Tuesday, 7 July 2009

Popular New Age Misconceptions

Having seen most of the pagan sites the internet has to offer across the world, I was utterly gobsmacked at the shear bulk of misinformation going around about "Native American spirituality". What's even worse is that some are charging big bucks for their hocum, and I'm not just talking about faux-injuns either. There are those who will use any trace of indigenous origin to offer you a vision quest from whatever hapless tribe happens to be fashionable at moment. Not every nation used sweat lodges, medicine wheels or dream catchers for that matter. Although I am quite solidly European. my mother lost her Prussian homeland to the nazis and then the soviets so I was born in Canada. My Father was a civil engineer in the military so we got chucked from one end of Canada to the other as well as Germany. Prejudical attitudes to "Germans" let alone my lack of religious denomination had me ostracized from so-called "civilized society" in those days. Of course being the volcanic tempered take no crap kind, I got labelled a "wild one" and landed amongst the métis wherever I went. Lucky for me that most of these places were gov't reserves where we attended the same schools- thus native heritage made an integral part of the cirriculum. I learned about the Ojibwa, Iroquois, Cree, Kwakiutl, to name a few, even the odd Hopi or Meso-American. They are as diverse as the ethnocultures found across any continent on this planet. No one-size-fits-all, in as much as starry-eyed idealists would like to aspire. That nature prefers to differ is the first law of quantum dynamics. Without it all gets sucked up into a black hole. That's just the way it is. Needless to say, whenever I see someone try to stir all these colourfully different nuances together into a sickly monochrome cliché, it really upsets me.

http://www.newagefraud.org/

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