Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality

Wandering God is the third of a remarkable trilogy on the evolution and diversity of the patterns thought and consciousness of Homo sapiens through the ages. Their manifestation, in spirituality and corporeality, were the themes of the previous two books, respectively, The Reenchantment of the World (1981) and Coming to Our Senses (1989). What Berman deals with in the present book, with impressive intellectual scope and erudition, is the shift of the thought patterns of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer nomads to those of sedentary agriculturalists (and beyond, to 20th-century Western industrial civilization). "Paradox" characterizes the former, a way of viewing the world, alertly, wholly and horizontally, with a broad, floodlight perspective that takes in all simultaneously, the opposites and the periphery. What is yielded is a "kind of kaleidoscopic consciousness," a "kind of mature ambiguity" for which the author has a distinct preference, as it fosters openness and tolerance, qualities lacking from the thought pattern that displaced it, with the rise of the Old World early agricultural civilizations. This Berman refers to as the "sacred authority complex" (SAC), with a mode of thought in which ambiguity yields to certainty, simultaneity to duality, and horizontality to verticality (and tolerance to dogmatism). Here certain elements of reality are designated elevated, sacred, eternal, true and transcendent value and, by their association with politics and authority, provide the ideological underpinnings for inequality. A key element of SAC is ASC, Altered/Alternate States of Consciousness, in particular "unitive trance" (which embraces, intensively and exclusively, one of a paired set of phenomena, for instance, Self the Sacred, to the exclusion of Other or the Secular). As a powerful "ascent experience," trance provides the person experiencing it with an intensified awareness of one or another of the ultimate truths and connects him or her to the eternal, yielding a "fusion with the absolute" and thereby utter certainty.The chapters that take the reader through this transformations of human thought are models of scholarship. Learned, informed and up-to-date explorations are offered of Palaeolithic cave art and culture; of the development, among complex hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, of inequality; of the rise of agriculture and the alleged cult around the goddess (and her male counterpart, the hero); of early pastoralism. The last two chapters fast forward in time, offering a far-ranging review and typology of Western intellectual traditions that balance the elements of logic or form and spirit or process, as well as paradox. Ludwig Wittgenstein receives detailed treatment, being heralded as the Western thinker whose thought embraced both logic and paradox (turning to the latter in the second half of his life, in a new philosophical incarnation). That "paradigm worship"--SAC's secular branch--continues to this day in Western thought, to our Western intellectual and moral detriment, is Berman's pessimistic conclusion. As an antidote to this Western epistemological disease he suggests that we should inject paradox into our mode of thought, not in massive doses, which would result in merely another paradigm, but through the irksome pinpricks of a gadfly, that "keeps nagging at us until we are ready to look at our need for certainty with a more critical eye. "While cogently argued--with much of the scholarly evidence provided in comprehensive endnotes that rein in a wide array of source material--a student of hunter-gatherers might have a couple of objections, especially a student of hunter-gatherer religion and of the Bushmen, a much drawn-on ethnographic example in Berman's book. …