“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Oscar Wilde
Cover art and all art by Naturaleza Muerta Resucitando
I was recently reading some papers regarding the amount of leisure and ‘play’ time hunter gatherers had/ have in comparison to agricultural societies. It was striking to consider how so many of our spiritual traditions have come from the more nomadic way of living and how those templates eventually became the traditions and belief systems we still have today.
https://phys.org/…/2019-05-farmers-leisure-hunter…
Of course, there were later a huge amount of agricultural traditions which are associated with land deities and crops but it might be argued that even these are seen through a lens of earlier ways of ritualising and worshipping more primal gods and goddesses. It really begs the question of whether the even busier lifestyle many of us lead today separates us from the chance to find our own spirituality, and, if so, are we losing out on a more meaningful and relevant gnosis?
https://rewild.com/in-depth/leisure.html
This is not to say that our ancient knowledge and customs should be discarded, rather, I’m wondering whether or not we are actually supposed to find our own individual connection as well as those which have been passed down through generations. The issue might be that we are distorting our own growth by trying to fit within a template either practiced by people living in a completely different context, or limiting our views because they don’t reflect what was written by people over a thousand years ago.
The other aspect here is the assumption that everyone believed the same things and worshipped the same deities, when it is likely the case that local land spirits and ancestral figures were more personal to where a person lived and died. The influence of written texts documenting myths and spiritual beliefs gave rise to the idea that they were documenting everything and that these stories of gods and goddesses were known by all.
However, this is really not the case. The academic, Claude Lecouteux, for example, has written about many lesser-known and localised spirit-beings which were both worshipped and acknowledged within specific geographical areas. Some of these were a matter of miles apart with the afterlife territory of some ancestral kings being decided by the distance of an archers arrow.
The Russian scholar Dimitriy Antonov has highlighted how many Eastern-European and Slavic spirit-beings were omitted from the written folklore but kept within oral tradition. Antonov notes that the earlier Christian writers were selective in who and what they wrote about, but after the 17th century, when reading and writing became more widespread, the accounts of gods, goddesses, and demon and fairy beings were collected by writers who did not have a religious or conversion pretext.
Another consideration here is a missive written by Pope Gregory the first in the 6th century when he asked monks and missionaries to stop destroying pagan sites and shrines and instead swap the figures and deities being worshipped to Christian saints and Biblical figures. Again, the sheer number of different gods and figures of worship show just how individualised our ancient spirituality likely was.
As spiritual traditions become embedded within a culture, and even legislation, it can be easy to see them as dogma and not to be questioned or interacted with in a way which might bring new revelation or more nuanced ways of being in the world and universe. Personal identity and exploration then becomes secondary to what a person is ‘supposed’ to encounter and believe.
In a way this even precludes us further from our own personal evolution because if we are restricted in how we can approach and question an idea then we are never going to see its full repercussions and own biases. By continually referring backwards we never get to chart our own direction.
My thinking is that much of this problem is down to a lack of time in our lives for play and recreation. In some ways, these notions have almost become frowned upon, as if there is laziness at their core, or a lack of visible productivity. And yet, it is from our dreams, and the time we need to dream them, that our ideas and imaginings are born. If we have no time to dream then we are always caught in the orbit of the past and wisdom itself becomes a dead monolith instead of a living part of ourselves.