The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The westerner’s bias against nonordinary states of
consciousness is as unthinking as the Indian’s belief in them is
said to be. The westerner’s bias is the result of an intellectual
climate that has been carefully fostered in the west for centuries,
that has reached its culmination in Freudian and Darwinian
theories, and that only now is beginning to yield to the masses of
data that contradict it. This cultural bias has had many
unfortunate side effects, only one of which is deep
misunderstanding of tribal literatures that has for so long marked
the learned and popular periodicals that deal with tribal culture.
In his four-volume treatise on nonordinary reality, Carlos
Castaneda has described what living in the universe as a shaman
is like. Unfortunately, he does not indicate that this experience is
rather more common to ordinary than to extraordinary people,
that the state of consciousness created through ceremony and
ritual and detailed in mythic cycles is exactly that of the “man of
knowledge,” or sage. He makes the whole thing sound exotic,
strange, beyond the reach of most persons, yet the great body of
American Indian literature suggests quite a different conclusion.
This literature can best be approached as a psychic journey.
Only in the context of the consciousness of the universe can it be
understood.
American Indian thought is essentially mystical and psychic in
nature. Its distinguishing characteristic is a kind of magicalness
—not the childish sort described by Astrov but rather an
enduring sense of the fluidity and malleability, or creative flux,
of things. This is a reasonable attitude in its own context,
derived quite logically from the central assumptions that
characterize tribal thought. The tribal person perceives things
not as inert but as viable and alive, and he or she knows that
living things are subject to processes of growth and change as a
necessary component of their aliveness. Since all that exists is
alive and since all that is alive must grow and change, all