AI as a Shamanic Revolution
the gerontocratic cycle.
The lone warrior, the hero, or the wandering warrior is an archetype, a mythological ideal, but has no basis in historical reality.1 However, this is not the case with shamans and wizards. A sufficiently advanced medicine man, by the use of drugs or other methods,2 could conquer an entire tribe by psychological means.3
A select few, or even an individual, might have intuitive insights into psychic techniques, with which he could control an entire tribe. This individual could then seek out and identify a younger individual with the same affinity, and train this individual in the same arts. A lineage of psychics, shamans, or wizards could form among a tribe.
Priestly techniques are not always confined to a particular individual. In a gerontocracy, each of the elders is inducted into spiritual rituals. Although this may bear some similarities with a class, the chronology of gerontocracy does not describe a class. Instead, the percentage of men or women who grow old becomes automatically inducted into this cult which rules the tribe, whether or not they have any particular characteristics.
If every man can become a warrior, there is no warrior class; and if every man can become a priest, there is no priest class. In order for a class to exist, it must be selective. The “council of elders,” while it does represent a priestly function, does not represent a priest class, in the same way that a general arming of a tribe, the war-making of every able-bodied man, does not constitute a warrior class. When a function is universal, it loses its class distinction and specialization.
The first task of a warrior class is to defeat and subjugate the former authority of the tribe. This puts any warrior class in direct competition with a council of elders. However, whereas a council of elders is a democratic institution (it is universal), the shamanic institution is selective. A council of elders will always be abolished by conquering warriors, since the democratic center of authority must be transferred to a military authority. In the case of a shamanic institution, the selectiveness of the function allows for specialization.
The conquest of a tribe by a warrior class, which first breaks the power of the democratic gerontocracy, allows for the shaman to exist unimpeded by those former authorities. The shaman and warrior class both share a distinction and “apartness” from the rest of the tribe, whereas the council did not.
Primitive society can be seen as a struggle between two forces of authority: the council of elders, and the independent shaman. In this case, the council of elders is represented by the concept of “the ancestors,” the mother earth, the dragon, the snake cult, the womb. In opposition to this, the shaman is represented by the archetype of the trickster, the Promethean, the wizard, the wanderer, the prophet, the one who steals the fire from the Gods. The dynamic tension between the worship of the “elders” and the worship of the divine trickster is then disrupted by the introduction of a warrior class. In every case, the warrior class, if it is to establish itself as a separate class, must destroy and subjugate the council of elders. In this struggle, it has an ally in the shaman.
We can say then that the imposition of a warrior class is a necessary precondition in order for a priest class to develop out of a shamanic class. Otherwise, the shaman would continue to be oppressed by the council. The act of scapegoating, depicted in the Bible as the stoning of criminals, or the sacrifice of an animal, is considered a priestly role, but here Christianity can retrospectively unveil a paradox. That is, the shaman is the one who is traditionally scapegoated by the council.
The picture of Jesus describes this scene. The shaman, the trickster, the breaker of the law, has, through his magic, captured a great degree of authority for himself among the tribe. The tribespeople, rather than following the orders of the council, begin to break with tradition and follow Jesus instead. As a result, Jesus is brought before the council, condemned for making himself God, and crucified. He is made an example of, and scapegoated for the sins of the people who followed him.
The scene of the crucifixion reflects a pattern which played out repeatedly over thousands of years. A shaman would arise, capture the authority of the tribe, and then be opposed by the council, who would ultimately sentence him to death. What is central here is the involvement of the people. In the case of Jesus, it is not merely the council who kills him. Rather, it is the entire body of the tribe which shouts out with one voice, “crucify him!” This is a reenactment of the cult of human sacrifice.
The confusion and paradox is that the shaman is often thought of as the sacrificer, not the sacrificed. In the Vedic religion, the priest makes sacrifices to the Gods. If the priest is the one making sacrifices, then who is the shaman being sacrificed? To resolve this paradox, it is possible to imagine a dialectic between council and shaman on an archetypal level, which oscillates with the establishment of religion.
The council is primordial and ancient. It is the primaeval religion of every human. In its simplest form, it is the parent -- the rule of the elder over the child. The council of elders is the collectivization of the parent-child relationship. The shaman arises as a young man, independent from this religion. He is a trickster, and through his uniqueness of intuition, he is able to perceive and perform miracles beyond the power of the council. His miracles grant him authority among the people, and he usurps the power of the council.
At this juncture, the council, threatened by the shaman, exists in a state of tension. The council will accuse the shaman of violating the law, of disrespecting the ancestors and ancient custom. If the shaman is successful in dislodging the council, then he is able to establish himself as a holy monarch above the tribe. Such a position is tenuous. It is possible to imagine a successive line of shamanic kings, but each such king will be subject to the rumor-mongering and resentment of the council.
The council is not possible to dislodge without violence, which requires human sacrifice. Even if the council is entirely eliminated, a new council will arise naturally, owing to the fact that the council is merely the emergent potential of the elderly toward collective democracy. In order for a monarch to suppress the democratic tendency, each successive crop of elders would have to be ritually sacrificed, in order to prevent the emergence of a new “shadow” council. On the other hand, if the council is to gain the upper hand, due to a mediocre generation of monarchs, then the council only needs to scapegoat and kill one shaman in order to regain power.
The task of a successive kingdom of shamans is infinitely harder than the task of a council. Furthermore, the adherence of the people to the rule of the shaman-king is dependent on miracles. When a storm comes, or an eclipse, or any other disaster, the shaman-king is blamed, just as easily as he was credited with former miracles. The adoring masses become an angry mob, who are whipped up into a passion, and incited by the elders to sacrifice the shaman-king.
The intervention of a warrior class disrupts this process. The council is suppressed by continuous violence, or at least, the threat of violence. Elders are subjugated to the rule of young, athletic men. The shaman, who was previously subjected to continuous human sacrifice over generations, is now offered an alliance and protection. This task is easier for the shaman, because it is easier to satisfy the immediate needs of a warrior class than to negotiate and make happy the broad masses. The arrangement between shaman and warrior elevates him to priest.
The role of the priest is to support and uphold the warrior class. This role is quite different from that of a trickster. The shaman, liberated from continuous human sacrifice, loses his rebelliousness. He becomes domesticated and subjugated to the warrior class. However, unlike the council, which is democratic, he is allowed to persist as a class. He is allowed to train students, to remain apart from society (as a monk or recluse), he is allowed gifts from the people in exchange for miracles, he is allowed exemption from laws and duties. So long as the shaman supports the warrior class, even though he loses some of his primacy and rebelliousness, he maintains many of his original and essential functions.
Over time, the priest class loses more and more of its individuality, and its original trickster spirit. As a result, the spirit of the council, which is founded in the parental instinct and adherence to tradition, seeps in and merges with the priest class. In other words, the priest class is a hybrid of the shaman and the council.
In a warrior-led society which does not have a council of elders, it is possible to imagine an independent shaman who would not be infringed upon by any defense of tradition. Such spiritual and intellectual freedom is a precondition for science and philosophy, which can only come into existence when Socratic skepticism or dialectic contradiction are permitted. Such an ideal is compromised by the spirit of the council in the form of priesthood.
The inherent contradiction of the priest class lies in its twin origins -- on the one hand, from the shaman class; on the other hand, from the council. The image of the priest who sacrifices, as well as the priest who is sacrificed, expresses this paradox powerfully, in the image of Jesus. The trinity represents three aspects which exist in tension:
The council, represented by God the Father, who judges, upholds the law and tradition, and condemns the shaman to sacrifice.
The shaman, represented by God the Son, who performs miracles, breaks the law, frees the people from the law, and is sacrificed.
The synthesis, represented by the Holy Spirit. This can be interpreted in the following ways:
As the paradoxical reconciliation between council and shaman.
As the outpouring of blood from the sacrifice of the shaman.4
As the divine spark which touches the shaman and differentiates him from the masses and the council.
That the Holy Spirit is imagined as “the voice of God” coheres well with the idea of a divine spark, if we accept that schizophrenia has some part to play in the divine intuition of the shaman, which allows him to see outside-the-box. Furthermore, the speaking of tongues, associated with the Holy Spirit, also agrees with the interpretation that shamanism represents a psychological uniqueness that allows for the shaman to see outside the strictures of traditional life.
The coming of Christianity was only made possible by the military conquests of Alexander the Great, and later of Titus. The hypothesis that shamans are saved but also transformed by warriors, fits with this picture. The Greeks and Romans represent the warriors; Jesus is the shaman; and the Christian church which results is the priesthood.
Christianity is a metaphor or series of instructions which symbolically represent a sociological cycle of history. Warriors conquer, shamans become priests, ending the human sacrifice cults of the council. This happened many times before the coming of Christ, in India, in Greece, and other parts of the Indo-European world. Zoroaster as a prophet was likely a shaman who sought to destroy the religious councils which dominated Iran -- but his followers then became priests of his new religion. Christ was completely independent of established religious authorities, but his followers created new councils and synods to replace the Pharisees.
Encoding this ancient cycle into the basic structure of Christian mythology would serve to maintain this crucial insight, at least in esoteric form, over two thousand years. By “going back to the text,” revolutionaries like John Wycliffe, John Ball, and eventually Luther and Calvin were able to destroy the power of Catholic tradition and usher in a new era of science and humanism.
Christianity, exoterically, is a priest class, it is a council, it is a series of laws and traditions, but esoterically, Christianity is revolutionary, a shamanic doctrine of liberation. The hard exoteric shell of Christianity protects it from competitors. But the soft and Promethean core of Christianity lies dormant like a seed, waiting for the ripe conditions to hatch or sprout.
Although it may seem fanciful to mention, the confluence of imagery between the resurrection of Christ, and the symbol of the egg, in the holiday of Easter, clearly illustrates this principal. Christ lies dormant in the ground, but at the right time, he will resurrect, re-emerge, and conquer his enemies in a second-coming. It should be no surprise that this second-coming in the Book of Revelation portrays Christ as a warrior rather than as a mystical shaman -- it is necessary, in order for a shamanic renewal to take place, that a warrior conquest must smash the council of priests.
The Thirty Year’s War offered a significant military challenge to the sovereignty of the church. Later on, the English Civil War, and the victory of the American and French Revolutions, allowed for a military class to defy the church. Although so far we have not discussed the role of the merchant class, the mercantilization of war was both a result and a cause of this process, in a feedback loop.
As warriors took power from the church, science (a shamanic revelation) was allowed to express itself. As science advanced, the mechanization of warfare in the form of firearms took greater power out of the hands of the church. Freemasonry, nationalism, and socialism arose as direct competitors to Christianity. By the conclusion of the Second World War, Christianity existed only in a severely degraded form, weakened by many edicts of toleration. The death penalty for heresy, which was established in the Middle Ages, faded into distant memory. Religious freedom was established firmly. Never before has the world been so intertwined and centralized as today.
The military application of drone warfare wipes out all the “progress” of previous centuries. With the arrival of industrialism and firearms, we could speak of a “people’s war.” The average peasant, armed with a gun, was formidable against the strongest of knights. The quality of soldiers declined as the quantity increased. Each person became a “citizen soldier.” The American Revolution highlighted the power of a “people’s militia.” By World War One, the question of morale became existential. The degree to which a population was nationalized and made patriotic determined the outcome of war like never before. Governments rose and fell according to their ability to propagandize the mass man. Governments were desperate to appear as fair and just to the common man, to the working class. All economic and political considerations were subject to the iron laws of populism.
However, the withdrawal of the soldier from the battlefield, replaced by a drone, eliminates this once crucial necessity. A former athlete, once well-trained, loses his strength with sloth. In the same way, western governments, which were once highly nationalistic, have come to ignore the common man. Nationalism is no longer viewed as the most essential strength, but as an inconvenience. The tension between the power of nationalism and post-industrial warfare produces fear and anxiety of a general uprising against the elites. Nationalism is now something to be suppressed rather than something to be encouraged.
In the long arc of history, the future is a glimpse into the past. National populism will decline in the 21st century, as quickly as it rose in the 19th. In its last gasps and death rattles, it will shock the world with acts of barbarism, terrorism, and clownery. Yet even as nationalist forces attempt to reclaim their primacy, the superficial economic conditions underlying nationalism will give way to a more spiritual foundation.
Whereas the drive of governments under nationalism was to maximize the patriotic fervor of the masses, the race now will be to maximize the scientific, and therefore, the shamanic potency of the military. The decline of nationalism will result in the disappearance of billions of people from the earth, if only by infertility if nothing else. Nationalism was an algae bloom, a brief period of overpopulation which is now coming to a disastrous end. Socialism has also lost the mandate of heaven. What is now occurring is the ushering in of a Shamanic Age.
The “Second Religiousness” of the Evangelical movement was a farce, as can now be seen by the implosion of that movement. Shamanism, under the name of science, claims that it will summon God to Earth with AI. Already, the forces of the councils are gathered, ready to sacrifice. Will shamanistic science triumph, and bring in a new age of Gods? Will the councils reform, and kill all those who study AI? Will AI disappoint, like a cheap magic trick? Or is there another technology, aside from AI, which will soon overshadow the current fad?
The military application of technology offers the potential for a re-unification or cycling of classes. The chariot, that mysterious invention which seemingly came out of nowhere, shocked the world and delivered millions into the hands of aliens. A new breed of warrior, who fights not merely with his hands, but with his mind and spirit, now emerges.
The singular hero is representative of the unity of a class. Pragmatically speaking, a single man cannot conquer a tribe.
If all men are warriors, then there is no warrior “class.” If there are no separate rights or privileges afforded to a select group of men, if there is not distinction, then we cannot speak of a distinct “class.” A war-band introduces itself in the act of conquest, remaining separate and distinct. Contact between distinct tribes results in the emergence of class differentiation.
(such as breathing techniques, meditation, asphyxiation, partial drowning, strangulation, cutting, mantras, lucid dreaming, or hypnosis)
It is the case that while an entire tribe cannot be governed entirely by a lone warrior, since physical violence can only be a political tool when wielded by a collective, an entire tribe could be conceivably governed by a sufficiently advanced shaman or wizard.
The question becomes whether or not such advancement could emerge out of the tribe itself, spontaneously, or if it must be imposed from outside. The spontaneous generation of psychics and other spiritually attuned individuals is possible. The tendency toward left handedness, hermaphroditism, and schizophrenia can all spontaneously arise without external intervention.
When Christians eat the body and blood of Christ, they receive the Holy Spirit.
shut the fuck up and get back out there asking women for their number