For the Intuitives (Part 1) AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Emerald

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (For the Intuitives (Part 1)) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (The Emerald) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

The Emerald episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: For the Intuitives (Part 1)

Author: Joshua Schrei
Duration: 01:37:05

Episode Shownotes

Across cultures and traditions, there have always been those that speak with the dead, hear voices, enter states of oracular trance, and receive visions of what is to come. Such sensitivity, traditionally, is common. It's common to have premonitions that come to pass, to have dream experiences that translate into

day-to-day life, and to be in continual felt dialogue with ancestors, with the dead, and with a larger world of animate forces. For most of human history, the people that received such visions lived right at the center of culture. But what happens when the seer is ripped from the ecology in which they traditionally lived? The intuitive is cast out, othered, vilified, and pathologized. Cast aside, relegated to the margins of society, without the context that once held it, oracular seeing can veer into charlatanry and delusion. So these days visions — like everything else in the modern world — are immediately monetized, translated into marketable pop-spirituality and much of the mastery and depth of visionary tradition is lost. But what this points to isn’t something “wrong” with intuition or the practice of oracular vision — it points to something wrong with modernity’s relationship with it. The proclivity towards vilifying and pathologizing intuition on the one hand and claiming it as an exotic and monetizable gift useful for attracting internet followers on the other — all of this is a function of the othering of intuition in the modern world. Societally, we would do well to rediscover the central role of the seer. For if we lose our ability to learn from the visions of seers, we lose the feeling body of culture — the very thing that drives culture forward. Featuring music by Marya Stark, Char Rothschild, and Peia, and featuring discussions with author Frederick Smith, psychoanalyst Bernardo Malamut, and Sophie Strand, this multi-part episode series seeks to place the seer back in their rightful place at the center of culture. It is simultaneously a celebration of the gifts of the intuitive and a reminder that dreams and visions need an ecology of accountability in which to live and grow. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention. Support the show

Full Transcript

00:00:07 Speaker_04
Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald.

00:00:29 Speaker_04
All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hey everyone. A quick reminder that this podcast is made possible through patronage. Patronage is the reason that I'm able to devote my full time to this podcast.

00:00:52 Speaker_04
It's a great way to support the artistic vision and to help pay for studio time and to help cover the costs of what is an editorially intricate process, as you can imagine. And patronage also comes with other benefits.

00:01:06 Speaker_04
Patrons get access to a twice monthly study group in which a vibrant group of people discusses mythic topics and the topics that we explore on the podcast in a lot more depth and detail.

00:01:19 Speaker_04
So it's a great way to dive deeper into the podcast and the topics that we explore on the podcast. Patrons also get access to bonus content.

00:01:28 Speaker_04
For example, there's a couple of snippets of interviews in this podcast episode with some pretty interesting people, and patrons get access to the full interviews.

00:01:38 Speaker_04
Patronage costs as little as $6 a month, and you can find out more at patreon.com slash The Emerald Podcast. And I also just want to say that this episode is dedicated to my mom.

00:02:04 Speaker_04
In 1773, a British anthropologist named Samuel Johnson visited the Hebrides Islands in far northern Scotland, a place, incidentally, where my ancestors on my mother's side come from.

00:02:17 Speaker_04
At that time, going to Scotland for your average Brit was like a journey to a far off exotic land, right? So Johnson took meticulous anthropological notes about what he saw.

00:02:29 Speaker_04
He wrote about the customs, the food, the landscape, the art, the farming techniques. And he wrote about something else, too. He wrote about the locals' mysterious penchant for seeing things that were about to happen.

00:02:42 Speaker_04
From Sam Knight in The New Yorker, quote, Johnson found that second sight was nothing unusual among the islanders.

00:02:50 Speaker_04
They saw their friends fall from horses when they were far away from home, and watched future bridal parties and funeral processions making their way across the fields. It is an involuntary affection, Johnson wrote.

00:03:02 Speaker_04
Those who profess to feel it do not boast of it as a privilege, nor are considered by others as advantageously distinguished. So common was premonition. So much did it hold a place in culture,

00:03:18 Speaker_04
that it did not need to be pathologized or ridiculed, and it also did not need to be aggrandized or used as a way to gain followers and sell stuff. Imagine that.

00:03:30 Speaker_04
Seamlessly interwoven into culture, without the need to prove itself, to convince anyone, and without it being vilified or othered. So let's establish something right away here.

00:03:45 Speaker_04
If you take a broad and deep look at human culture and human experience, if you expand out from modern Western industrialized capitalism to reach across traditions and into the deep past, you see something very simple.

00:03:59 Speaker_04
The sensorial attributes, the empathic and visionary abilities of those who are now referred to loosely as seers, intuitives, oracles, or psychics are common, right? So it's common to have premonitions that come to pass.

00:04:18 Speaker_04
It's common to have dream experiences that translate into day-to-day life. It's common to be in continual felt dialogue with ancestors, with the dead, with a larger world of animate forces. It's common, it's inherent. Just ask the kids.

00:04:37 Speaker_04
You know, kids see ghosts sometimes.

00:04:39 Speaker_05
Kids see ghosts sometimes. Kids see ghosts sometimes. Kids see ghosts sometimes. Spirit. Moving around, just moving around. Kids see ghosts sometimes. Kids see ghosts sometimes. Kids see ghosts. Spirit. Yeah, that's the king.

00:05:02 Speaker_04
I'm sure that you've had such experiences. Most people have. Even in the modern world, most people have. Premonitions are impossible, says Knight, and they come true all the time.

00:05:15 Speaker_04
The second law of thermodynamics says that it can't happen, but you think of your mother, and then she calls. You dream a place and then visit it three years later. You receive a vision. You hear a voice. Its meaning unfolds only later.

00:05:30 Speaker_04
But it was there, you realize, guiding something in you. It was there all along. Such visions and premonitions, such voices, such dreams aren't extraneous to culture. They're at the heart of what moves culture forward.

00:05:49 Speaker_04
In fact, interaction with seen and unseen forces, the incorporation of dreams and premonitions into the heart of cultural discourse and decision-making, ongoing dialogue with the ancestors and the dead, spirit mediumship, transpossession, the navigation of communal life through ritualized group rapture in which people receive visions, all are common foundations of culture seen as central to existence.

00:06:16 Speaker_04
In a world of what Marshall Salins calls immanence, in which we are utterly dependent upon our ability to interact with dynamic forces all around us, in which we are all, says Laurie Shapira, medial to one degree or another, it helps tremendously to act as a conduit for visions and voices.

00:06:36 Speaker_04
It helps to be in constant personal dialogue with the larger world, to reinforce relationality over and over again. so that the human embodies a relationality that is ultimately necessary for human thriving.

00:06:51 Speaker_04
We need to be in dialogue with the watersheds we inhabit, with the dead on whose bones we build our fragile lives, with the dreams that move through us when we sleep, with the luminous glimpses of future paths and possibilities that present themselves in fleeting tapestries of light.

00:07:09 Speaker_04
It is necessary and it is innate within us. There's nothing other about having visions and premonitions. It's common to have visions. For where would we be without visions? There is the history of books and words and names and dates and places.

00:07:27 Speaker_04
And then there is the history of visions. History blazes with the visions of prophets. History pours through the wound carved by the angel's flaming spear. History hisses with the voice of oracles.

00:07:44 Speaker_04
Prophecies seep from the cracks at Delphi and mumble in spontaneous glossalial tongues. History rings with the lucid bells of divinatory dreams. Do you hear the lucid bells of the dreams of the visionary, shaping history? Your ancestors were seers.

00:08:04 Speaker_04
The fragrant smoke of divinatory herbs curls its way through history. Copal and cedar, myrrh and frankincense, sweetgrass and laurel. The ruler receives the laurel crown because they have received the blessing of the seers.

00:08:18 Speaker_04
The laurel transports the seer, the serpent woman, the Pythia, into the visionary trance, where she unites with the blazing god. In the process of divination, says Shapira, the Pythia becomes enteos, plenadeo, engodded, full of the divine spirit.

00:08:38 Speaker_04
The god enters into her and uses her vocal cords as if they are his own. He squeezes his way into her frame. It is a collision, a wild conjoining that leaves no one unchanged. The visions come searingly bright.

00:08:53 Speaker_04
The visions arrive as spears, as music, as thunder, as flames in the night, as ghosts, as the speaking dead, as voices. So many voices. Joan heard voices. Teresa heard voices. Hildegard heard voices. The Nechung hears voices. The Koros hears voices.

00:09:19 Speaker_04
The Babalao hears voices. Voices speak. Bodies tremble. History shakes with the tremblings of oracular trance. History does not unfold according to the rationalist's plan. It is not a Google map with neatly articulated highways and superhighways.

00:09:42 Speaker_04
It is a festival of ruptures and collisions, of ecstasies and tearings apart. No one achieves true and inspired divination when in his rational mind, says Plato.

00:09:53 Speaker_04
And oracular vision, delivered in states of trance ecstasy, he said, is the greatest gift of the immortals to the mortals. Here's the grandfather of rational thought extolling the virtues of oracular vision. Imagine.

00:10:10 Speaker_04
Perhaps cultures need people who are willing and able to hear voices. and receive visions and to shake and tremble and traverse other worlds. Perhaps those who tremble are invaluable for navigating a trembling world.

00:10:25 Speaker_04
Those who hear voices are invaluable for navigating a world that is shouting its lessons at us all the time. Shouting with voice, shouting in the rude brilliance of the squawking macaw.

00:10:37 Speaker_04
shouting with the voice of thunder on the plane, shouting with the calls of the ancestors. Listen. Awaken. Listen. Awaken. Every single culture on the planet has oracular trance practice. Every culture has some form of intermediary spirit work.

00:10:57 Speaker_04
Every culture speaks to the dead.

00:11:00 Speaker_04
Every culture has people who mediate between human beings and the larger world of animate forces, plant, animal, elemental forces, ghost and spirit and ancestral forces, all of which are felt as fully imminent, natural, and real.

00:11:16 Speaker_04
I'll go into this more later. These forces are not seen in traditional cultures as super-natural. They do not require interaction with something abstract, unverifiable, transcendent.

00:11:28 Speaker_04
They are imminent, and the impacts of such visions on culture are tangible. In fact, some of our most present and pragmatic and societally cherished institutions arose from the oracular visions of seers.

00:11:42 Speaker_04
The oracular vision of the possessed trance medium, says Professor Yulia Ustinova, is not a psychiatric disorder to be treated medically, but one of the sources of our praised cultural assets.

00:11:55 Speaker_04
The very foundations of Western civilization, some say, were built on oracular possession. Our modes of learning came through transpossession. The Greek world was utterly built on this.

00:12:09 Speaker_04
What we haven't been told, says Peter Kingsley, is that a spiritual tradition lies at the very roots of Western civilization. You could say the people concerned were mystics, But they weren't mystics as we might understand mystics.

00:12:22 Speaker_04
That idea of mysticism only came into being much later. They were intensely practical. So practical that thousands of years ago they sowed the seeds of Western culture and shaped the structure of the world we live in.

00:12:36 Speaker_04
But they did this all with an understanding that we no longer have. Because their knowledge came from a wisdom that to us is no more than a myth. That wisdom arose in caves. It arose in visions. It arose in trance practices spurred on through fasting.

00:12:56 Speaker_04
It arose in spontaneous exhortations in states of rapture. It arose in musical freestyling. It arose in taking bodies to edges, right to the edges, and then across edges, into abysses, and plummeting bodies into the state of visions.

00:13:15 Speaker_04
The somatic state where one knows in living tissue what the world is, what the voices mean, knowing the sum total of its ecological connections, where it is inevitably going, and how to ride those waves.

00:13:32 Speaker_04
Democracy itself, some say, arose from prophetic vision by seers and dreamers. Greek democracy from the cave visitations of Apollo, upon Parmenides and Epimenides,

00:13:44 Speaker_04
American democracy arose from the dreams of a native grandmother, in a tradition that had an ecosystem for dreams to live, that insisted that all dreams cross over to the waking world and be enacted.

00:13:57 Speaker_04
Visions of right governance and right relationality arise from dreams. Visions of law and how it is reflected in land, and how land is a mirror for right relation, these visions arise in dreams. Visions of what societies can be arise from dreams.

00:14:15 Speaker_04
Eagles and bears and stars and dragons and moons adorn national flags because someone somewhere saw them in a vision. This is the foundation of history. This world is built on visions.

00:14:28 Speaker_04
And there is nothing other or odd or abnormal about centering the visionary. In fact, the longest continuously surviving cultures on the planet place oracular vision dialogue with the ancestral dead, and dreaming right at the center of their lives.

00:14:46 Speaker_04
In certain Kalahari tribes, 30% of adults facilitate trance rituals. That's 30% of the people enacting what you could call some type of shamanic role within the culture. And you can find the same in many parts of southern India.

00:15:00 Speaker_04
Among the Quao of the Solomon Islands, Salens tells us, people talk aloud with ancestral spirits continually. Quote, this is not a world where ancestral shades are remote presences, creations of theological imagination.

00:15:15 Speaker_04
They are part of the daily social life of Quao communities. If you look at hunter-gatherer cultures across the globe and the direct interaction they have with the dead and the animal spirits and the seen and unseen forces,

00:15:30 Speaker_04
you find they reinforce Shapira's words. Everyone is medial to one degree or another. Intuitives are not other. That's right, rationalists.

00:15:41 Speaker_04
Intuitives in many cultures were not a marginalized subgroup, not someone to wag a finger at and say, tut-tut, you out there on the fringe. For many cultures, for much of human history,

00:15:53 Speaker_04
There was no divide at all between the rational-pragmatic and what is now called the intuitive. Spend time in indigenous tracking cultures and you'll see the seamless marriage of what we would now call rational-pragmatic and intuitive.

00:16:08 Speaker_04
The hunter navigates decision-making through what? Through what their experience tells them. Through careful observation over years. Through accumulated cultural knowledge passed down to them.

00:16:21 Speaker_04
and through awakened sense faculties, through skin, through gut, through eyes, through listening, through spontaneous speaking of the animal language, through trance adoption of the animal's potency, through wearing their fur and horn, through blessings of the animal beings, through verbalized requests, through prayer.

00:16:43 Speaker_04
All of it is how the hunter navigates. The hunter knows if you want to stay invisible to an animal you're tracking, never step on their tracks. Because animals can listen through their tracks. This is shared knowledge across many hunting traditions.

00:17:01 Speaker_04
Feel into it. Feel how the elk's ears prick up just as the hunter's foot collapses the edge of the track many miles away. Can you? This is knowledge that is received in the place of deep listening.

00:17:18 Speaker_04
So rational pragmatism and visionary intuition have been compartmentalized as two separate things. But are they really two separate things at all?

00:17:28 Speaker_04
Sure, we take facts into account when we make decisions, but is the final decision some type of rationalist exercise? The final decision The very final decision, like when you make that last decision, what is it? It's felt.

00:17:44 Speaker_04
It's a moment of intuitive insight. We take all the facts into account and then we feel into what to do. Decisions are made with every faculty, with the whole feeling body.

00:17:56 Speaker_04
Even in the most practical spheres, Ustinova says, intuitions are deeply involved in decision-making. And this simple little thing is important. When you make a final decision, you use your whole feeling intuitive body to do so.

00:18:13 Speaker_04
So within the traditional unbroken body of a culture lives a seamless wedding of what we now call intuitive and rational. But what happens when the cultural body is broken?

00:18:30 Speaker_04
When that visionary capacity is ripped away from the body in which it traditionally lived? What happens when the gifts of the intuitive become seen as unimportant? Or worse, demonic, irrational, out of control, hysterical, woo,

00:18:52 Speaker_04
The intuitive is outcast, othered, vilified, pathologized, and there's a long history of centralized power structures, religious, political, and scientific, pathologizing the intuitive for varying reasons all across the world.

00:19:09 Speaker_04
And then, unanchored from context, freed from the culture that held their visions close, that fed those visions and cradled them and grew them in the body of the larger culture,

00:19:21 Speaker_04
the intuitive wanders, unsure what to do with their gifts, prone to sensitivities that the larger culture has no way of understanding outside of the narrow lens of pathology. The intuitive must be in trauma response. The intuitive is neurodivergent.

00:19:38 Speaker_04
The intuitive is hypervigilant. The intuitive is a witch. The intuitive is other. But the call of the wandering seer persists. What do I do with these visions, it whispers. What do I do with these visions, it asks.

00:20:00 Speaker_04
I have a feeling that some of you can relate. Visions so acute and strong and terrible and beautiful and no one to listen. No one who could receive them. No ecology in which they can live.

00:20:14 Speaker_04
These visions are so bittersweet they sting, a teenage me once wrote. So bittersweet they sting. You know what I mean. Thy words were found, says Jeremiah, an old seer, and I ate them.

00:20:31 Speaker_04
And thy words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, and also my anguish, my anguish. I writhe in pain. Oh, the walls of my heart. My heart is beating wildly. I cannot keep silent, for I hear the sound of the trumpet.

00:20:50 Speaker_04
I hear in my heart the alarm of war. What do we do with these visions? What do we do with the trumpets that sound their alarms in our hearts? What do we do when we can't keep silent in a world that has no place for visions?

00:21:05 Speaker_04
You gave me these visions, great universe, so searingly bright, so present, so tangible, so real. Did you do so just for them to be locked inside? To stay hidden in a world that is not ready for them?

00:21:22 Speaker_04
Oh, woe, oh, woe, oh, woe, the torment of seeing sweeps me away again, cries Cassandra. You remember Cassandra, right? Daughter of Troy, devotee of the god of visionary trance himself, Apollo.

00:21:39 Speaker_04
Apollo offered Cassandra the gift of oracular vision in exchange for uniting with him. But when she changed her mind and refused his advances, he cursed her.

00:21:51 Speaker_04
She would still receive visions so clear, so bright, so right, so real, but no one would believe what she said.

00:22:02 Speaker_04
So she wandered, seeking to wake the people of Troy to their imminent doom, seeking to wake them with transmissions of sunbeams through black cloud, with visions of holy Anatolian fire. But no one listened.

00:22:20 Speaker_04
How many Kassandra's hearts and minds ablaze with visions now roam the kingdom? How many have seen in perfect detail its ruin? How many are crying it aloud, even now, not to be believed? This, in one way or another, happens to the modern seer a lot.

00:22:42 Speaker_04
Lost, wandering, removed from accountability, removed from the counsel of elders who were instrumental in interpreting and integrating visions, the modern visionary, the modern intuitive, is alone with their sensitivities in an un-understanding world

00:22:59 Speaker_04
The modern intuitive hides visions away. The modern intuitive shakes and trembles and then medicates because they aren't held in a culture that understands shakers and tremblers.

00:23:10 Speaker_04
The modern intuitive silences voices that speak inside because they aren't held in a culture that can handle people hearing voices.

00:23:18 Speaker_04
The modern intuitive becomes anxious and paranoid because they have no cultural body for their acute, painful visions to live. How many locked those visions away forever, only to have them resurface as what we now call mental disorders?

00:23:35 Speaker_04
How many young people dead on the street from fentanyl are there because in an insane world, they had sensitivities that had no place to live, sensitivities that required them to numb themselves in the face of the crush of modernity?

00:23:49 Speaker_04
How many end up lost, othered, mad, dead, precisely because the options presented to them swallow your visions until they fester inside, or treat them solely as pathologies, were not felt to be options at all. This happens.

00:24:09 Speaker_04
And perhaps something else happens too. Perhaps the modern seer, unmoored from context, removed from any circle of accountability, any council of elders that understands visions and how to integrate them into the body of the culture,

00:24:22 Speaker_04
the modern seer gets swept up in the specialness of their visions.

00:24:28 Speaker_04
Their visions reaffirm in a culture of individuality their own uniqueness, their own messianic vision, which these days probably looks less like Judeo-Christian prophets preaching in the wilderness and much more like having one vision

00:24:44 Speaker_04
and then labeling oneself a seer and a mystic and an intuitive on Instagram and turning those visions into followers. Monetize those visions in three easy steps.

00:24:58 Speaker_04
The modern would-be seer removed from the culture of accountability has no one to keep them in check. There's no container in which to communally weigh the difference between vision and delusion.

00:25:10 Speaker_04
The modern-day would-be seer has one vision on the mountaintop or in the medicine circle.

00:25:16 Speaker_04
one vision that feels so real and so vivid, and rather than spend years honing that vision in communal context, rather than begin an inquiry or a path of study around that vision that could last the rest of one's life, an inquiry into what it actually means to cultivate an individual and communal container that can hold visions, that vision is taken as a sign, a sign that reinforces a highly individualized calling,

00:25:45 Speaker_04
a sign that demands an immediate career change. The vision tells the unanchored seer how to rise above the grind in a world of competition through monetizing their intuitive gifts. Get those visions out to the people, people.

00:26:00 Speaker_04
I mean, what are the alternatives? To work at a menial job, to be a cog in the machine, or to sell those visions one by one by one? And so the seamless integration of the seer into culture is lost.

00:26:14 Speaker_04
That vision of a culture like that of the Hebrides, where the gift of sight was so common it's nothing abnormal, but also nothing to brag about, that gets lost. And in an unanchored world, anyone can claim any old thing.

00:26:29 Speaker_04
So, these days, right, everyone's an empath, everyone's a mystic, everyone's an intuitive, everyone's a shaman, everyone has ESP, and... I'm kind of psychic.

00:26:41 Speaker_05
I have a bit sense. What do you mean? It's like I have ESPN or something. My breasts can always tell when it's going to rain. Really? That's amazing. Well, they can tell when it's raining.

00:27:00 Speaker_04
Everyone's facilitating frog medicine circles for tech entrepreneurs. Everyone's a light worker who happens to be one of the lucky few that's in on a little secret about the powers that are really in control of everything.

00:27:12 Speaker_04
Everyone's going to Peru and starting a transformative retreat center after drinking ayahuasca twice. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a circus out there, right? A spiritual circus.

00:27:23 Speaker_04
And there are people profiting off the spiritual circus, and there are people criticizing the spiritual circus, and there are people profiting off of criticizing the fact that there are people profiting off of the spiritual circus.

00:27:34 Speaker_04
And it's all gotten pretty messy. But what this points to isn't something wrong with intuition. wrong with the act of seeing or the practice of oracular vision. It points to something wrong with modernity's relationship with it.

00:27:50 Speaker_04
It points to lack of context.

00:27:52 Speaker_04
The proclivity towards vilifying and pathologizing intuition on the one hand, and claiming it as an exotic and monetizable gift useful for attracting followers on the other, all of this is a function of the othering of intuition, the othering of oracular vision, and the absorption of it into the free market.

00:28:11 Speaker_04
So, modernity, you could say, has given Cassandra exactly three options. Hide those visions away, treat those visions as an illness, or pimp those visions out. And with these as your choices, where go you now, Priestess of Apollo? Who will listen?

00:28:35 Speaker_04
Where go you now, Cassandra? Barefoot and bleeding, hair tousled, eyes wild with the sight of far-off things. Where go you now? Where is your place in a world of deadened senses and forgotten dreams? And yet, the place of the seer is essential.

00:28:56 Speaker_04
It's central to the health, growth, and well-being of culture. There was a time in my life when it really would have helped me to hear someone say, there is a place in this world for your visions.

00:29:12 Speaker_04
So, if there's anyone out there for whom it's helpful to hear it now, there is a place in this world for your visions. There is a place for you on the mountaintop. There is a place for you in the wind.

00:29:29 Speaker_04
There is a place for you where the green grass grows again, again, again. There is a place in this world for your visions. and we can pass it on and echo it back to one another again and again.

00:29:47 Speaker_04
There is a place in this world for the oracle, for the dreamer, for the shaker, the trembler, and the hearer of voices to be held again within the fabric of culture. There is a place for you. There is a place for those who see on the mountaintop.

00:30:05 Speaker_04
There is a place for Joan and Jeremiah, for Cassandra and Teresa. There is a place. For in the truest sense, the seer comes for a purpose. The seer comes to wake culture up to how it is, and to how it could be.

00:30:22 Speaker_04
The prophetic cry in the desert, the voice in the wilderness, is the cry that seeks to rouse a numb world from its slumber.

00:30:31 Speaker_04
The seeker moves the culture forward through their premonitory visions, and there is no culture that I can think of, even modern culture, that is not consistently moved forward by the vision of seers.

00:30:44 Speaker_04
So the seer keeps the vision of a culture young and vibrant. Wake up, the seer cries, and don't you see how it could be? The seer also anchors culture to the past through their constant dialogue with the ancestral dead.

00:31:03 Speaker_04
The seer is a mouthpiece for ancestral knowledge so that the culture doesn't forget, so that it learns from its past and its past stays present as a living force, a living foundation.

00:31:18 Speaker_04
The seer acts as a relational conduit between humans and the larger ecology, of which we are only a small part.

00:31:25 Speaker_04
The seer serves as intermediary to these larger forces, so that we don't get too convinced that the world is controlled by humans and humans alone.

00:31:34 Speaker_04
For a world in which humans are seen to be calling all the shots, a world in which we've lost touch with our ancestral roots and with forces larger than us, a dead, objectified world that we rule alone, that is a world that lends itself to psychic disturbance.

00:31:51 Speaker_04
to all types of societal and personal malady. So the seer is also a societal healer. Imagine culture without the vision, the songs, the art, the space-holding, the healing hands afforded by those who tread sensate, felt, visionary spaces regularly.

00:32:15 Speaker_04
And people sometimes think when I'm talking about reviving the central role of the seer,

00:32:20 Speaker_04
the intuitive, the visionary, the healer, that I'm talking about getting rid of the line between church and state and reinstalling the state oracle or something like that. I'm not.

00:32:30 Speaker_04
I'm talking about something very basic that has always lived at the center of our lives. I'm talking about a very pragmatic way to interact with reality.

00:32:40 Speaker_04
In an age where souls wander lost, anxious, and depressed, ritual reconnection is one of the most pragmatic endeavors there is.

00:32:49 Speaker_04
In an age of disconnect in which the world is suffering from an overemphasis on anthropos, on us and us alone, to be in constant dialogue with a world of larger agencies makes total rational sense.

00:33:04 Speaker_04
It's a reflection of the alignment we're actually in with nature. The more we think we're in control of everything, the more we think we're the center of the story

00:33:13 Speaker_04
The more we think that everything can be reduced and isolated and extracted and objectified, then the more we are called to return to a basic porosity, a basic recognition of the place of individual bodies within the greater body of ecology.

00:33:29 Speaker_04
The more we think we are a chosen generation, riding the absolute peak of the wave of history, the more we are called to reach into the past, and dialogue directly with the ancestral dead. For a culture that stops speaking with its dead, dies.

00:33:46 Speaker_04
The more that we claim the Anthropocene for ourselves, as both creators and destroyers, the more those practices that challenge notions of agency and control are necessary. We are compelled to consider a bigger force than the man, Bayeux says.

00:34:03 Speaker_04
We are forced to notice the vigorous potency of archetypal flows, the near primordial humming of cavernous entities lurking beneath the humdrum of the modern, the mythopoetic excursions of the Orishas, the molecular experiments of the subatomic, the espionage of bacteria, the lamentations of ancestral ghosts.

00:34:32 Speaker_04
Yes, in an age where the dominant narratives emanating from all sides, political, scientific, and religious, have to do with control, there is a central role for those whose practice centers around seeding control, around openness to the transversal, to the more-than-human.

00:34:52 Speaker_04
There are great cultural lessons to be learned from those who speak to the river and the ancestral dead every day, from those who dream and incubate, and who cede agency to the greater-than-human forces all the time.

00:35:06 Speaker_04
To embody these lessons societally is going to require a willingness to expand conversation into territory that is uncomfortable, seemingly irrational, non-anthropocentric, in which agency is flipped on its head, and the agendas of all beings are front and center, and the dead co-inhabit space with the living, and the land is full of hidden dreamings.

00:35:31 Speaker_04
it's going to require a pretty profound re-evaluation of what exactly is Wu. Because some of you have probably been called Wu, too. And I'll say it plain as I can say it.

00:35:45 Speaker_04
There is nothing Wu about speaking to the ancestral dead, or receiving guidance from dreams, or having a lucid vision and then building one's life around it.

00:35:56 Speaker_04
about receiving messages and translating those messages into one's life and one's communal ecology. All of this, for 99.9% of our history, has been absolutely pragmatic.

00:36:09 Speaker_04
It only gets woo when postmodern free market transcendentalist capitalism gets involved. That's where things get truly woo. So for those who dreamed a dream of how it will be, and no one believed you when you spoke it aloud, this is for you.

00:36:26 Speaker_04
For those who hear voices, this is for you. For those who grew up speaking with unseen forces only to be told that those forces were figments of your imagination, for those wounded in ecstasy by the flaming spear of St. Teresa's angel, this is for you.

00:36:44 Speaker_04
For those labeled fringe by a culture that itself is so far out of the norm of how humans have ever lived in our multi-hundred-thousand-year history, this is for you.

00:36:54 Speaker_04
It's for you, meaning that, in the time-honored words of Niteri from Avatar, I see you. I honor you. I know you've probably faced societal ridicule. I know in what little way I can the strength and intensity of those visions.

00:37:11 Speaker_04
And also, this episode is for you, meaning that there's a reminder here, too. A reminder for all of us, certainly a reminder for me. That dreams and visions need an ecology in which to live and grow.

00:37:26 Speaker_04
Many, many traditions provide an example for us of how oracular vision and intuition live best when anchored in accountability. Which is why the process of the oracles,

00:37:38 Speaker_04
The process of receiving visions and growing them took years, and involved multiple initiatory steps, and invited acolytes on a path of mastery. Not immediate gain, but mastery over time.

00:37:57 Speaker_04
One did not become a Delphic Oracle by taking a two-week online course and drinking ayahuasca once. One became a Delphic Oracle over years and years of slow, grinding training.

00:38:11 Speaker_04
Because it was recognized that visions grow best when held gently over time. Tended slowly. When they are distributed evenly amongst a community. When they are anchored in a body. When they can actually serve an ecology.

00:38:29 Speaker_04
When they are about the replenishment of the community more than about us.

00:38:35 Speaker_04
In my 20s, if someone had reaffirmed for me that there is a place for my visions, but also that it was going to take a long time to find it and foster it, it might have taken me out of an anxious, agitated urgency to figure out immediately what to do with the visions I had, how to turn them into a career.

00:38:55 Speaker_04
It might have helped me understand that wisdom, the wisdom to hold visions and translate them into embodied practice, It takes a lot of slow, steady, precious time. Perhaps you've felt what I'm talking about here. If you have, then this one's for you.

00:39:15 Speaker_04
I feel the potency of vision and the question of what to do with those visions. I feel the urgency and the frustration and the loss and the fracture. I believe you, Cassandra. I see how the oracular God speaks through you.

00:39:31 Speaker_04
I hear your wailing assessment of the state of the times. I hear you trying to wake the body of the culture from its slumber.

00:39:39 Speaker_04
And while there is plenty to say about how this type of oracular vision has come unmoored, plenty of reason to criticize the spiritual circus, while there is plenty to say about the state of the spiritual marketplace and the New Age drift into unanchored self-absorption,

00:39:55 Speaker_04
Ultimately, it's vital to remember that the intuitive is responding to something real.

00:40:02 Speaker_04
It doesn't mean that every way they respond is real, but the intuitive is inherently responding to a world that needs to be jolted awake, that needs its systems reexamined, that needs fine gradations of healing that aren't always available institutionally.

00:40:20 Speaker_04
The intuitive is responding to a world that has forgotten it's dead. A world that is stumbling blindly into abyss after abyss with no connection to ancestral wisdom. A world that needs to remember to listen to larger voices.

00:40:37 Speaker_04
A world that needs to be shaken from numbness by those who remember how to feel. Shaken from numbness by those who remember how to feel. For the intuitives. For you. This time, on the Emerald.

00:41:23 Speaker_06
I'm still free.

00:41:49 Speaker_04
So this is an episode in two parts because, as you can tell, I've got a lot to say on this topic. This first part is about the centrality, necessity, and normalcy of oracles and visionaries.

00:42:03 Speaker_04
It's about dreams and premonitions and dialogues with the ancestors and how utterly sane that all is. You could call this part Cassandra in Context. And the reason I'm going into this part so deeply is because when we get to the second part,

00:42:19 Speaker_04
about the unmooring of Cassandra, the fracture of the intuitive from the fabric of culture, it's good to have an understanding, first, of the absolute centrality and normalcy and necessity of intuitive vision.

00:42:35 Speaker_04
So yeah, it's good to set certain things in context. Because if you were to listen only to a certain strain of cultural discourse, you might come to think that the oracular visionary is from a bygone era.

00:42:48 Speaker_04
that something like spirit mediumship is outdated, or irrelevant, or primitive, or dangerous, or, my least favorite word, problematic, or that serious thinkers don't play in that field or something.

00:43:03 Speaker_04
You might think that things like spirit possession are inherently fringe, and that view, that modern Western scientific rationalism is the only valid vehicle through which to interpret and interact with reality,

00:43:17 Speaker_04
and that all other things are woo, that is an extremely narrow vision held by an incredibly small percent of the global population. That view historically is far more fringe. I mean, really, it's really out there.

00:43:35 Speaker_04
So just to get some perspective on visions, premonition, ancestry, and that little question of spirit, and a lot of this research comes from Pew Research, Half of Americans report having had some type of vision or premonition that came to pass.

00:43:51 Speaker_04
Some type of precognition. Half. And that's like numbed out Americans, right? In other countries that are more comfortable with visions, that rises to as high as 80 or 90%.

00:44:03 Speaker_04
I'm willing to bet that pretty much everyone listening to this has dreamed of a landscape or a brief fleeting interaction that you then encountered in your waking life. or seen a face in your mind's eye and then met that person.

00:44:21 Speaker_04
I'm willing to bet it's pretty much everyone. And I also bet that a whole lot of listeners have experienced shyness, awkwardness, shame around this type of premonition, cultural fear around being perceived as woo, as out there, as different.

00:44:39 Speaker_04
I bet many have felt the contraction in your body of, I can't share my visions. And there is an inordinate amount of fear in primarily Protestant-derived countries about talking about spirit and animacy and lucid dreams and oracular vision.

00:44:58 Speaker_04
The religious and secular power structures of the early Enlightenment instilled that fear. Modern psychology sometimes reinforces that fear.

00:45:08 Speaker_04
Because if you start encouraging visions and tremblings and suggest that occasionally it might actually be a good thing to hear voices, then you get into the space of promoting altered states of consciousness without a licensed expert in the room.

00:45:25 Speaker_04
And this requires extreme amounts of caution and care, right? All of this is Western puritanical culture in action.

00:45:32 Speaker_04
My Brazilian and Indian friends have no qualms about speaking about possession experiences and spirit mediumship and expanded consciousness. It's normal. Nobody's showing off when they talk about these things, nor are they weird.

00:45:47 Speaker_04
And just to get something straight here, I know people who have visions and hear voices who find pharmaceutical medication incredibly helpful. I'm not saying throw down your medication or don't seek help from within the mental health establishment.

00:46:01 Speaker_04
Not at all. I'm saying that the scope and prevalence of visionary experience cannot be summarized neatly as a medical or psychological condition.

00:46:13 Speaker_04
Ralph Hoffman, a psychology professor at Yale, responding to repeated attempts by psychiatrists to find something pathological in the visions of Joan of Arc, said that visionary and creative states, up to and including hearing voices, are not necessarily signs of mental illness.

00:46:31 Speaker_04
it's important to remember that. So, like it or not, Dr. Freud, people everywhere feel the presence of spirits, the presence of ancestors. People experience premonitions and temporal dilations. People step into places of lucidity.

00:46:48 Speaker_04
They see confluences and patterns, and those patterns give insight into how things are moving within them and within the world around them. There are patterns in leaves, green and gold patterns, have you seen them? There are patterns in the stars.

00:47:04 Speaker_04
There are patterns in the lines of palms. There are patterns in handwriting and in shadows cast on walls. People see patterns and they see lights. Yes, they see lights. They see faces everywhere. They have visitations.

00:47:21 Speaker_04
They speak with beings and they feel things. They feel very distinct feelings in their bodies. a rush, a whisper, a movement. And they attribute those feelings to the presence of what in some traditions is called spirit. People feel spirit.

00:47:40 Speaker_04
Not just adrenaline. Not just dopamine. People feel, distinctly, spirit. Teresa felt it. Joan felt it. Jake and Elwood felt it. Aretha felt it.

00:47:54 Speaker_04
Go to any black Southern Baptist church on any given Sunday and come with an open mind and heart, and I bet you'll feel spirit. And here's something interesting. The less white you get, the higher the number of people feeling spirit rises.

00:48:10 Speaker_04
African American women are much more likely to report direct contact with spirit, for example, than white men are. 97% 97% of African Americans, according to Pew, feel the presence of a higher power in their lives.

00:48:28 Speaker_04
More than 98% of the 1.2 billion people of the African continent. 98% of the 1.4 billion inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. And on and on. In Brazil alone, there are millions of people, millions who practice spirit possession every week.

00:48:47 Speaker_04
There are cultures that have a place for visions.

00:48:50 Speaker_04
where if you're feeling certain sensitivities or wanting certain clarities or experiencing certain energetics at play in your life, it would be completely par for the course to consult someone who knows how to work with spirit entities, like a normal Tuesday or Thursday or Saturday night kind of thing.

00:49:07 Speaker_04
We have parties for dead people all the time, said my friend Bernardo, a Brazilian psychoanalyst and devotee of the Afro-Brazilian traditions. The first thing I want to ask very simply is how common is spirit possession in Brazil?

00:49:23 Speaker_01
It's absolutely common. In all sorts of life, it's a common phenomenon. You can see spirit possession in different religions in Brazil, completely different ones, like you can see that in Candomblé and in Umbanda.

00:49:41 Speaker_01
Candomblé is an Afro-American tradition and Umbanda was a religion born in Brazil and it was born out of a spirit possession, a spirit that showed up. And we also have a lot of spiritism here, And that's super, super common.

00:49:59 Speaker_01
And even more common right now is in evangelical churches, you know, spirits appearing, like, I live right next to a church. So it's like every single day, a lot of them, you know, so it happens. And people speak about this all the time.

00:50:21 Speaker_04
So it would be safe to say that in pretty much every major Brazilian city, every minor Brazilian town, almost every day of the week there are spirit possession rituals happening.

00:50:39 Speaker_01
Yes, you can absolutely say that. Even in the smallest town, You can find an old lady who, you know, receives a healer and she does a really small work, but everybody in the town knows about it.

00:50:57 Speaker_01
And when things, you know, get weird, they try to find that person. That's really common.

00:51:03 Speaker_04
Like you said, I think we have parties for dead people all the time. Was it?

00:51:08 Speaker_01
I love that. I said that. Yes. Because, you know, if you've never been to a dead people's parties, they're the best. You know, they're the best because, you know, those people are dead. So they know how to party.

00:51:22 Speaker_04
Parties for dead people. Want to go? It's easy. There are spiritist traditions all through the Caribbean, all across the African continent, all across East Asia.

00:51:32 Speaker_04
Tibetan culture, Chinese culture prior to the Cultural Revolution, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Malaysian, Lao, Indonesian, Balinese, Polynesian and Melanesian, Papuan and West Papuan.

00:51:44 Speaker_04
These are cultures of spirit possession, transmediumship, and oracular vision. Pre-Roman Celtic cultures were constructed around transvisioning and dreams. The lifeblood of Indian tradition is oracular transpossession.

00:52:00 Speaker_04
At Balaji Temple in India, author Fred Smith told me, thousands of people per day come to have some type of spirit possession exercised. Thousands. People from all walks of life flock to Balaji. All walks of life, rationalist scientists included.

00:52:17 Speaker_04
How could it be? And yet, it is. How common is the practice of spirit possession in the Indian subcontinent?

00:52:25 Speaker_00
It's very common. I would venture to say that the most common type of spiritual expression in India, and possibly the entire subcontinent, would be spirit possession or deity possession.

00:52:40 Speaker_00
Mostly it's deity possession of either a goddess, usually a local minor goddess, or Hanuman, or occasionally major figures like Shiva and so on, but usually it's local deities.

00:52:55 Speaker_00
Like in the Himalayas where I have a house and where I spend a lot of time, there's a huge presence of oracular possession there. Once you get below the kind of anglophone and

00:53:08 Speaker_00
and highly educated, like highly Sanskritized maybe, surface of what's presented usually as Indian religion, like Advaita Vedanta and such things. I mean, that's like a quarter of an inch deep. It's like your skin.

00:53:22 Speaker_00
Your skin is there, but there's a lot more below the skin. I'm not saying that Vedanta or Advaita is shallow. I'm not saying that by any means. I'm simply saying that what's prevalent in the subcontinent is

00:53:35 Speaker_00
is way different from what you might find in official accounts. Possession of that kind can be kind of contagious. I've seen large festivals. I mean, I lived in Pune for many years way back in the day, and there's a temple there, a place called Jejuri,

00:53:53 Speaker_00
On the Monday of a new moon, when a new moon falls on a Monday, Somavati Amavasya, there's this huge, unbelievable possession festival that goes on on the Mondays of the new moon. It's kind of weird and scary to watch.

00:54:09 Speaker_00
It's fun and interesting and brilliant and beautiful also. But you see a lot of people falling into trance states, saying that they're possessed by the spirit of Khandoba.

00:54:21 Speaker_00
And the Sona Vati Amavasya, the New Moon Monday, is well known, at least in Maharashtra, probably Karnataka as well, as a day that's special for that.

00:54:33 Speaker_00
And people will kind of self-appoint themselves as being oracles that answer questions and that sort of thing.

00:54:41 Speaker_04
you know, what you said right at the beginning when you said like, it's probably the most common spiritual expression. I mean, that's a big jolt to a lot of people, right?

00:54:50 Speaker_04
You know, it must be puja, it must be meditating, it must be, you know, contemplation of Advaita Vedanta or this type of thing. And then you actually go around into the villages and you understand like the substrate is spirit possession.

00:55:02 Speaker_04
And I've seen it over and over again in Tamil Nadu. I've seen it in Odisha, I've seen it in Bengal, I've seen it in Kerala, I've seen it in Himachal Pradesh, I've seen it in Rajasthan, I've seen it in Gujarat, you know.

00:55:16 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's everywhere.

00:55:18 Speaker_04
Everywhere. It's everywhere. The dead and the living intermingle in constant dialogue, and visions of what will be roam the world, landing upon bodies by the millions. Do you hear, Cassandra? You're not. alone. They speak through so many.

00:55:38 Speaker_04
They speak all around us. The Melanesian Kaluli medium communicates with spirits constantly, is in constant dialogue. The people of the invisible world enter the medium's body and talk through his mouth.

00:55:54 Speaker_04
The Dobu people and the Kwayo people speak out loud to the dead almost as much as to other people.

00:56:00 Speaker_04
Festivals across the Trobriand archipelago involve weeks of feasting with ancestors, speaking with ancestors, dancing with ancestors, dreaming with ancestors, playing games with ancestors, crying with ancestors, singing with ancestors, singing with nature spirits in direct dialogue.

00:56:20 Speaker_04
These ancestral spirits show up in the dreams of the people in the weeks prior to the festival. They arrive through premonitions and signs. They arrive through weather. They arrive even when the ritual is disrupted by a falling coconut. Hello, ancestor.

00:56:37 Speaker_04
It's that simple. It's a continual reminder. It's not me. It's not me alone. It's us. It's all of us.

00:56:48 Speaker_04
In cultures of imminence, says Salens, gods, ancestors, and other meta-person denizens of the cosmos are not only occasional visitors, they are ever-present in human affairs.

00:57:02 Speaker_04
Such daily, normative, thorough, relational interaction with the world of forces is anything but woo. Anthropologists studying animate traditions all across the world speak to how pragmatic animate tradition is.

00:57:17 Speaker_04
Many, and I mean many, anthropologists are surprised by how rational it all is when immersed in it. How direct, how relational, how simple. Like, why wouldn't we talk to the dead?

00:57:32 Speaker_04
In a world of voices, a world that speaks through the waters and in the call of songbirds, why would we not dialogue? People who speak with the dead are not participating in abstraction.

00:57:47 Speaker_04
They are reawakening relationality in the most tangible of ways, through speaking it, through singing it, through living it. We are continually in dialogue with the dead, and everything around us is an ancestor.

00:58:03 Speaker_04
only a culture ripped from its ancestry would stop speaking to the dead. Dialogue with the dead creates a living umbilical line to what is past, and allows the past to continue to live in the present, for its lessons to be embodied here and now.

00:58:23 Speaker_04
So one of the foundations of Brazilian Umbanda practice is dialogue with the spirits of indigenous Brazilians and deceased slaves, the Caboclos and the Pretos Velhos.

00:58:35 Speaker_04
Such embodied dialogue, felt dialogue, operates on a level that other forms of discourse can't. It's different than speaking about the past politically.

00:58:46 Speaker_04
It provides a living sociocultural vehicle for processing and enacting paradoxes of identity and race relations, says Lindsay Hale. It recognizes the dead, the past,

00:58:58 Speaker_04
as a force that is alive and still exerting its influence, not just as societal traumas and patterns, but in each breath we take and how we move and speak and how we walk the streets and who calls to us at the crossroads and guides us forward along our way.

00:59:15 Speaker_01
having weekly meetings with spirits, you get a sense that there is something that came before you.

00:59:22 Speaker_04
And to me it sounds like a remembering, not just on an intellectual level, but remembering as an actual somatic dialogue with the past.

00:59:35 Speaker_04
But in modern America, we don't want to even consider the possibility that a haunted past might be affecting outcomes today. Because the past, for us, is not alive. It is not fed. It is not offered candles and sweets.

00:59:53 Speaker_04
It is not spoken with in a way that invites change in the present. Have you offered candles and sweets to the living being that is the past recently? Have you sung to the ancestral dead? But modern culture scoffs. Move on, modern culture says, move on.

01:00:13 Speaker_04
So when the ghosts of the past resurface and the topic of reparations for slavery is brought up, for example, The most common refrain in response is, but that was so long ago. So long ago. Keep moving ahead and don't look back.

01:00:31 Speaker_04
And so we have abandoned both the future and the past in favor of relentlessly pursuing an immediate hunger that demands all of our attention now. Who has time to honor the dead? Who has time to plan seven generations forward?

01:00:48 Speaker_04
I must consume now, produce now. Ask any tradition that deals thoroughly with ghosts, and they will tell you that this is ghost behavior.

01:01:00 Speaker_04
This is a culture that is not in good relation with its ancestral dead, and so its dead are reappearing as unquenched societal thirsts. More on that in part 2.

01:01:15 Speaker_04
So yeah, we fear the past and the future because of what they might tell us about how we are living in the present. Because they might reveal that we are caught in a frenzied march on a road to nowhere.

01:01:27 Speaker_04
and that despite all the talk we make of progress, nothing in the trajectory of how we approach life, nothing in the models of relentless charging forward, nothing in the vision of continuous expansion, suggests that we are remotely ready to even think about the future.

01:01:47 Speaker_04
The real future. The living future. The 10,000 year future. But despite our best efforts to ignore it, the future seeps through all the time.

01:02:02 Speaker_04
In dreams, in portents, in discomforting feelings that we've seen this all before, the future whispers at the edges of our consciousness, inviting us into the place where we are nothing at all in the face of the luminous flows and tides of history.

01:02:18 Speaker_04
That place of flow, that eternal place, is the stomping ground of the visionary.

01:02:25 Speaker_04
It's only reviled in cultures that have a societal aversion to the past and the future, and to a basic recognition that they are not the pinnacle of history, that they are subordinate to the ancestors, and aren't actually in control of anything.

01:02:42 Speaker_04
We don't ostracize oracles because looking into the future is a fringe activity.

01:02:48 Speaker_04
We ostracize oracles because the worst thing you could tell a culture built on the absolute supremacy of individual determinism and agency is that everything is unfolding exactly as it ever has and always will.

01:03:04 Speaker_04
And the future, like clear, clear stream water, flows in a pattern in relation to the banks created for it. And those banks were created long, long before us. And we have very little to do with it at all.

01:03:27 Speaker_04
Ours is the first and only society in history to not make a place in its story of causality for sensing or knowing events in the future, says Eric Wargo in his book Time Loops, and more generally of the teleological relevance of final causes in explaining human affairs.

01:03:46 Speaker_04
But even Western culture, despite these rifts, has not stopped speaking to the dead, not stopped stepping into the fiery vision space of the oracles, as much as it has been dismissed as charlatanism, which we'll also get into later.

01:04:01 Speaker_04
There is a long tradition of western spiritism, western mediumship, and Western prophetic vision.

01:04:08 Speaker_04
And recognizing this, recognizing that even though it has been ridiculed and othered and dismissed, people still, despite being labeled fringe, still consult oracles, still read stars, still go into rapturous states and commune with the dead, means that it's not something other.

01:04:28 Speaker_04
It's not an aberration to culture. That in fact, it's completely normal to have visions of the future.

01:04:37 Speaker_04
Ordinary people in all walks of life, says Wargo, in every culture on earth, including our own, and throughout recorded history, have reported getting forewarnings of traumatic or threatening events, commonly called premonitions.

01:04:52 Speaker_04
And many religious traditions make a place for the ability of certain individuals to speak or even write about future events, commonly called prophecy. As Sophie Strand says,

01:05:04 Speaker_02
I think that people are having visionary experiences all the time in pre-cog and pre-cognitive dreams. And I think this stuff is like, it's so prevalent. It's not just some unique charismatic individuals. And it's hard.

01:05:17 Speaker_02
It takes a lot of work culturally to pretend like these aren't happening.

01:05:21 Speaker_04
So this human predilection towards oracular vision never really went anywhere. Freud tried to deny it as best he could, but he couldn't get away from the fact that a massive percent of his clients came to him with oracular dreams and visions.

01:05:37 Speaker_04
In a great irony, Freud himself had oracular dreams, premonitions of an affliction that would grip him later in his life, which he tried to ignore.

01:05:46 Speaker_04
Says Wargo, quote, Freud's own explicit denial of the possibility of precognition could even be seen as his tragic flaw, making his life a fascinating case study of a man haunted by time loops he could not or would not confront.

01:06:01 Speaker_04
Freud's insistence that everything, Everything comes from the individual subconscious. That it's all you traps us in a world where all there is to do is walk the lonely hamster wheel of self-actualization and individual betterment by ourselves.

01:06:20 Speaker_04
It shuts off access to the time-honored flows and communications of a sentient world and severs us from the fundamental porosity that has formed the foundation of human animate experience for hundreds of thousands of years.

01:06:33 Speaker_04
And that's an overly fancy way of saying, would you really want to live in a world in which everything you dream is yours? That you're responsible for all of it? That all of it is your psychological muck?

01:06:49 Speaker_04
Rather than a communal, ecological, cosmic expression moving through you? I mean, welcome to the prison of horrors. Who wants to own everything that passes through them?

01:07:00 Speaker_04
Who wants to own every emotional state that passes through them and label it as their identity? Go too far down that road.

01:07:09 Speaker_04
And you might end up with a world in which no one knows how to relate beyond themselves, to dream beyond themselves, to communicate with the ancestral past, to see into the future, to hold visions and dreams as communal, ecological, relational powers, rather than just food for narcissists.

01:07:28 Speaker_04
White people sleep a lot, says David Kapanawa, a Yanomami shaman. but they don't know how to dream. They only dream about themselves. They don't leave themselves, they don't leave mankind, they don't conjunct with the spirit world.

01:07:45 Speaker_04
This is why they're destroying Amazonia. Now there's a hot take. For many traditions, the ability to leave oneself To be the springbok and be the river? To be the hawk flying over? To be the thread of ancestry? To see with the eyes of the oracles?

01:08:03 Speaker_04
To tread the spirit world? To enact a communal dreaming? This is the key to navigating life. How would we even know what to do if we don't do this?

01:08:14 Speaker_04
As Hallowell wrote of the Anishinaabe, quote, it is through dreams that the individual becomes directly acquainted with the entities which he considers the active agencies of the world around him. Through dreams.

01:08:28 Speaker_04
How can we possibly understand the living forces of the world if we think all dreams are ours? If we shun liminal spaces because they don't conform to our immediate sense-making project?

01:08:43 Speaker_04
Liminal spaces have long been feared in the industrialized West because the industrialist wants no liminality at play in the world. No downtime, no off time, certainly no dream time. Start dreaming and who knows what might happen.

01:09:01 Speaker_04
Start dreaming and forgotten voices of renewal might shine through like light through autumn leaves. But many cultures have held a central place for dreams and dreaming, for liminal spaces. And dreams have shaped the course of history.

01:09:20 Speaker_04
The day before his planned invasion of Massalia, Celtic King Katamandus dreamed of a fearsome goddess. He woke, terrified, says author Lorna Smithers, and sued for peace with the Massaliots.

01:09:36 Speaker_04
He then, quote, asked permission to enter the city in order to worship their gods. He went to the temple of Minerva, and there in the portico, he saw the image of the goddess that he'd seen in his sleep.

01:09:51 Speaker_04
To make consequential decisions based on dreams was not unusual at all in the ancient world. Quote, dream incubation was a widespread practice across the Near Eastern civilizations of the ancient world.

01:10:05 Speaker_04
Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Hebrew texts all refer to some form of inviting the other world to send prophetic dreams. Nor is this type of dream work limited to the ancient past.

01:10:18 Speaker_04
The Iroquois of the northern United States traditionally have deep practices around dreaming. Quote, whatever the Iroquois see themselves doing in dreams, they believe they are absolutely obligated to execute at the earliest possible moment.

01:10:35 Speaker_04
Iroquois would think themselves guilty of a great crime if they failed to obey a single dream.

01:10:42 Speaker_04
According to Tika Yupanqui, quote, men in the Iroquois society did ritual dream quests as part of their initiation in order to awaken both visions and dreams that would guide them. And this enactment wasn't just an individual exercise.

01:10:57 Speaker_04
Yupanqui says, quote, dream sharing was often a communal experience. Tensions experienced in the dream were expressed and released through community sharing and interpretation.

01:11:10 Speaker_04
All of this culminated in the Midwinter Dream Festival, one of the most sacred festivals in Iroquois society, in which dreaming was done together. Dreams were told, together.

01:11:24 Speaker_04
And the nature of the dreams, and the nature of the dreamtelling that happened after, shaped the course that the culture would take for the following year. One dream landed once on a native woman in the Northeast United States.

01:11:38 Speaker_04
It told her that her daughter would give birth to a son who would plant a white pine tree at Onondaga, a tree of peace. Her grandson, the peacemaker, fulfilled his grandmother's dream.

01:11:52 Speaker_04
He braved cannibals and vengeful spirits and united the disparate nations in a lasting peace. What was the profound teaching that the peacemaker brought that could bring such peace? He taught patience. Patience.

01:12:11 Speaker_04
And when the twisted sorcerer Tadadao slaughtered his companion's entire family, for even suggesting peace, he forsook vengeance. He forsook vengeance because the cycle has to end somewhere, right?

01:12:28 Speaker_04
He forsook vengeance, and he reached out his hand, and he combed the snakes from Tadadao's hair, and he established peace.

01:12:42 Speaker_04
and the peace he established set a precedent that Benjamin Franklin would later refer to as a direct inspiration in the creation of the United States. The states are still here. Where is the dream of peace?

01:13:02 Speaker_04
Where is the peacemaker and where the white pine tree? Where is anything resembling patience? In a world where the word peace isn't mentioned seriously anymore, let us be open to omens of peace, arriving in unexpected places, in unlooked-for dreams.

01:13:33 Speaker_04
Let us still dream dreams in peace. These stories of dreaming invite us into a more relational space, a space where the living presence of the animate bubbles forth and shapes lives and moves histories.

01:13:54 Speaker_04
It opens us into a world where communication is a constant living flow, and we are conduits. This is perhaps the human in its fullest expression, a conduit for the flow of dreams. I'll repeat the refrain, everyone is, to some degree, medial.

01:14:14 Speaker_04
Everyone is a conduit between below and above, past and future, between earth and air, between fire and water. Everyone channels, because the body is literally a channel, a tube, a vessel. Such medial activity is not supernatural.

01:14:38 Speaker_04
Supernatural is a modern projection. In animist tradition, there is generally no distinction between natural and supernatural, no dividing line.

01:14:48 Speaker_04
Flip the perspective and you will find West African thinkers who describe their own traditions as deeply pragmatic and Western scientific and religious tradition to be decidedly woo. Because, tell me, what's more woo, really?

01:15:03 Speaker_04
trying to upload your consciousness and live forever, or speaking out loud to the waters that form the basis of your very life? What's more woo?

01:15:13 Speaker_04
A seance designed to connect people to the ancestral dead, who continue to directly impact our lives, or spending all day staring into a glowing rock in your room by yourself? One look at modern humans stooped over their phones

01:15:31 Speaker_04
doom-scrolling, and our ancient ancestors would have a thing or two to say about who is who," says Salans quote.

01:15:42 Speaker_04
Africans and others whose worlds are populated by spirits are commonly supposed to be mystical by Westerners who are operating on their own transcendental suppositions.

01:15:53 Speaker_04
It's modernity's fractured vision of transcendence that causes us to separate the world into natural and supernatural. We assume that to interact with water spirits and ghosts, with ancestors and stones, requires conceptual belief in something other.

01:16:11 Speaker_04
Never do we consider that in a world in which spirit communication has been completely normal, utterly felt and enacted for 300,000 years, there might be something other about us. Or as Jean Pouillon put it,

01:16:29 Speaker_04
Only the non-believer believes that what the believer does is believe. Start looking deeper, and Cassandra is everywhere. All children are Cassandra, a friend reminded me recently, seeing things that no one around them believes.

01:16:49 Speaker_04
So the Achuar of Ecuador say that, quote, anyone, man, woman, or child, under certain circumstances, is capable of sending their soul beyond the narrow confines of the body to dialogue with another of nature's beings, be it human, animal, plant, or spirit.

01:17:11 Speaker_04
It started when I was about 13, says Solomon, a Honduran Buye. I always had dreams of the Dugu and of the dead. When I was little, says Mina, a 47-year-old woman, the spirits would take me and six men couldn't hold me down.

01:17:30 Speaker_04
Once, she says, I fell into a trance for a whole year. Carlitos, a deeply respected visionary and healer, says that at eight years old he dreamed a lot about medicines and plants, and about what would happen in the future.

01:17:47 Speaker_04
All of this is extremely tangible, if you have cultural space for it. For the Inu of Labrador, anthropologist Frank Speck says,

01:17:58 Speaker_04
The realm of non-human agencies, which the European calls unseen, is as often sensed by sight as are the familiar creatures of everyday life that surround the most pragmatic-minded.

01:18:12 Speaker_04
The cannibal giant, he says, the underwater people, the animal owners, are not to him questionable beings, but realities.

01:18:20 Speaker_04
The division between the visible and invisible implies no transcendence, no ultimate separation between the ancestral realm and the human. So there you have it. Let's have a party, shall we? Let's have a party and invite the dead.

01:18:36 Speaker_04
For it's normal to have oracles, and it's necessary to be in dialogue with seen and unseen worlds. Such relational dialogue is somatically embedded. It lives in bodies. It lives latent in all of us.

01:18:51 Speaker_04
Some recognize this and attune themselves to it, build their whole culture around it. Roger Keesing says of the Quayo people of the Solomon Islands, quote,

01:19:01 Speaker_04
Already by age three, the Kwayo child learns that the social universe includes actors that he or she cannot see, and that these unseen ancestral powers are the cause of illness and misfortune, and the source of success, gratification, and security.

01:19:19 Speaker_04
The seer, the intuitive, the spirit medium, interacts constantly with forces beyond human control, just as we do still. Here we are, still at the whim of the fire and the waters. Here we are, 70,000 in Nevada scattered by one good rain.

01:19:40 Speaker_04
Here we are, ants claiming to own the world. Here we are, at the very whim of dreams. The oracle reminds us of this. The oracle takes us to the fearful precipice where we see that we were never fully in control.

01:19:58 Speaker_04
and asks us to feel that we are only one part of a much larger play. Quote, people are not the authors of their life and death, the forces of their propagation, growth and decline, their illness and their health.

01:20:14 Speaker_04
They did not make the plants and animals on which they subsist, the weather upon which their prosperity depends. The common predicament is human finitude. Human finitude, we are small and temporary. The powers around us are great.

01:20:33 Speaker_04
We think we know why things happen, where they're heading. What do we know? We are placed in this world, says David Hume. as in a great theater, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us.

01:20:49 Speaker_04
How much of your life is determined by ancestry, by ecology, by the movement of weather? For those of the Trobriand Archipelago, says Salens,

01:21:01 Speaker_04
The Ancestors are the perceived agents implicated in nearly all aspects of living humans and spirits socially.

01:21:09 Speaker_04
Procreation, kinship, clanship, aphenal relations, mythology, cosmology, chiefly hierarchy and rank, ritual performance, sacrifice, burial, harvest. It turns out the Ancestors are indispensable agents in all variety of human endeavor.

01:21:28 Speaker_04
So, for those who listen to this podcast regularly, this is cranking up the animism another notch. In traditional animate visions, everything unfolds due to animate agencies. None of it is ours the way that modernity defines the word.

01:21:45 Speaker_04
We do not do anything independently of natural forces, ancestral forces, independent of time, relationality, independent of stones, independent of stories.

01:21:58 Speaker_04
Explorer Nood Rasmussen, commenting on the world of the Inuit, said this, all the little outcomes of daily life are the outcome of activity on the part of the mysterious powers. Do you hear? All of them. all the outcomes of daily life.

01:22:17 Speaker_04
Everything is guided by something else. The human life is intermediary. We are conduits, like it or not. Kind of throws a wrench in what we call power and agency, doesn't it? Agency is always hybrid, Paul Christopher Johnson writes.

01:22:37 Speaker_04
built of interactions between human, near-human, and non-human things.

01:22:43 Speaker_04
Think of spirit possession, spirit writing, revival jerking, speaking in tongues, ritual demonstrations of extraordinary resistance to pain, or even being inspired by an unexpected voice, stricken by a muse that set your painting or writing on its way.

01:23:00 Speaker_04
All of us have witnessed and some have directly experienced being managed by non-human beings, or, put differently, attuning the experience of the body to the question of the other, an impinging external force.

01:23:14 Speaker_04
Its most familiar and paradigmatic cipher, the possessed body, pushes back against assumptions that the quests for voice, status, autonomy, or power are universal. This being managed by non-human agencies isn't abstract.

01:23:34 Speaker_04
It only becomes abstract when we abstract it. But it's territory the artist treads every day.

01:23:41 Speaker_04
When asked about writing also Sprecht Zarathustra, Nietzsche said, quote, does anyone at the end of the 19th century have a clear idea of what poets in strong ages called inspiration? If not, then I'll describe it.

01:23:59 Speaker_04
You would indeed scarcely be able to dismiss the sense of being just an incarnation, just a mouthpiece, just a medium for overpowering forces.

01:24:10 Speaker_04
The notion of revelation, in the sense that suddenly, with ineffable assuredness and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes you to the core and bowls you over, provides a simple description of the facts of the matter.

01:24:27 Speaker_04
You hear. You don't search. You take. You don't ask who is giving. Like a flash of lightning, a thought flares up. with necessity, with no hesitation as to its form. I never had any choice. The oracle has no choice.

01:24:49 Speaker_04
This is important to remember when culture gets into criticizing mediums and visionaries. Quite often, there is very little choice. The oracle asks, was there ever one thing that was mine? Was there ever one thing I actually controlled?

01:25:07 Speaker_04
Was there ever a moment where I was not a vessel for greater powers passing through? Was it ever me, Apollo? Or was it you all along? Was it just you all along? How cruel. How beautiful.

01:25:27 Speaker_04
So the spirit medium, the intuitive, the seer, the oracle is at the mercy of greater powers. A channel for larger agencies speaks words that aren't theirs, sees lights that aren't theirs, feels shutters that aren't theirs to keep.

01:25:43 Speaker_04
The South Indian Kali Oracle's eyes redden. His breath becomes hot with the arrival of the goddess. It's not him, it's her. He's only a vessel. I speak these things with my whole bodily frame driven out of its senses, the Apollonian Oracle says.

01:26:03 Speaker_04
I do not know the things that I say. For you are the one who speaks all these things in me. St. Teresa is impaled by the angel's flaming spear. It is pain, it is ecstasy, it is the flow of life, and most of all, it's utterly not up to her.

01:26:32 Speaker_04
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, she says, and at the point was a shining flame. He thrust it into my heart. When he drew it out, he left me all on fire with a great love of God.

01:26:46 Speaker_04
The pain was so great that it made me cry aloud, and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it. The oracle is taken by the world.

01:27:04 Speaker_04
The oracle is shattered over and over again, but is also given the gift of being held by the larger universe. The oracle's body often pays a price. The journey is not about wellness in the self-serving sense of the word.

01:27:20 Speaker_04
The oracle is not on a path of individual acclaim or affirmation. Instead, it's an understanding that communities heal through the bodies of those willing to be taken by the gods into the place of visions and ruptures and seeings.

01:27:35 Speaker_04
That is how the healing comes.

01:27:38 Speaker_04
It pours through the open wounds of history, through the hearts of those with no choice but to feel, through the sensate portals which the living cosmos opens in those willing to receive its transmissions, even if those transmissions come with spears and unthinkable fire.

01:28:02 Speaker_04
This is important to feel into. Visions pour through ruptures, Visions aren't me having a nice little meditation on the mountaintop and then deciding what to offer for my next wellness seminar.

01:28:15 Speaker_04
Visions pour through ruptures like blood through wounds, like rain through thunderclouds. Visions come as a deluge through portals opened up in states of being torn open.

01:28:30 Speaker_04
Crazy Horse's visions arrived after seeing a fellow warrior killed on the battlefield. From that day on, he was flooded with visions.

01:28:40 Speaker_04
As Black Elk says, quote, Crazy Horse dreamed, and he went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world.

01:28:57 Speaker_04
He was on his horse in that world, and the horse and himself on it, and the trees and the grass and the stones, and everything were made of spirit. And nothing was hard, and everything seemed to float.

01:29:11 Speaker_04
His horse was standing still there, and yet it danced around like a horse made only of shadow. It was this vision that gave him his great power.

01:29:20 Speaker_04
For when he went into a fight, he had only to think of that world to be in it again, so that he could go through anything and not be hurt. From that day on, Crazy Horse was never harmed in battle. Not once.

01:29:36 Speaker_04
He painted hailstones on his body as he saw in the vision. He painted lightning on his cheek as he saw in the vision. And no bullet ever found him in battle. Joan of Arc began receiving voices and visions when she was 13.

01:29:53 Speaker_04
Angelic, saintly visitations there in her family garden.

01:29:58 Speaker_03
She was in her father's garden, she says, the first time that the boys came to her. And she said it would always come with a great light, and it would come from the right side.

01:30:07 Speaker_04
Visions of Archangel Michael blazing there in the garden, speaking there in the garden.

01:30:14 Speaker_04
Visions that told her that against all odds, she, a teenage peasant girl in 15th century France, would be instrumental in helping the French Dauphin gain the throne. And so it was to be.

01:30:27 Speaker_04
Her visions came at a time of societal upset and upheaval, in the midst of a hundred year war. As much as visions pour through ruptures, they also arrive in rupturous times.

01:30:42 Speaker_04
At times when there is more death in the world, more precariousness, more instability, there are more visions. It's an equation. Times of rupture bring visions.

01:30:55 Speaker_04
So maybe, just maybe, the growing number of intuitives on the fringe of culture has something to do with the fact that there are literally more visions pouring through the ever-thinning veil between this world and the next. I'm not saying it's so.

01:31:13 Speaker_04
I'm saying it's something to consider. It's good to flip the rational script sometimes. The presence of more visions in times of rupture means that, perhaps, visionaries are particularly necessary in times like this. Think of it this way.

01:31:32 Speaker_04
Prophets don't arrive when everything is all fine and good in the kingdom, right? Prophets come to shake the culture awake. To point right to the societal wound and to shout it out loud to the people.

01:31:47 Speaker_04
So the true visionary is not telling people to bliss out and not pay attention or trying to convince them that whatever they want to manifest they can.

01:31:56 Speaker_04
The true visionary is seeking to inform culture of its ruptures and return people to the state of feeling.

01:32:05 Speaker_04
And when cultures don't like to be informed of their ruptures, as we'll explore in the next part of this episode, visionaries are the first to blame.

01:32:15 Speaker_04
But we better find a way to listen to the seers and visionaries, the intuitives and empaths, the Cassandras of the kingdom. If we lose our ability to learn from the visions of seers, we lose the very thing that drives culture forward.

01:32:33 Speaker_04
For culture, as we'll explore next time, culture is not a rationalist exercise. Culture adapts and changes and learns and grows way out there on the fringe. Lots of people to thank today for this episode.

01:33:16 Speaker_04
First of all, many thanks to Maria Stark for whooping, wailing, hollering, whispering, and providing lots of beautiful textures for this episode. You can find Maria's music everywhere that you find music, and it's really worth checking out.

01:33:31 Speaker_04
She's got a new album out called Weightless, and the single is How Did The Song. Travis Puntarelli added some vocals for this episode. Pia recorded a beautiful version of Ave Generosa. song by Hildegard of Bingen.

01:33:46 Speaker_04
And many thanks also to Sonja Drakulic for allowing me to use the song Kyrie Eleison by Stella Mara. Sonja's music has influenced this podcast very deeply, so it's a joy to get to feature some of her music.

01:34:00 Speaker_04
Special thanks also to Char Rothschild for adding some ripping zurna and trumpet to this episode. Char plays in the band Round Mountain and Corvin Orchistar. And you can find Char on Instagram, Char Rothschild.

01:34:17 Speaker_04
Special thanks also to Lorraine Couture for doing some research for this lengthy episode. Thanks to author Frederick Smith and Bernardou Malamout for agreeing to be interviewed for this episode.

01:34:29 Speaker_04
And Frederick Smith has a wonderful book out called The Self-Possessed, which is a really authoritative journey through the spirit possession traditions of India. Highly recommended.

01:34:40 Speaker_04
And again, if you want to hear more of the interviews with Bernardo and Frederick, they're available for patrons, and you can find out more about patronage at patreon.com slash the Emerald Podcast.

01:34:52 Speaker_04
This episode also contains reference to many books, articles, etc. These include The New Science of the Enchanted Universe by Marshall Salins, highly recommended. The Cassandra Complex by Laurie Shapira.

01:35:05 Speaker_04
Divine Mania, Consciousness Alteration in Ancient Greece by Yulia Ustinova.

01:35:10 Speaker_04
In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann The Writings of Bayo Okomalafe The 2009 film Avatar, directed by James Cameron Pew Research Studies on Religion and Spirituality in Various Communities Across the Globe Preto Velho, Resistance Redemption and Engendered Representations of Slavery in a Brazilian Possession Trance Religion by Lindsay Lauren Hale The book Time Loops by Eric Wargo

01:35:37 Speaker_04
Dreams and the Wishes of the Soul, a type of psychoanalytic theory among the 17th century Iroquois by Anthony Wallace. The Iroquois Dream Experience and Spirituality by Tika Yupanki. Dreams in Berthonic Tradition by Lorna Smithers.

01:35:50 Speaker_04
Dream Tending by Steven Eisenstadt. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods by Bruno Latour. A couple of books by Paul Christopher Johnson. These are diaspora conversions and automatic religions near human agents of Brazil and France.

01:36:07 Speaker_04
The book Black Elk Speaks by John Neihart. The work of Friedrich Nietzsche on writing Thus Spake Zarathustra. The book The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight. A couple of songs by Kids See Ghosts. That's Kids See Ghosts and Free Ghost Town Part 2.

01:36:24 Speaker_04
Tibetan Horn by the Drepung Losaling monks. The 2004 film Mean Girls, undoubtedly one of the top ten films ever made. and stop trying to make fetch a thing. And, of course, the 1980 film, The Blues Brothers, starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.

01:36:40 Speaker_04
Feel the spirit.

01:36:47 Speaker_05
Well, me and the Lord, we got an understanding. We're on a mission from God.