The operator of that Arizona sweat lodge in which 3-people died last month has yet another lawsuit to answer — this one from the Lakota Sioux tribe, which claims he unlawfully appropriated a spiritual practice over which they enjoy exclusive control.
In the aftermath of the tragedy at Angel Valley Retreat Center, where an incompetently conducted “sweat lodge” held by Californian self-help guru James Arthur Ray killed three participants, political steps are being taken by several native people across the United States. While local Indians from Arizona are forming a Council for Indigenous Traditional Healing to reclaim native ceremonies, the Lakota tribe of North and South Dakota has filed a lawsuit against the United States, the state of Arizona, James Arthur Ray and the Angel Valley Retreat Center.
Good luck. All spiritual traditions indulge the conceit that they are something special, something unique, the protectors of something revealed — and they are all wrong.
The more complicated truth is that thought across the entire range of human knowledge is a continuum, that each school arises (usually) in consequence of a political dispute and takes most of what exists at the time of its founding, making only a miniscule change or addition.
Monotheism itself was a political solution to pagan conflicts, a device for uniting the disparate castoffs who coalesced to become the Jews.
A prototype of the Trinity is found in Gilgamesh, an old story 2000-years before Jesus was born.
There is virtually nothing that is new in the Christianity of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount? Confucius trashed it 300-years before Jesus was born.
Analects 14:36: Someone said, “What do you think of repaying hatred with virtue?” Confucius said, “In that case, what are you going to repay virtue with? Rather, repay hatred with uprightness, and repay virtue with virtue.”
It was Jesus’ good fortune to preach to an obsequious underclass that had no choice but to eat shit and smile.
So far as I can tell, the only thing original in Christian thought is the demented and destructive doctrine of Original Sin, discerned by Augustine in ~350 AD from a close reading of the self-loathing (because probably gay) Apostle Paul.
So, too, the spiritual practices of the Lakota; nobody knows when the sweat lodge originated, but it was probably brought to North America from Asia with the crossing of the Bering Straits.
The sauna has always been important for Finns. It has a long history, going back at least a thousand years, probably more. Originally the sauna was a place to bathe, but as it was the only available clean place with abundant water, it has also been a place for giving birth and healing the sick.
If the Holy Man who knows anything of the history of the thought of his own tradition is rare, those who will tell the truth about that history are even rarer.
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1 Per the OED: “Attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices, esp. in philosophy or religion; spec. the system or principles of a school founded in the 17th century by George Calixtus, who aimed at harmonizing the sects of Protestants and ultimately all Christian bodies: see Calixtin 2. (Almost always in derogatory sense.)”
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