelstrom, diarrhea

Ritual                          – A counting; related to arithmetic, rite

Rosemary                  – Dew of the sea

Royal                         – To move or direct in a straight line

Sabbatical                 – Seventh year, for resting – related to Sabbath

Sabotage                   – To throw a wooden shoe (sabot) into the machinery

Sacred                       – Related to sanctify, sacrosanct, saint, sacrilege, sanctimonious

Sacrifice                     – To make sacred

Sacrum                      – Sacred bone (the one offered in sacrifice)

Sad                             – Related to sated, satiated

Salary                         – Soldier’s allowance for the purchase of salt

Sarcasm                    – To strip off the flesh; related to sarcoma, sarcophagus

Savage                      – Forest dweller

Scene                         – Wooden stage for actors; tent or booth; giving shade

Science                      – To cut; related to conscious, schism, schizophrenia, shit, scat,

Scrutinize                  – To search through trash; related to shred, inscrutable

Serendipity                – Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island

Shampoo                   – To press, knead the muscles

Silly                             – Blessed, happy, blissful

Stagnate                    – To seep, drip; related to stalactite

Slave                         – A Slavic person

Sniper                        – A marksman who can hit a tiny snipe bird

Soldier                       – One who has been paid in gold coins (solidus); related to solid

Solstice                      – The sun stands still

Soul                            – Coming from the sea, the stopping place between birth and death

Source                       – To rise, as a spring; related to resource, resurgent

Spirits                         – That which can unite the elements of the philosopher’s stone.

Superfluous             – Overflowing, related to fluent

Surveil                        – Related to vigil

Suture                        – Stitch together; related to couture, sew, seam, suture and souvlaki

Symbol                       – That which is thrown together; related to ballistic, dance, emblem

Symptom                   – To fall together with

Talent                         – Balance, weight; sum of money

Tenor                         – To hold (one’s voice), related to tenet

Territory                     – Where people are warned off; related to terrible, terrific

Testify                        – Swear on one’s testicles (?)

Text                            – A thing woven

Therapy                     – Attend, do service, take care of

Think                          – Cause to appear to oneself; related to thought, thank

Theory                       – Looking at, viewing; related to theater

Thesaurus                 – Related to treasure

Toxic                          – Pertaining to arrows, bows, archery

Torment                     – Twisted cord, sling for hurling stones; related to torque.

Touch                         – To knock, strike; related to touché

Tragedy                     – Goat song (originally to Dionysus)

Trophy                       – To turn; related to apostrophe, atrophy, tropical, trope, troubadour

Uncanny                    – Not knowing wise or cunning

Utopia                        – No place

Vaccine                      – Pertaining to cows

Vagabond                  – Related to vague, vagus

Value                          – To be strong; related to valiant

Vanilla                        – Little pod; related to vagina

Venereal                    – Related to Venus, goddess of love

Vengeance                – To set free; related to vindicate

Virtue                         – Man; related to virile, world, werewolf

Vote                            – A promise to a god; related to vow

Vulgar                        – Of the common people; related to Vulgate

Vulnerable                 – Capable of wounding; related to Valhalla (hall of the battle-slain)

Wander                      – Related to wind

Weird                         – Fate, to turn, bend; related to wrong, versus, version, diverge

Whiskey                     – Water of life

Whole                         – Uninjured; related to heal, health, holistic

Xenophobia             – Fear of the stranger – or of the guest

Yes                             – To be

Yoga                           – Union, to join; related to jugular, yoke, junction, joint, conjugate

Zero                            – Empty place, desert; related to cipher, sunyata (“emptiness”)

Read Part Three Here