Shamanic Roots of Western Culture: Odyssey & Tolkien


“I love these kind of interviews – makes you feel like you’ve been sitting around the campfire with one of the ‘elders’ – out there in the jungle with the ancestors. You can almost hear their voices echoing in the wind. This is the new shamanic tradition with a cyberspace twist,” Timaeus commented after listening to this interview.

To listen to the second hour of the interview, click here:

Red Ice Radio Hour 2

6 Replies to “Shamanic Roots of Western Culture: Odyssey & Tolkien”

  1. You mentioned in your interview that numbers were not real but a metaphysical construct got my attention, can you direct me or expand on this as I am having a problem on grasping this concept.
    Thank you.
    Jon

  2. Hi Jon, numbers are an invention of the rational mind, and as such are metaphysical entities, just as any other archetypal form is. Empirically, you simply cannot locate one, scour the natural world as you will. You simply will not find a number three nesting in a tree, swimming in a pond, wiggling beneath a microscope, or twinkling in some deep recess of the sky. In this sense, numbers can be seen as a key component of a metaphysical belief system, one which we call “science”.

    Naturally, this leads us to the next question — Are numbers real, then? 😉

  3. The fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8,13 …) and golden ratio (1.618..) are two ways of expressing the same numerical relationship and are found throughout nature. The spiral of a snail’s shell is measureable with the golden ratio. Thus I would suggest that numbers underlie nature, which expresses the information contained within them.

    For more, you may wish to visit http://www.pateo.nl

    Also: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave expresses our mutliple dimensions well.

  4. I agree there is order in the cosmos, and a language we’ve found to detect and express this order is mathematics. Yet, from a purely empirical perspective, numbers do not exist. This debate over the reality of the unseen, of course, has been going on for centuries. Thus, Diogenes could state about Plato’s archetypes, “I can see Plato’s cups and bowls, but I can’t see his cupness and plateness.” The issue arose again in the fierce debates between the Rationalists and Nominalists in the Middle Ages, out of which came Occam’s Razor and the founding of the modern scientific method.

    My point is numbers, like archetypes, are metaphysical entities. You cannot find one in nature. Of course, that doesn’t invalidate your statement, “numbers underlie nature, which expresses the information contained within them.” The truth value of that statement is beyond my capacity to reckon!

    I do question the implicit assumption in this statement that numbers are somehow primary, however, and that the manifest world is simply an expression of their encoded information. That seems to me to be unjustifiably reductionist.

    The fact is, I have no trouble with there being multiple dimensions in the cosmos, seen and unseen. In fact, I am a vigorous defender of animistic perception. My critique is we’ve privileged numbers to a degree that has invalidated other dimensions of the cosmos as holdovers of a more primitive apprehension.

    We ourselves are as “superstitious” about the existence of our invisible numbers as other cultures are towards the inhabitants of their own sacred dimensions.

  5. Thanks for elaborating. Why would we not open our minds and hearts to creational archetypes other than numbers 😉 “Do numbers exist” is not a black and white question, and your elaboration illustrates that fact well.

  6. Thanks for explaining tribal connectedness as a deeply spiritual contrast to the modern matrix. Tribes have been stereotyped as primitive. Far from primitive, we need to see ourselves as healing a schism between us and their wisdom.

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