At the turn of the common era, male cults devoted to a goddess that flourished throughout the broad region extending from the Mediterranean to South Asia. While galli were missionizing the Roman Empire, kalū, kurgarrū, and assinnu continued to carry out ancient rites in the temples of Mesopotamia, and the third-gender predecessors of the hijra were clearly evident. It should also be mentioned of the eunuch priests of Artemis at Ephesus; the western Semitic qedeshim, the male “temple prostitutes” known from the Hebrew Bible and Ugaritic texts of the late second millennium; and the keleb, priests of Astarte at Kition and elsewhere.
Category Archives: nayra
“For example, we can notice how the turn to the singular engenders — and in fact requires — a limited engagement with the historical. By treating the internet as a monumental event that has shaped the entirety of the present, the post-internet, as both a discourse and a concept, gains its particular “currency.” History must be stripped of complexity, ossified and binarized, for the post-internet to function. This denuded sense of the historical is reflected in Olson’s understanding of the post-internet era, which for her “may be ahistorical insofar as it has no degree-zero.” This assertion’s appeal to generality, its belief in the total subsumption of the contemporary by the internet, refuses to countenance historical complexity, instead allowing for a subsequent assertion that “We are now in a postinternet era. Everything is always-already postinternet.” In these terms, history is rendered as a thing that happens, that has already happened, not something that can be shaped, that emerges out of economic, social, political, or cultural forces. The internet’s emergence can then be posited as a rupture, something that, by clearing away the vestiges of the past, announces a new future. In the face of this epochal shift, art exists simply to register these changes and to self-consciously comment on them from within.
No politics, no struggle, only content.
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The play […] is to desediment, to exfoliate, to renew the earthly and inseparable assembly, the habitual jam, by way of and in the differentiation of what will be neither regulated nor understood. All we got is us in this continual giving away of all.
Against the individual, Crampton is instead enfolded in a trans-generational play of influence that resolves itself into a sonic mantle that she takes on and continues. Ownership of this sound is less important than its persistence, ensuring that its legacies are respected, its attachments attended to. This is a mode of music-making for the present, one that neither shies away from history nor lets itself be overcome by it. It is a music-making that understands that history is made “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” The past does not recede into obscurity here, crushed by the momentousness of the internet. Instead, it is reworked, returned to the present in a new form, giving the lie to a historical consciousness constructed according to a series of pre-s and post-s.”
Buffalo (American Bison)
“in Arapaho: bii (bison cow), henéécee (bison bull)
in Lakota: pté (bison cow), tȟatȟáŋka (bison bull)
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With a population in excess of 60 million in the late 18th century, the species was down to just 541 animals by 1889. Recovery efforts expanded in the mid-20th century, with a resurgence to roughly 31,000 wild bison today, largely restricted to a few national parks and reserves.
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Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century.
The US Army sanctioned and actively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. The federal government promoted bison hunting for various reasons, primarily to pressure them onto the Indian reservations during times of conflict by removing their main food source. Without the bison, native people of the plains were often forced to leave the land or starve to death.
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As Crow chief Plenty Coups described it: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere.” Spiritual loss was rampant; bison were an integral part of traditional tribal societies and they would frequently take part in ceremonies for each bison they killed to honor its sacrifice. In order to boost morale during this time, Sioux and other tribes took part in the Ghost Dance, which consisted of hundreds of people dancing until 100 persons were lying unconscious.
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[The bison’s] historical range, by 9000 BC, is described as the great bison belt, a tract of rich grassland that ran from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, east to the Atlantic Seaboard (nearly to the Atlantic tidewater in some areas) as far north as New York and south to Georgia and, according to some sources, further south to Florida, with sightings in North Carolina near Buffalo Ford on the Catawba River as late as 1750.
The first thoroughfares of North America, except for the time-obliterated paths of mastodon or muskox and the routes of the mound builders, were the traces made by bison and deer in seasonal migration and between feeding grounds and salt licks. Many of these routes, hammered by countless hoofs instinctively following watersheds and the crests of ridges in avoidance of lower places’ summer muck and winter snowdrifts, were followed by the aboriginal North Americans as courses to hunting grounds and as warriors’ paths. They were invaluable to explorers and were adopted by pioneers [and went on to become many of the highways and roads we still use today].
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A white buffalo or white bison is an American bison possessing white fur, and is considered sacred or spiritually significant in several Native American religions; therefore, such buffalo are often visited for prayer and other religious rituals.
White Buffalo Calf Woman told the people that she would return in the form of a white buffalo calf and that it would be both a blessing and a warning. When the white animal shows its sacred color there will be great changes upon the earth. Arvol and many others interpret those changes to mean the current ecological crises taking place. If humanity continues to live without harmony with the earth it will be cursed, but if spiritual unity and harmony with the earth is achieved humanity will be blessed.
On May 12, 2011, a white male buffalo calf named Lightning Medicine Cloud (Wakinya Pejuta Mahpiya in Lakota) was born near Greenville, Texas during a thunderstorm on the ranch of Arby Little Soldier. In May 2012, less than year after its birth, Lightning Medicine Cloud was found dead, thought to have been butchered and skinned by an unknown individual; his mother was found dead the next day. A necropsy determined that they died of natural causes, from a bacterial infection called blackleg [or quarter evil]. In April 2012, Lightning Medicine Cloud’s father was killed by a lightning strike.”
“It almost feels like a museum, a collating of cultures and eras – only, it’s rare for a museum to offer up more than just a snapshot of then. “That was then,” it says. “This is now.” In this place though, it’s more of a composite, with one informing the other and in turn, as perpetual as the dance between the sun and the moon.”
“This film is the prisoner’s freedom. My original goal in picking up the camera was to document the everyday rights violations being perpetrated by the police surveying us in such close proximity. Gradually, however, the camera became an outlet for my pent-up solitude. Watchers and prisoners alike have been confined to the same narrow space, both trapped in an autocratic system, waiting day in and day out for their own Godot.”
“Amazonian shamans, talking to the anthropologist Graham Townsley, described their mode of expression as ‘language twisting-twisting’, and explained its elliptical and abstruse power thus: ‘I want to see — singing, I carefully examine things — twisted language brings me close but not too close — with normal words I would crash into things — with twisted ones I circle around them — I can see them clearly’.
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Listen: the actors are changing behind the scenes. At the threshold you can hear their shifts rustling. And just at that moment, on stage, Prospero slips off his cloak, and Shakespeare shifts the shape of shamanism into art, the magician becoming the imaginer.”
“Music, chanting, and dancing are indispensable elements of the Phi Fa ritual. The khaen, a bamboo mouth organ, is the primary musical instrument of the ritual. It is creates a sacred atmosphere accompanying ritual prayers and devotions and encourages dancing around the sacrificial altar. The khaen is accompanied by the phing, a guitar-like stringed instrument, by a drum, and by ching, small bells, cymbals. The chanting is very similar to mor lam, the traditional music of Lao and northeast Thailand.
Phi Fa ritual participants dance around a decorated sacrificial altar. The dance lasts a full night and creates trance conditions for many of the participants. They believe Phi Fa will participate the ceremony and they expect healing and protection from unfavorable fortune.
The steps of the ritual are related to the songs chanted by the shaman and are always accompanied by the khaen. This is because the khaen is believed to be an important mean to communicate with the gods and the spirits. The steps of the ritual are as follows: inviting the gods or spirits, explaining the reason for the invitation, praying for assistance, praying for protection, consoling the patient, re-calling the spirit that has fled the patient, inviting Phi Fa to accept the offerings, Baasii ritual, fortune telling, and taking leave of Phi Fa.”
“The baasii ceremony is an important part of Lao culture and few Lao would consider undertaking a long journey or important endeavor without holding one. The faithful sit around a small table on which a variety of offerings are displayed – bananas, sticky rice, biscuits, money, and rice whiskey. An elder or a shaman recites the blessing, while everyone touches the offerings or, if they can’t reach, the elbow of someone touching the offerings.
The elder or the shaman ties a piece of string around the wrist. In Lao tradition, the soul consists of many guardian spirits that occasionally wander away from their owner. These must be called back and bound to the body to ensure a person is properly protected before any important undertaking. Once the elder has finished other participants continue tying loops of string. Yet more string is produced and finally everyone ties string around each other’s wrists, whispering good wishes all the while. It is believed that the string must be worn for at least three full days to ensure the desired effect.”
Excerpts (from https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-ecology-of-perception/)
Well, one of the most common misreadings of my work and of my research has been to say, “Oh, Abram is suggesting that writing is bad and that the alphabet is the cause of all our problems.” This is a terrible misreading, because I’m a writer and I love the written word and I love to read, and I’m deeply given to the exquisite power of the written word to open wonders. I’m not at all claiming—and this is quite important—I’m not at all suggesting that writing is bad, but, rather, that writing is magic, and that the alphabet is a very potent form of magic, a very concentrated form of animism.
For our Indigenous ancestors, one could be wandering through the terrain and have one’s attention snagged by a boulder with patches of crinkly black and red lichen spreading on their surface, and you would focus your eyes on a patch of lichen and abruptly hear the rock speaking to you. Well, that’s not so different from us waking up in the morning, walking to the kitchen, opening up the paper, and focusing our eyes on a few bits of ink on the page, and suddenly we hear voices and we see visions of events happening in the White House or in Iraq.
We focus our eyes on these ostensibly inanimate bits of ink on the page and we hear voices, conversations unfolding between people on the far side of the world. This is animism, folks. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism, but it’s animism, nonetheless; as outrageous as a talking stone. We just do it with our own scratches and scripts. Our oral ancestors were doing the same thing with bent twigs, tree forms, leaves, cloud shapes, animal tracks — everything in the surrounding terrain was speaking to us. But this new, very concentrated form of animism only speaks with a human voice, and the words that we experience as we read are human words.
So, again, the alphabet closes us into a space of exclusively human meaning and verbiage, while the wider, more-than-human terrain doesn’t seem to speak at all. And in that sense, this new, very concentrated form of magic that we call the alphabet makes possible the forgetting of the lives and perspectives of all the other animals, of the plants, of the mountains and rivers. It doesn’t force us to forget these other beings, but it makes possible that we begin to neglect them.
So, I’m not saying writing is bad. I’m saying writing is a magic, and only when we recognize it as such can we use it responsibly. If we don’t recognize writing as a very potent magic—that is, as something that has much more than rational effects upon our experience—if we don’t recognize it as a magic, we tend to fall under its spell. The word “spell” has that double meaning, both to cast a magic within the world and also simply to arrange the letters. But those two meanings were once one and the same, because to learn to read with this new magic was to cast a kind of spell upon our own senses.
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I’m not in any way trying to reduce the mystery of spirit to the wind, but rather to expand our sense of the wind and the breath and the air as something irreducibly weird and richly mysterious and deeply magical and filled with meaning: this meaning-filled plenum in which we find ourselves bodily immersed, from which we drink steadily to fire our hearts and our awareness. It does seem to me that one very interesting way of looking at climate change is to recognize that climate change is the simple consequence of forgetting the holiness of the invisible medium and beginning to treat it as just empty space.