The Re-Enchantment by Hank Wesselman

Author:Hank Wesselman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True

NATURE MYSTICISM AND DEITY MYSTICISM

In our time and in response to such insights, spirituality is changing and shifting away from how our mainstream monotheist traditions have previously defined it. Having taught a university and college-level course in the anthropology of religion for many years, I’ve examined many of the world’s mystical traditions and have come to the conclusion that there are many gateways into the spiritual worlds, though there appears to be two primary windows—Nature Mysticism and Deity Mysticism.

Many, if not most, of the world’s indigenous people and Western people alike use the gateway of Nature Mysticism. For example, among the pre-Christian tribal peoples of Britain and Europe, there lived a shamanist priesthood who the Gauls called the Druides. In the classical period they came to be known as the Druids, and history reveals that they were highly organized into a hierarchy that included both men and women.

The Druids believed passionately in reincarnation and our personal immortality as a soul, percepts that lay right at the heart of their practices and teachings. Like most of the world’s traditional tribal peoples, they were also keen observers of nature, and their knowledge of natural and universal processes was unequaled in the Roman and classical Greek worlds. They understood that the universe itself is indestructible. They also knew from direct revelation that what monotheists call “God” is not some supernatural god-father but rather a process that is densely concentrated in all living beings and thus within all of nature. In this sense, they knew that God is not a noun; it is a verb, a pantheistic revelation in which God is literally within everything everywhere as the life force, affirming that the shamanic tradition is the heritage of all those descended from the Anglo-Saxon-Gaulish-Celtic-Germanic-Norse peoples of Britain and Europe.

The Druids also served their tribal societies as judiciaries, as mediators who had the power to stop conflicts between competing tribes, families, or powerful individuals, and who dispensed justice from their vast knowledge of tribal and natural law, affirming the important role shamans traditionally held in tribal societies. Unlike our current judiciary in the United States today, the Druids were said to be immune to political or economic influence of any kind or at any level.

The Druids were the counselors of kings, respected visionaries and prophets, and supervisors of important religious rituals. Noble children were instructed by them, and oaths sworn before them. They were the wisdom keepers of their peoples, and for them the gateway into the transpersonal realms lay in the practice of Nature Mysticism, with the many aspects of nature itself, including their own bodies, serving as the doorways into the other worlds. Their teachings included knowledge of the motion of the stars, the size of the earth and the whole universe, the ordering of nature as well as the cosmic order, the power and nature of the gods, and why the universe behaves the way it does. In other words, they were highly educated people.10

It was through Nature Mysticism that I

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