Apocalyptic Grace: The Evolution of Culture and Consciousness

By Stephen Powell

Here is a unique exploration of the five eras or Worlds of cultural (socioeconomic,
psychological, spiritual) evolution. Stephen Powell, a seasoned anthropologist
and psychotherapist, illuminates the hunter/gatherer, horticultural,
agrarian, and industrial/technological epochs in unexpectedly fresh and timely
ways. Foremost, the diversity of these Worlds is still within us all.
World One, reaching back to 50,000 BCE, was a time of widely accepted
shamanic assumptions. World Two (10,000 to 3500 BCE) developed small-scale
horticulture and tribal cohesion, but also unprecedented social conformity. World
Three (from about 3500 BCE) experienced the global rise of caste-structured
hierarchies with the World Religions as cultural compensation. Beginning in
the 1600s, World Four developed a mechanistic, secularized worldview, accentuated
by individualism, popular culture and a capitalist agenda.
Finally, Powell describes the beginnings of a new, fifth set of world
assumptions a world without borders. Here we may start to integrate humanitarian
aspects of the preceding Worlds, embracing multiculturalism without
losing cultural integrity. Moreover, the wisdom traditions from each time
appear to hold seed truths of the profound changes that mark the end-time
and the beginning of each World. Apocalyptic Grace leads the reader on a
stunning survey of this remarkable journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462872206

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Copyright © 2010, 2011 Stephen Powell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the author.

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Stephen Powell

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Medicine Whoel Mandala on cover is designed by Rose Morton, copyright © 2004. Rose Morton is a master herbologist and artist. Her photos are not so much technical as emotionaland observationol.She based this image on the native medicine wheel using barley, peas, beans, different types of corn, wheat and other seeds.

Hardback:    ISBN: 978-1-4628-7829-1

Paperback:   ISBN:978-1-4628-7219-0

Ebook:           ISBN: 978-1-4628-7220-6

Library of Congress CIP data:

Powell, Stephen, 1956-

Apocalyptic grace : the evolution of culture and consciousness / Stephen Powell.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Human evolution. 2. Human behavior. 3. Social evolution. 4. Ethnopsychology.

5. Consciousness. I. Title.

GN281.4P67 22010

304—dc22

2011904708

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Shamanism

WORLD ONE

Foragers: The Magic Of It All

Neolithic Revolution

WORLD TWO

Horticulture: There Comes (And Goes) The Neighborhood

The Codependent Dance Of The Haves And Have-Nots

WORLD THREE

Agrarian Hierarchy: The Rise Of The World Religions

The Modern World View

WORLD FOUR

Industrialization: The Mechanistic Paradigm

Post-Apocalyptic Thinking

WORLD FIVE

Coming Of Age In A World Without Borders

Ten Explorations For Engaging The Five Worlds Within

Bibliography

About The Author

Dedication

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This work honors the many teachers, and mentors who have come into my life, including Roshi Joan Halifax, Kay-lynn Sullivan TwoTrees, Robert Waterman, Steven Foster and Meredith Little, Onye Onyemaechi, Don Chavez, soul partner, Treaca Allen, and all of the countless students and clients that have grounded my ideas with their experience.

Acknowledgements

So many valued people and institutions contributed to this work. First, please forgive me for overlooking those who I may have unintentionally missed.

Special gratitude to Rebecca O’Day, my student, friend and first-round editor who convinced me of the textbook value of this book. To my ongoing support network: Laurel Chiten, Mark Garland, Ian Bald and family, John Stevens, Lauren Moore, Laurie McDonald, Judy Scher. To my neighbors and adoptive family, the Lopez clan; and to all who have lived on and/or supported my two acre San Pedro ranch.

To my many fellow travelers in Christ, including Pastor Kevin and the Lighthouse Church of Chimayo, Pastor (and neighbor) Barry Trujillo and the New Creation Ministries in Espanola, the mentorship of Jimmy Orr, Scott John, and the staff at Vineyard Church in Santa Fe; the Santa Fe New Life City bunch; to Leroi, Carolyn and Justice and the incredible spiritual family they’ve created in my Espanola community; and to my neighbor and brother Titus.

To Rose Morton, who graduated with honors as a master herbologist, makes her own smudge sticks and medicines, and creates mandalas from seeds and other natural materials, as you see in her brilliant rendition for the cover.

To my Santa Fe Community College supervisors Bruno Bornet and Bernadette Jacobs, who afforded me the opportunity to develop this material over the course of the last 15 years; to the faculty of Southwestern College in Santa Fe; to the leadership of Southwest Family Guidance Center; to the Upaya Zen Center people and their openness to allow me to show up as needed.

To my family who have accepted my role as the stray sheep, and to the trio that persevered with my sensitive artist dogmas in completing this project: orginal publisher Richard Polese, editor Cinny Green, and layout designer B.J. Harris. And finally to the many four-legged friends—llama, sheep, horses, goats, dogs and cats, and two legged—turkey, chickens, ducks—who continue to demonstrate the power of unconditional love.

Preface

A pocalyptic Grace provides an anthropological model by which to understand multicultural psychology. This model addresses both past and present cultures, as well as how multicultural psychology continues to operate within us. As complex as this whole subject may seem, the journey of Cultural Anthropology tells us that humanity has had only four basic types of cultures: hunting and gathering, horticulture, agrarian, industrial. The disciplines of Archetypal Psychology and Comparative Religion will help us fill in the dynamics of each of these types of cultures, particularly in regard to how they continue to show up in the modern psyche.

In this work, these respective types of culture will be referred to as Worlds. Psychologically speaking, each of us is our own unique mixture of these older Worlds and the modern mindset. In other words, even though most of us are in some manner a part of industrial culture, our inner sensibilities point back to ancient ways of experiencing life. Put all of this together and Apocalyptic Grace is about The Evolution of Culture and Consciousness. As prophecies and wisdom traditions have been forecasting from around the world, we are now bumping up against a Fifth World.

This helps explain the title, Apocalyptic Grace. While the notion of apocalyptic may seem rather doom ‘n’ gloom, it is actually derived from the Greek word apokalypsis meaning revelation, disclosure, unveiling. Like the overall nature of evolution, without tension and crisis there is no opportunity for viable change. As is regularly touted in the field of Recovery Psychology and praise and worship oriented Christianity, two of my own personal anchors, our mess becomes the message, our breakdown the breakthrough. Apocalypse, in other words, is not just what prophecies have forecasted as happening out there. Apocalypse is foremost an internal process by which circumstances bring us to our knees. From there, a true psychological growth and expansion is possible.

The tensions of global economic recession, ecological disaster, international and interpersonal conflicts invite deeper and novel resolution. So do the challenges of one’s personal psychology. This work is not about looking at these tensions with a new kind of rose-colored glasses, but taking off our ethnocentric blinders and integrating the rich diversity that the journey of culture and psychology has been about. When and how this resolution actually arrives, both culturally and personally, has its own timing—that is, a matter of grace.

Because of the metaphoric quality of this journey, the disciplines of Anthropology, Psychology, and Comparative Religion have been moved to rely on central metaphors to explore and describe the human condition and story. And so it is in the long list of 20th century explorers of human nature. For mythologist Joseph Campbell (1959), this was the journey of the hero; for Jung and subsequent Jungians, it is individuation; and for Aldous Huxley’s it was the study of comparative mysticism he entitled The Perennial Philosophy (1944).

In later generations, Ken Wilber (1980) described this journey as The Atman Project, a Hindu notion in which the individual soul becomes aligned with a universal soul. Jungian renegade Arnold Mindell (1985) referred to this process as the dreambody, those seemingly irrational elements of the human experience that actually serve to make it whole.

Anthropologist Victor Turner (1982) turned to the concept of communitas and liminality, that constant ritual process by which we attempt to transcend, at least momentarily, our cherished social identities for a greater and expanding understanding of who we really are. Social theorist Michel Foucault (1980) referred to consciousness as being governed by discourse, meaning the rules and contexts beneath the surface of social and personal realities. Scholar of Comparative Religion Mircea Eliade (1978) noted that all beliefs seemed to center around a need for regeneration and core values and perceptions (axis mundi).

The Dallas School of Thomas Moore (1992), James Hillman (1975), and Robert Sardello (1999) entertained the sweeping territories of psyche and soul, by which the human personality was only the pawn of much deeper forces. Robert Moore (1992) and Robert Bly (2001) engaged similar material and were responsible for helping to launch the modern day Men’s Movement.

While Apocalyptic Grace is written more for the layperson than the academic, I find it important at the outset to pay homage to all of these teachers and the global wisdom traditions they have engaged. At the center of this work is the notion of archetype, those particular psychological dynamics that seem to govern individuals, nations, and cultures alike.

Very little of our archetypal histories can be discarded. They are a part of our hardwiring. But they can be reinvested with new energies and possibilities. Jolande Jacobi, a student of Jung and the only one to receive sanctioned permission from Jung himself to write a primer for his work, shared these thoughts during World War II, our last full planetary apocalyptic outbreak:

Not without reason have the archetypal images and experiences always formed a central part of all of the religions of the earth. And although they have often been overlaid by dogma and stripped of their original form, they are still active in the psyche, their rich meaning is still powerfully at work, especially where religious faith remains a living force… Only where faith and dogma have frozen into empty forms—and this is largely the case in our ultra-civilized technological, rational minded Western world—have they lost their magic power and left man helpless and alone… However, in every individual psyche they can awaken to new life, exert their magic power, and condense into a kind of ‘individual mythology,’ which presents an impressive parallel to the great traditional mythologies of all peoples and epochs, concretizing as it were their origin, essence, meaning, and throwing new light on them. (Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung, 1942)

Apocalyptic Grace is a journey into the cultural evolution of archetype, not as a linear march through time, but as strands of perennial wisdoms that continue to spiral back through the trials and triumphs of the human experience.

INTRODUCTION

Understanding Cultural

Diversity

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Ancient Prophecy Meets Cultural Anthropology

M y mother is German Baptist. My father is Polish Jew. When they were married in 1945, one side of my heritage was mass murdering the other side back on the European continent. While both sides of the family were already two generations removed from this tragedy, the deeper tragedy remained embedded within my thoughts. What is it about the human species—with all its dazzling array of cultural diversity and wisdom traditions—that allows this to happen? I moved around a lot in my twenties: Philadelphia, Montreal, Colorado. But wherever I went, these thoughts became a karmic attraction. If your family went through the Nazi Holocaust, I was attracted to you, as three girlfriends in a row would testify.

A major psychological point was being made. Whatever has not been worked out on the inside, will manifest and persist in the world. To break this pattern, one option would be to airlift the participants of war into a psychotherapist’s office. Considering the unlikelihood of that endeavor, the next best solution seemed to start working this stuff out on the inside. This led to a study of how the cultural, psychological and spiritual differences of humanity came about. The result was a synthesis of the three disciplines in which I received college degrees—Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Religion, and Archetypal Psychology. What I discovered was this:

Cultural diversity, a primary source of human conflict, is not really about religion, politics or social organization. It’s not even about ethnicity or race. While these are all critical components, they are only symptoms and trigger points for a much deeper and older dynamic. Cultural diversity is, foremost, about differences in the ways people have lived on and related to the earth.

As vast as history has been, the discipline of cultural anthropology teaches us there have only been four basic types of cultures: 1) foraging (hunting and gathering), 2) horticultural, 3) agrarian, and 4) industrial. These four cultures are represented perfectly in the unique cultural diversity—Apache/Navajo, Pueblo, Hispanic, and Anglo—found in the state of New Mexico where I have spent most of my adult life.

The Maya and Hopi speak of these shifts in terms of Worlds, and according to them, the Fifth World is upon us. For the Hopi these earth changes were forecasted to begin in 2005 (think South Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina). East Indian philosophy speaks of this era as the Kali Yuga, the Bible as an endtime, and many indigenous groups from the Americas have forecasted tremendous earth changes. Probably the most well known, via a series of social movements starting with the Harmonic Convergence (1987), is the Mayan calendar. It reveals that everything is coming to a head, a dramatic shifting of both consciousness and social structures. Certainly the dramatic increase in natural and ecological disasters (2010-2012) and the internal revolution in Islam sparked by the social networking of their young people are pointing us in that direction.

What these prophecies point to is really a keen sense of the obvious. In terms of ecological and societal tension, the industrial world is bumping up against its own limitations. Something has to budge. As is the underlying theme behind the title of this work, apocalyptic doesn’t simply mean the end of something. It, foremost, points to rebirth. Although these various teachings may seem romantic and vague, what they suggest is profound. Culturally and psychologically, we need to remember all that we have been.

Revelations

Two life-transforming revelations supported this exploration. One occurred when I moved back to the American Southwest in the late 1980s after the completion of a graduate degree in Cultural Anthropology. I was reading Frank Waters’ groundbreaking work, Book of the Hopi (1963), a rare instance in which indigenous peoples shared their prophecies with an outsider. There it all was. While couched in mythological terms, Waters’ telling of the story of the Hopi myth of Five Worlds indicated these stories held a sophisticated understanding of historical time.

The boldface words in parentheses are mine, indicating the anthropological parallels in Hopi oral traditions. "In the First World they had lived with the animals (foraging). In the Second World, they had developed handicrafts, homes, and villages (horticulture). Now in the Third World they multiplied in such numbers and advanced so rapidly that they created big cities, countries, and a whole civilization (agrarian). This made it difficult for them to conform to the plan of Creation and to sing praises…. More and more of them became wholly occupied with their own earthly plans." The Fourth World (industrial) is then described as where all the people went on their migrations to the ends of the earth and back,and a full expression of man’s ruthless materialism and imperialistic will. (Waters 1963) These prophecies, in other words, were the mythological way of recording history, an uncanny understanding of how cultural evolution has unfolded.

The foraging and horticultural cultures were fairly egalitarian, that is, no one had a whole lot of power over another. Together they will be referred to as tribal. Agrarian cultures introduced hierarchies; that is, societies composed of haves and have-nots, which most often appeared as chiefdoms and feudalistic monarchies. The industrial world attempts to throw democracy, economic and spiritual free will into the mix, but hierarchies based on power and wealth remain entrenched. In the 21st century we are, more so than ever, a complex and often confusing mixture of these four types of cultures, or what will hereafter be referred to as Worlds.

As analyzed by the discipline of anthropology, the complementary layers of infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure hold each of these Worlds together. Infrastructure refers to economy, how a group feeds themselves and survives on the earth. Social structure is how society is organized (i.e., marriage, education, government). Superstructure indicates how a people think, feel, and worship. Put all three together and you have the nuts and bolts of a culture.

Whereas the industrial World has threatened the survival of the infrastructures and social structures of earlier cultures, their superstructure, or what hereafter will simply be referred to as consciousness, doesn’t change so easily. These differences in types of consciousness speak too much of the tension, both within us and in society, that the planet is experiencing. The prophecies are suggesting that these older ways of culture must be restored and balanced with the newer—a kind of cultural resurrection that must occur, foremost, from within.

Apocalyptic Grace is a disciplined, grounded understanding of these prophecies. It provides the evolutionary understanding that the wisdom traditions, from shamanism to the world religions, were well aware of the kinds of earth changes, internally and externally, that anthropologists and psychologists of the modern era have now been uncovering. What these older philosophies and modern social sciences have in common is tracking the evolving soul of humanity.

Revitalization

The second revelation central to this work occurred to me many moons ago while surveying the anthropology shelves in the Temple University library. At that time, I was an undergraduate Comparative Religion student, a mere teenager. I picked out the book, Revitalization Movements (1956) by Anthony F. C. Wallace, and I flashed upon the whole of time. By hook or by crook, culture will revitalize itself. Like life itself, culture’s will to survive is irrepressible.

While most of the planet is doing this dance to an international monetary system and the demands of an industrial order, there are deep undercurrents in the psyche that recall older cultural ways of surviving. What then does a Fifth World have in store for us? Perhaps for the first time in the history of the planet, we can look back at our entire evolution, take our ethnocentric blinders off, and begin to fully understand and appreciate our differences. This is an unprecedented opportunity for the species.

For better and worse, again as the prophecies suggest, it may take shades of apocalypse (i.e., worldwide economic collapse, the tragic intra-warfare of the Abrahamic faiths, ecologically induced disasters) to be able to receive this information. The psyche, in its movements to alleviate tension and resolve conflict, provides numinous (meaning filled with a sense of the presence of divinity, appealing to the higher emotions or to the aesthetic sense) experience. This is its inbuilt nature.

Through this experience, a new kind of anchoring opportunity is afforded to re-envision one’s life and the world. When the power of numinous experience begins to work upon a collective body of people, therein we see the origins of religion and social movements. Anthropology calls this movement Revitalization.

When a people and a culture get their backs pushed up against the wall, when they are looking at the possibility of their own extinction, a collective unconscious envisioning process occurs that offers both a psychological and social way out. In the last century and a half, we have seen this rampant among both colonized peoples and colonizers who felt disenfranchised from their own cultures. The Ghost Dance, Peyote Religion, the Rastafarian movement, the Western fascination with Eastern Religions and the New Age are all examples of this.

This process, however, can quickly become co-opted and corrupted by the entrepreneurial tendencies of World Four. Prime examples are Rastafarian dreadlocks, colors and garb. This is a movement that began in the 1930s as a visionary, anti-imperialistic brand of Africanized Christianity that has since become mainstream chic. Reggae, the Rastafarian synthesis of ritual and popular music, is now used as a kind of elevator music for hip establishments, while all the Rastafarian paraphernalia can be picked up at your local shopping mall or head shop. The symbolism remains, but its full potency has been bought off. This is how capitalism often survives. It doesn’t defeat its opponents. It absorbs them. The Gods descend into the marketplace.

However, no matter the absorption rate, a new synthesis has occurred. Again using Rastafarians as an example, and however this movement has been mainstreamed, it has now joined the ranks of World Religions. Rastafari became a global movement by adding a potent pop culture ritual form and pronounced social agenda to a Christian belief system. Most importantly, social movements are parallel to the drive for revitalization within the psyche itself. Social liberation and the quest for personal liberation become simultaneous movements.

The Homestretch

Apocalyptic Grace boils down to this: Each of us is the world soul unfolding. The cross-pollination of Worlds the industrial era (World Four) has created an unprecedented global archetypal pool of information and activity. Disco is big in India, salsa and reggae in Japan, and Tibetan Buddhism is the fastest growing grassroots religious movement in the United States. No culture, no matter how traditional it appears, is untouched