Finding My Religion

Poetic Faith and DIY Shamanism

Religions may usefully be considered as psychological technologies. Just like any other tech, they can be hacked or invented by those artistic fringe-dwellers who have the courage, imagination and tools to take that understanding as read and then ask “now what?”

— Tony Wolf, A Cultpunk Manifesto

When I first came across the work of Tony Wolf, a man of eclectic talents (he was the guy called upon to design unique fighting styles for each of the different species of characters in the Lord of the Rings films), I’d been developing a set of practices I’d taken to describing as “Archetypal Shamanism” for a number of years. Although “developing” isn’t quite the right word, meaning that I had an idea for something and then set about creating it. The way it really happened is that the various practices I was engaged in — yoga, vedic chanting, shamanic journeying, singing medicine songs, dreamwork, altar-making — started to morph and blend together in a unique and (to me) exciting way.

Tony Wolf (right) teaching a Bartitsu seminar at the 2007 Paddy Crean International Stage Combat Workshops in Banff, Canada

Without any conscious intent or effort from ‘me’, the hodge-podge of psycho-spiritual-somatic-imaginal practices that I’d cobbled together from different cultures and places over a decade or so had gradually morphed into something much more personally resonant and altogether more cohesive. At some point a few years ago, it occurred to me that all these practices were related and that they each incorporated some aspect of what we could broadly call “shamanism.” And yet they no longer (for the most part) resembled any particular indigenous shamanic practice. Instead, they appeared to be new practices rooted in age-old principles. Hence the term Archetypal Shamanism.

So, back to Tony Wolf. As I struggled to put into words what I was doing and how it all fit together, Tony was on his own journey of discovery. Only he was a couple decades ahead of my curve and had begun to develop some language around his own creative spiritual practice.

A “vanitas” altar constructed for a Memento Mori ritual c/o Morbid Anatomy & Tony Wolf (New York City, September 2023)

When I heard about him via Morbid Anatomy sometime in 2024, he was just starting to publicly present his ideas around what he was calling Poetic Faiths. (If you want the full backstory, you can listen to the conversation we recorded in August 2024 here.) What he was talking about perfectly captured the essence of what I’d been doing, much better than I’ve been able to describe it.

Poetic Faith is a term he picked up from Samuel Coleridge which describes the suspension of disbelief one needs in order to participate fully in imaginative practice or narrative. The poet John Keats (who inspired the name of this Substack) used the phrase Negative Capability to refer to one’s capacity for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Both Coleridge’s Poetic Faith and Keats’ Negative Capability elegantly capture the cognitive leap most of us moderns need to make in order for our hearts and souls to be moved by any narrative artform, whether it’s a film, play, novel or a religious ritual. It’s what another recent podcast guest Abi Millar calls “faith without belief.”

Essentially, it’s the recognition that in order for any ritual to be truly meaningful in the deepest sense, we need to leave our rational, materialist mindset at the door. A well-crafted ritual or artwork are often compelling and immersive enough for us to make this leap of faith, and there are certain practices (breathing, chanting, dancing) that are designed to help. And, when all else fails, a fair-sized dose of any psychedelic will certainly hurtle us across the threshold of disbelief/belief. But you can also loosen the stranglehold of the rational mind and increase your Negative Capability by regularly and consistently engaging in imaginal, creative practices.

The First Church of David Bowie, featured in the Poetic Faiths anthology vol 1

Tony Wolf’s new book Poetic Faiths: New Religions and Rituals as Works of Living Art is an anthology of illustrated interviews with an emergent counterculture of artists and activists who are crafting their own Poetic Faiths. As it’s summarized on the back cover of his new collection, Poetic Faiths “embody soulful practice through ritual participation in mythopoetic art; they are ways of taking as profound that which may not be taken literally.” In the introduction he goes on to write that the artists, scholars and activists who are involved in creating their own Poetic Faith practice are engaged in a “metamodern, post-Humanist form of spirituality; taking the skeptical and scientific world-view as read*, taking soulfulness and imagination seriously, then asking “now what?” and finding their answers in and via artistic creation.”

*Read, in this context, is a British usage that means “to accept or assume that something is true and does not need to be proved.”

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I’m grateful to Tony’s work on this, because it helps me better contextualize and understand what I’d been fumbling toward in my own intuitive way. It lets me off the hook of trying to write about what I’ve been creating and why it’s meaningful to me, and just stick to doing it.

Since I first started hinting at a “new western shamanism that embraces both psychology and spiritual practice,” a few people have expressed interest in the specifics of what I’ve been doing, but I’ve been resistant to creating yet another colour-by-numbers self-help program. And yet, I do see some value in perhaps drawing up an outline for a DIY shamanic practice that allows you the creative freedom to colour inside (or outside) the lines as you see fit.

Following my most recent chat with Tony (which is available here until its public release) I’ve been inspired to start sketching out a framework for what might constitute a personal practice of Archetypal Shamanism. This approach happens to be perfectly harmonious with the way I was taught to teach yoga: take a set of time-tested principles and techniques and adapt them to the individual’s cultural background, needs and interests.

Over the next few weeks on this Substack I’ll be laying out some basic building blocks for a DIY shamanic practice, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what other folks make of them.

Until then…

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Links

• Read Tony’s Cultpunk Manifesto: https://cultpunk.art/2023/06/30/read-this-first-a-cultpunk-manifesto/

• Tony’s new book: https://a.co/d/1nZ7zkq

• HITW 146 CultPunk, Death & The Art of Ritual w/ Tony Wolf https://www.patreon.com/posts/cultpunk-death-107564746

• HITW 177 Poetic Faiths: The Art of Embodied Philosophy w/ Tony Wolf https://www.patreon.com/posts/poetic-faiths-of-126002139