Can George W. Bush Be Purged?

A propos of the news that Mayan priests purified a sacred archaeological site to eliminate “bad spirits” after President Bush’s visit, SF Gate columnist Mark Morford has this to say:

Can George W. Bush Be Purged?

Mayan priests purified their sacred land after Shrub scurried off. Can we do the same? By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist — Friday, March 16, 2007 Sage is always good. Or maybe lavender. Pine is nice, too. Dried, bundled, tied with string, burned with hot, divine intent. Would it work? Do we have enough to go around? This is the question.

I speak, of course, of ritual. Purging and cleansing and purifying and, truly, burning a nicely dried, blessed smudge stick can be a terrific slice of personal magic, to rid a space (or perhaps even your own body) of negative juju or vicious spirits or just to make way for the new and the moist and the good. You can smudge a room. You can create a divine smoldering cloud and then move through the smoke, invoke change, purge the negative, invite hot licks of yes. It is a thing to do.

But here’s the thing: Can you smudge an entire nation? Do we have enough lavender for 300 million? It is, all things considered, a big goddamn country. Windy. Rocky, in places. Could be tricky. Not to mention, you know, hazy. From all the smoke. Think of the potential traffic accidents. Coughing.

Important considerations, really, because it is becoming increasingly evident that a great national purifying ritual is just about exactly what we need. We are, after all, almost at that point. The Great Bleakness is nearing its end and you can veritably feel the swarm of uptight BushCo demons and malicious energies swirling around the country like happy karmic leeches, like a giant intellectual rash, like black raindrops of dank sweat from Karl Rove’s evil mealy thighs.

To make matters worse, these dark energies, these base spirits were actually invited here by the Powers That Be, by those quivering, shivering, terrified armies of evangelical right-wing neocon bonk jobs and attorneys general and sour Supreme Court justices and scowling defense secretaries lo these past half-dozen years, and this means they shall not leave easily, despite how it is quickly coming time for them to be shoved back down into the bowels of fear and shrill egomania whence they came.

We must, therefore, do like the Mayans do. We must follow their divine and entirely appropriate example, set just recently.

Apparently, George W. Bush — famed warmonger, despoiler of lands, despiser of gays and women and science and earthly resource, hapless fascist-wannabe — it seems George just visited Guatemala, where he happily trod upon a holy Mayan site or two and shook hands with wary diplomats and blinked a lot and mispronounced a hundred different names. You know, same old, same old.

But then something interesting happened. Seems Bush left behind huge steaming piles of banality wherever he went, and therefore the first thing Guatemala’s holy guardians of the sacred did as soon as Air Force One’s wheels lifted off the ground was, of course, to purify the hallowed ground our president’s shockingly low, nefarious energy had infected.

It’s true. Those Mayan priests rushed in right after George left and cleansed the sacred archeological site upon which Dubya had trod, shooed away the snickering hordes of bleak spirits that trail behind America’s Great Embarrassment like a sickly fog of ignorance and misprision and shockingly humiliating grammar.

Yes, we need a grand American ritual. We are, after all, far more deeply infected than that Mayan site. Does it not seem entirely appropriate? Does it not make perfect sense? Of course it does.

Ah, but maybe you scoff. Maybe you say what those highly regarded Mayan priests did was just quaint tribal nonsense, a little savage, silly, pagan. Truly, most Christians tend to sneer at such things, mock and deride and denounce even as they kneel before giant gruesome crosses and flock to pieces of suspiciously burnt toast and make Mel Gibson insanely wealthy.

Christian rituals, if they exist at all, are largely tepid and bland and might involve, say, a little rosary bead here, a little sip of wine there, maybe a quick bologna sandwich followed by 4,000 Hail Marys and a bunch of blind fervent prayers to some grand unhappy deity because, well, most Christians don’t really understand the notion of spirit guides or negative energies unless it looks really sexy in red leathery skin and black boots and sharp pointy horns.

I bring this up only because an estimated 75 percent of Americans at least vaguely identify with the Christian faith, and we can safely presume that only a wizened handful know how to burn, smudge, cleanse with anything resembling deep laughter and honest pagan intent and the understanding that Bush has been more toxic to this nation than Adam Sandler and MySpace and cheap piss-water domestic beer combined. Would this fact be an obstacle? Can we please try, anyway?

We could try water. Sacred baths. Not-so-sacred baths. Any sort of bath, shower, divine scrub-down involving divine intent and maybe some candles and a little dish of salt and some blessed soap and the prayer-full idea that you are sloughing off skanky Bush demons and old skin and past loves and idiotic politicians.

Can we bathe each other? Hose each other down? We do, after all, have a lot of water laying around. Bottles and bottles of it stacked to the rooftops of the nation’s Costcos and Wal-Warts like wet plastic kindling. Would this be sanitary? Do we have proper drainage? Enough soap? Ah, logistics.

Ah, but wait. There is another fabulous possibility. There is, of course, fire. I love fire. Fire is God’s own enema. Fire is the devil’s dental floss. It is beautiful and powerful and dangerous and obvious and fun. As purgatives go, it can’t be beat. Ritualistically, you can burn it all: incense, candles, locks of hair, photographs, bedsheets, foreign policy documents, Dick Cheney’s black charcoal heart, Jenna Bush’s beer bong. Fire is good. Fire kicks serious spiritual butt. This is what they say.

Sure, it won’t be easy. We will have to get around the law. Skirt the federal fire marshal’s implied edict that we cannot really have, say, a National Day of Fire, a grand torching of the toxic memory that is eight miserable years of the Bush administration.

No matter. It’s still worth a try. It is, in fact, mandatory. And this being America, we can just keep it simple. Obvious. Keep the metaphor so clear that even celebrities and teenagers and recovering born-again Christians will understand.

Here is what we can do: We shall burn a bush. Ten thousand bushes. Maybe a million. Bushes laced with sage, lavender, pine, incense, with eight years of warmongering and intolerance and those beady squinty vacant eyes. We shall gather in parks or street corners or fire pits at the beach sometime next year, and ignite.

We will burn bush. We will burn away Bush. We shall purify and rinse and cleanse the nation of this horrific and banal poison, once and for all, and it shall be Good. And those Mayan priests? Why, they’ll simply look over and nod, smile knowingly. They understand completely.

An Ism of Other Worlds

From today’s Mumbai (India) Financial Express newspaper.

Shamanism has more to it than just rituals that look exotic in documentaries

by TASHI TOBGYAL

Over the years, in many forlorn places, I have seen them. They were real. To the naked mind they did appear like some death metal freaks from the mountains, but Shamanism is an ancient belief dating back to the Neolithic period [sic]—of connections with the invisible but not the unknown.

Utility of a hundred and eight melodies to cure, romances with the immensely invisible, flights above and below the human sphere, advocacy with powerful beings, vanquishing the dread of chronic shadows, ability to control the weather, divination and sortilege, astral projection, gift of prognosis . . . just the periphery of this rather mythical sounding existence.

In the ancient Bonpo tradition, the native religion of Tibet, these personalities were called the Shen—special individuals who had the gift of insight into the other worlds. The Bonpo texts regard that the whole pantheon of the Universe is based upon thirty-three realms of existence. Striking a balance between all realms is necessary and only the Shens have the remedy.

With the propagation of the Buddhist faith, the Bonpos were defeated in the long battle of might and magic. Many of the sacred texts of the Bonpos called the “termas” were hidden away from the brutal invaders. Till date excavations in the region, where the Shangshung civilisation once flourished, throws up the hidden objects.

The original tradition may have long died but traces of it have trickled down centuries into the numerous communities that nest in the Himalayas today. The region comprises of more than hundred different clans. The more prominent and esoteric in their practices being the shamans of the Rai, Gurung, Tamang, Thakali, Spiti, Hor, Lepcha, Apatanis, shingsakwa and the Magar communities. The shamans are known as Jhakris, Bijwas, pao, pangmos and the Khandros. They claim to be initiated into the practice through dreams at a tender age, being taken away to places beyond human imagination. The teacher is called the “Ban Jhakri” — a monstrous appearance with magical powers and a rude cannibal wife. It is long before the boy finally becomes a “Jhakri” — possessing special powers and the ability to travel in his consciousness to worlds beyond our mortal senses.

A special vicinity is made for them, replete with effigies and objects like tiger’s teeth, swords, human skull and bones, monkeys paws etc. Each ritual and cure requires its own set of instruments. There are no scripts to follow as this tradition is purely based on oral and spiritual lineages. During the ritual the Shaman is dressed in a typical attire — adorned with innumerable bells that creates its own melody.

The most important instrument used to communicate with the other world is through the Shaman’s one faced drum called the “Kna.” The shaman converses in varied languages. I had seen one in Sikkim who spoke fourteen languages accompanied by melodies of eagles, deers and the wind. In a trance like situation, when the ritual is finally concluded, with much fatigue and weariness, the shaman collapsed to return back to our world in a few minutes. “I traveled a thousand years,” he claimed.

Many women too follow this practice, especially in the Taplejung region of Nepal, where a Shingsawa khandroma had the supernatural power to forsee the future. In Dolpo, Nepal, I came across a Shaman who had the gift of “Sutras.” He chased the falling hail away from the village and also claimed of performing the “divination of mirrors”. Another in Mustang, performed his sortilege through a woman’s hair. All through the Himalayas, numerous such practitioners exist with an expansive proof of reality and faith, but sadly to the modern world they are only time-lapsed documentaries on the National Geographic!

Priests to Purify Site After Bush Visit

by JUAN CARLOS LLORCA | AP | March 9, 2007 12:20 AM EST

GUATEMALA CITY — Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate “bad spirits” after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.

“That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands,

is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture,” Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday.

Bush’s seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.

Tiney said the “spirit guides of the Mayan community” decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of “bad spirits” after Bush’s visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace. He also said the rites—which entail chanting and burning incense, herbs and candles—would prepare the site for the third summit of Latin American Indians March 26-30.

Bush’s trip has already has sparked protests elsewhere in Latin America, including protests and clashes with police in Brazil hours before his arrival. In Bogota, Colombia, which Bush will visit on Sunday, 200 masked students battled 300 riot police with rocks and small homemade explosives.

The tour is aimed at challenging a widespread perception that the United States has neglected the region and at combatting the rising influence of Venezuelan leftist President Hugo Chavez, who has called Bush “history’s greatest killer” and “the devil.”

Iximche, 30 miles west of the capital of Guatemala City, was founded as the capital of the Kaqchiqueles kingdom before the Spanish conquest in 1524.