I often hear things like ‘society is breaking down,’ ‘young people are out of control,’ and ‘we need national service.’ Then I wonder how many of the adults calling for this have served. If they are Generation X, like me, none of them. But we have all gone through Rites Of Passage, even if we don’t realise it. Turning 16, 18, 21? First kiss? First sex? First time Getting Drunk, stoned, or tripping? That Ayahuasca tour you went on? Getting a driver’s license? Death of a parent? Getting Arrested? Doing NVDA? D-Locking yourself to a machine to stop the destruction until they cut the lock? Surviving Trauma? But these are not real Rites of Passage. A Rite of Passage is a transformative process. Except for the last, society expects every child in industrialised countries to go through minimal rites of passage, like the school prom.
Yet in indigenous cultures, the Elders are central to the transformative process of a Rite of Passage. If we are to inherit Rites of Passage from our ancestors, let’s not sanitise them just to get public liability insurance or make them easier for ourselves. More importantly, let’s not sell them.
Vision Quests: Re-Awaken Your Potential – Modern Vision Quest for All
“The unimportant things fall away, and your emptiness invites the vision of the work that must be done. In your solitude, you wander through the precincts of death, where vision lies waiting.” This quote is taken from one of the many Vision Quest vendors.
How can you wander through the precincts of death when public liability insurance means your vision quest has been risk-assessed, sanitised so that you do 3 days without water rather than 4?
Immediately, a sales pitch lays out the transactional exchange and expectation. When we pay for something, we expect results. What if, during your Vision Quest, the rain is relentless, your fire goes out, and the basic bushcraft skills you learned a few days earlier are woefully inadequate? What if it’s brutally hot during a heatwave?
You are wet, cold, starving, and miserable. Nature is humbling you, but do you even understand how or why?
The idea of a refund will probably cross your mind. Nature is telling you your skills are inadequate. The question is, will you ask for a refund, and will the facilitators acknowledge inadequate skills as a contributing factor and accept responsibility? Or will you be encouraged to persevere? It’s meant to challenge you; it’s meant to be difficult; it’s meant to feel like a test
The sanitised Vision Quest cannot kill you: You so desperately want to be the shaman, hold space, feel the connection that you are prepared to make it easier for yourself and then justify that by telling everyone that you are making core shamanism safe; it was never dangerous: But this sales pitch works.
Apparently it’s all about connection
Connection to what?
I keep hearing people talking about connection in the abstract. Connection is a buzzword in Neo-shamanic / New Age circles. But they keep it vague. Vague connection could mean anything. I know they mean the image on the right, but again, do they mean connection to each other or nature? The nuance matters, and so do the jargonisation and vagueness.
It’s not connection to nature, though; it’s connection to the “web of life“: Nature is very specific, but the “web of life is an abstraction with the appearance of vastness. It’s a bastardisation of “Alles ist Wechselwirkung!” (“Everything is interaction!”)-Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt’s vision of nature has scientific rigour: Alexander von Humboldt’s “vertical thinking” refers to his way of conceptualising the Earth by measuring and visualising nature across depth and elevation, linking subterranean mines, mountain ranges, and atmospheric zones into a unified global system. His concept of Nature as a web was deeply holistic; he connected minerals, the universe, the atmosphere, and the dance of life on Earth and in the ocean. He was immersed in nature during his travels in the Americas. Compared with Humboldt’s philosophy and the German description, the “web of life” seems like a distant, impoverished relative and indeed its impoverishment continues in the hands of Neo-shamanic practitioners: You know the ones who aren’t being shamans; they are just using their tools, just using their tools. “Connect to the web of life” is like a mantra. As I listen to these teachers who people pay for spiritual training, they admit that they are still learning, and I am not talking about CPD. They teach what is essentially an animist tradition; they have just started discovering what anima is. What a scam.
We forget that in hunter-gatherer cultures, by age 10, a child is an expert at bushcraft and knows 100s of plants, their ecology, their culture, habitat. They have a deep understanding of the honourable harvest and what it means to eat our cousins. The community’s Elders taught the children survival skills. In some communities, the Elders may have been Dog Soldiers, Scouts or Medicine Men. They taught them the most extreme survival skills and tested them repeatedly. A few days of survival skills training is inadequate preparation for a Vision Quest. A Vision Quest done with zero survival training is something else — I’m not sure what to call it.
Over-Jargonisation of An Anima-Based Spiritual Path?
Some practitioners are overestimating or exaggerating what they are teaching
An introductory 4-day survival skills course to facilitate learning Vision Quest. Comes with wild claims about teaching long-term outdoor survival in 10 days, including 3 days of fasting and using those skills, which are fantasy and can leave students overconfident in their skills and under-equipped for difficult and dangerous situations.
There is nothing more deadly than an overconfident survivalist, and the world of outdoor adventure is littered with their corpses
Over-jargonisation: A Nature-Based Spiritual Path and Survivalism.
Some practitioners over-jargonise what they do in Bushcraft and Vision Quest. Adding layers and framing the structure with jargon confuses students.2 things are being taught. Introduction to survival skills and Vision Quest. Wild claims about teaching long-term outdoor survival in 10 days, including 3 days of fasting and using those skills, are a fantasy that could leave students overconfident in their skills and ill-equipped for difficult situations.
Vision Quest Business is touted as the “Best team building event you will attend this year”. Part 2: A Hero’s Journey: Your Time Alone In The Wilderness, modelled on The Hero with a Thousand Faces (PDF) by Joseph Campbell:
A Hero’s Journey: Your Time Alone In The Woods with roots in the White Supremacism and antisemitism of Author Joseph Campbell
A “Hero’s Journey” often includes a period of solitude in the wilderness, symbolising a descent into the unknown and a confrontation with one’s inner self. This “time alone in the woods” is a crucial stage where the hero grapples with challenges and tests, ultimately transforming before returning to the ordinary world.
“The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation — initiation — return, which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.”
Joseph Campbell’s Spirituality is so beloved by New Agers and NeoShaman, and you only need to scratch the surface, and there it is: White Supremacy, fascism and blood and soil. Campbell was an anti-Semite in the old style, and a racist bigot:
“More steps along the way take us toward “a potentially very dangerous situation…” Campbell now gathered various scholars, including Count Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Alfred Rosenberg. He doesn’t provide any detail on these figures, yet it seems appropriate to acknowledge the racial thinking that marks this journey, and the fact that he guides us up those steps to stand among this particular group of renowned philosophers. All three of these men were infamous proponents of white racial supremacy whose ponderings set the intellectual underpinnings of Nazi racism. Here Campbell remarks, “Clearly, mythology is no toy for children.” This is the “Prologue” of Campbell’s intended quest.
“Here it seems useful to visit Campbell’s personal biography. Years after the sudden debate over Campbell’s private attitudes, Maggie Macary noted in 2004 that Campbell studied at universities in France and Germany in the late 1920s. There he “grew to love German culture and became deeply involved with the work of German scholars” and his initial reaction to Nazism “was enthusiasm.”
“Here it seems useful to visit Campbell’s personal biography. Years after the sudden debate over Campbell’s private attitudes, Maggie Macary noted in 2004 that during the late 1920s Campbell studied at universities in France and Germany. There he “grew to love German culture and became deeply involved with the work of German scholars”, and his initial reaction to Nazism “was enthusiasm.” Macary assures us that “Campbell ultimately came to see that Fascism, like the dreaded Communism, was no friend of the individual…” Her implication is that Campbell became infatuated with the Nazi interest in mythology but worried about the crude political manifestations of fascism. This brief note on personal history helps explain Campbell’s passing reference to Alfred Rosenberg in The Masks of God. Rosenberg was the leading theorist of the Nazi quest to craft a sense of national identity from the makings of ancient myth. He was later executed in the course of the Nuremberg trials.” https://tolkienland.wordpress.com/2016/05/29/joseph-campbell-and-race/
Myths about the land are easily misappropriated by philosophers with intolerant fascist ideologies and unwary new agers with an agenda.
The Pro-Wealth Anti-Capitalism Paradox, The Anti-Establishment Identity—It’s Gaslighting
The wealthy neoshaman who embraces a “pro-wealth, anti-capitalist” philosophy highlights a core contradiction in modern spiritual consumerism. This paradox relies on a psychological separation between “abundance” (viewed as a pure, cosmic flow) and “capitalism” (viewed as an exploitative, material system). By framing their wealth as spiritual alignment rather than economic extraction, practitioners can accumulate millions while maintaining an anti-establishment identity.
“We who live by writing and publishing want – and should demand – our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.” Ursula LE Guin
The freedom not to have to work. Le Guin is aware of this: people paying to learn a spiritual path aren’t rich, so there’s a balance between earning enough to stay in the cult and having time to practice. The same is true of self-sufficiency. It’s impossible if you have to work as well: This is what’s called class unconsciousness. The inability to know what poverty is actually like.
It’s one or the other, but not both. “I don’t know anyone who thinks the current system is working for them“. Apart from the City Broker who thinks wilderness skills mean hair shirts? “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Matthew 6:24. As an atheist, I find Jesus’s moral compass useful to periodically borrow for navigating these psychological mindbenders.
The fact is that some Neo Shaman Podcasters are saying: “I don’t know anyone who thinks the current system is working for them”. They already admitted in another video on another channel how wealthy they were, which meant they could sit at home with their fire (at home, in case you missed it) and dream up a cult based on an indigenous tradition where the indigenous practitioner spends years training in the wilderness.
“We are going to have food shortages, but I’m really not advocating that everyone starts stockpiling beans or anything of that order; I don’t think that works… If you can find ways to store water..”
These pseudo-spirituality grifters have no actual experience of any kind of survival skills; in fact, they reject learning them, describing survivalism as dystopian, but they are quick to tell their followers in a food crisis: “We are going to have food shortages, but I’m really not advocating that everyone starts stockpiling beans or anything of that order; I don’t think that works… If you can find ways to store water..” Another simplistic false-equivalence argument so beloved by the Green Grifters. This is what a Deathcult looks like.
By the same token, they don’t understand poverty or preparedness; they can’t admit they’re ignorant of the dystopian survivalism they despise, yet they tell us what they think it is and how we should behave.
I bet the Celts had granaries; I bet they stored food for the winter and the lean times. I’m amazed none of the “spirit guides” have suggested any kind of food-resilience planning; after all, isn’t that what asking the “old gods” for help is all about? To be honest, this just looks increasingly like psychotic delusion rather than visionary.
Collapse Starvation Deathcult
Unpreparedness Doesn’t Work
https://linktr.ee/SolidarityPrepper
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