Fascinated by Celtic or Native American Spirituality? Think of their bloody Cruelty, too!

On Friday the participants of our Himalaya Journey arrived at the Ashram. Some had stayed in Rishikesh to continue their journey from there and the rest returned to the Ashram. Yesterday our last guests left, our friends Sylvia, Melanie, Thomas and Iris. It was nice to have another free day together with them to just sit and talk a bit. While talking, I remembered a topic that Thomas and I had discussed before they left: the spirituality of people before our times and the fascination that some people have with that.

I told Thomas that I thought the religions we know today won’t stay with people forever. He agreed and we talked about religions that had been there before and which we now know only from stories. We know that the Greek mythology describes lots of gods with different qualities, half-gods, demons and more and when most people hear of that they think of fairytales, Disney movies or other fiction stories. The Roman Gods were very similar and although children in the west learn about them in school, they all know it is just fantasy and nothing real.

There are however also cultures before these that people mostly don’t learn about in school. The fact that they don’t and that most people don’t know too much about them makes them interesting to some people. Their belief was maybe not even very organized yet which is why you can hardly call it religion but it is belief with Gods and supernatural beings, including magic and energies. Many people get very fascinated and if they have the right psychological preset, they tend to believe that those beliefs were better than whatever exists today.

In the spiritual scene in the west, there are some who get more fascinated by the native American beliefs while others are attracted by the Celts and their ideas of how the world was created and how it still went on. People who are into these things will tell you of all the great knowledge those cultures had, how many things they knew that we have forgotten and how they were, with all this wisdom and knowledge, so much more powerful than we are today.

They seem to just ignore other things that we know of those natives of centuries ago! Or maybe they don’t know about it! Thomas and Iris, who had been interested in exploring the remains of the Celts in Germany, told me that they had visited a museum where their ancient rituals were explained and depicted. It was the contrary of what people like to believe! They were doing ritualistic human sacrifice, partly eating the dead because they believed they would thus soak up the strength of those people! They were barbaric, from today’s point of view you would call it inhuman! The same I have heard about rituals of Native Americans in earlier times!

So you see what is happening – out of a fascination for what they don’t know, people make themselves and others believe that the ancient times were great, that people were much more spiritual and understood life and world much better. The reality is that they were just believing in spirits and beings because they did not have any better explanation for natural phenomena! They were barbaric because their world consisted of wars among tribes and families, of violence, of eating meat of animals that they hunted and of making clothes and tools out of the other parts of those animals.

Of course people may sometimes refer to old times saying things were easier when they were simpler, when people didn’t have that much or when science had not explained the world and had not crated all kinds of gadgets for us yet. When times were slower because we didn’t have to be available at all times. But the time was not better then – it was bloodier, colder and more dangerous.