Ghost Dance

by Weston La Barre

A history of the Ghost Dance in the Great Plains during the 19th century. A very useful account by an early investigator.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, Religion, Psychology, Native American

677 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Weston La Barre is best known for his work in anthropology and ethnography, in which he drew on the theories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Born in Uniontown, PA, La Barre studied at Princeton and Yale, and later taught at Rutgers, Wisconsin and Duke universities. La Barre conducted field work across North and South America, and later through India, China, Africa and Europe. He studied the Plains Indians and their peyote cult with Richard Evans Schultes (which resulted in the 1938 book The Peyote Cult).

La Barre's masterwork is The Ghost Dance: The Origin of Religion (1970), which draws together his explorations of shamanism, world religion, Native American culture, altered states of consciousness and the use of drugs in belief systems.

Works:
The Peyote Cult
The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau
The Human Animal
Materia Medica of the Aymara
They Shall Take up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snakehandling Cult
Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion
The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion
Culture in Context, Selected Writings of Weston La Barre
Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ghost Dance is a book from a well-established anthropologist that offers an outlandish thesis ”All religions .. had their origin in a crisis cult” (P 345) which the author fails to see is not supported by any conventional academic evidence.
LaBarre's book is very similar to Mircea Eliade's "Chamanisme et les Techniques Archaiques de L'extase" in which Eliade attempts to establish that shamanism was the dominant religion of all hunter-gatherer societies. LaBarre accepts Eliade's conclusions noting that Eliade developed his theory based on field work done in Central Asia. LaBarre then states that his own field work conducted in North and South America also shows that the religion of the hunter-gatherer societies in this region was shamanistic. LaBarre, however, goes much further with the daring thesis that these American shamanistic religions all had their origins as crisis cults and that in fact all religions begin as crisis cults.
Weston La Barre’s “Ghost Dance” is composed of three components.
1. a description of crisis cults lead by shamans and of which the 19th century native American ghost cult is one well-known example. Here the writing is based on the solid field work of the author and other academics
2. a psychological model of religious behaviour. In this section, the author argues that mature man desires an omnipotent male God to replace his biological father that provided him security when he was a child. Religion then is simply a “folie-à-deux” (pp 342-343) or shared psychosis. While this conclusion will certainly offend the religious reader, La Barre is still within the range of acceptable academic thinking at this point.
3. The third component of the book is a bizarre effort to show that Christianity and Judaism came into existence as “Crisis Cults”. While La Barre is too cautious to say overtly that Christ was a “shaman” but he boldly applies the label to Moses: “The ancient Moses was clearly not a state-priest but an archaic tribal sheikh-shaman.” P. 564. Here La Barre is obviously not basing his conclusions on field work. He appears rather to be reading the Bible as literature and applying the techniques of literary criticism to it. For example, noting that snakes figure prominently in legends about shamans, he points to the fact that Moses’ staff turns into a snake at one point in the Book of Exodus as a sign that Moses is a shaman. This type of reasoning clearly belongs to the world of popular culture rather than academia.
The last quarter of the book in which La Barre recounts how Christianity emerged is filled with preposterous assertions. He alerts the reader very early on to his incompetence in the area with the statement: “Greek religion was in our sense curiously untheological.” P 479.
Any undergraduate half-way through an introductory course on classical Greek civilization would realize instantly that La Barre is writing as a rank amateur. Greek theology was not “untheological” but rather pre-theological. True theology did not exist until late in the third century when the first Greek translation (the Septaguint) of the Jewish Bible appeared which forced Christians trained in philosophy (the so-called apologists) to reconcile the Christian sacred texts with the Greek philosophers. The so-called Greek religions lacked theology, doctrines, sacred texts and liturgy. What existed were city-specific rituals and a literature that alluded to the various Gods (the Iliad, the Metamorphoses and plays by authors such as Euripides.) At this point, the reader understands that La Barre is writing for an audience that knows nothing about Classical religion. As reader progresses through the book, he or she will realize that La Barre himself knows nothing about the topic
On Plato, La Barre makes the absurd statements: “Platonism is a typical ghost dance eclectic melange of the archaic, the reinterpreted and the improvised.” P 545. “Platonism is not a secular world view to be taken seriously. It is a ghost-dance religion born of troubled times. And its roots are historically in religion, Pythagorean Orphism and this is a mixture of very old Palaeolithic and Neolithic cults.” P. 541
La Barre’s argument that Christianity emerged in response to a crisis in classical society runs against the facts and the conclusions of every major author who has written on the era. Gibbon observed that Christianity which was pacifist and promoted charity was in complete contradiction with the values of Classical Rome. Christianity was not the response to a crisis, it was what caused the Decline of the Roman Empire by undermining the marital qualities of the Romans. All historians since have agreed. Rome was militarily strong and prosperous when Christianity arrived not in a state of crisis.
Judaism suffers as badly as Christianity at La Barre’s hands. Reading exodus as a literary critic he concludes that Moses was a Shaman like Jack Wilson (Wovoka) the charismatic leader of the Ghost Dance cult. As anthropologist, La Barre should have realized that you cannot draw conclusions like this without field work. In the case Jack Wilson the field work was done. In the case of Moses it was not. In fact, there is no way to be sure that Moses ever existed as an historical person whereas Jack Wilson’s existence is an established fact. A Shaman must be self-delusional. A true crisis cult shaman believes every extravagant thing he or she says; a certain spell will protect one against bullets, dead ancestors will return from the grave to fight along the cult members, etc. However, there is no reason to believe that Moses if indeed he existed, thought that his rod turned into a snake or that the Red Sea had parted on his command. All we know about Moses is that some writer or writers after the fact put these elements in the Exodus story. It is rather appalling that a university professor could conclude that Moses was a shaman with a Crisis cult using such material.
However, it must be recognized, that in this regard, LaBarre is simply emulating Eliade who notes the similarities between Orphism and Shamanism to conclude that the religion of Classical Greek have evolved out of Shamanism.
I adhere to the traditional school which views Christianity as being a profoundly syncretic religion that absorbs motifs and themes from other religions in order to facilitate evangelization. In this way, shamanistic elements were added to Christian rites and art in order to increase the appeal of Christianity to potential converts living in societies with shamanistic religions practices. LaBarre in my view has simply mistaken the addition for the base.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 'psychological and anthropological' study of world religion. He's out to demystify: "There is no mystery about religion" he tells you sternly. I heard of this as a masterpiece even if outdated, huge in scope.

One of the most high and low books I've ever read. There are chapters that are sheer lunacy, of the Freudian kind. It's written in 1970, but I didn't know how absurd the Freudian can get, until I read this. Other chapters were splendid, with a conceptual grasp, a width of material and insight into the how and why of religions within cultures. Highlights for me were the chapters on indigenous cults/messiahs/salvation religions as a shock reaction or an answer to the cultural upheavals and atrocities of meeting the European world. It was brilliant (and extensive) on that. Also on Stone Age religion.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, if you ask me. But I have to add a note on how he writes. For a scholar, he uses words like a novelist: he's frequently witty and often, very often, I stop to eat a sentence again, slurping and smacking my lips and saying 'I wish I'd written that'. He's one of those authors who keep you company, he's a presence in his book, and he'll make you laugh and argue with him and wish you didn't have to part company.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an unabashed anthropology of religion that suffers from a wayward, drunken weaving back and forth between themes and a rather untoward, smug attitude.
At first glance, the topic of common denominators amongst religions such as shamanistic practices, animal totemism, mana, animus, the sexual function of religion, and so on, makes for a potentially fascinating read. La Barre drifts back and forth between these themes, without ever satisfactorily tying everything together, teasing the reader. He does go into some detail on each topic, with the rather inconsistent and nebulous concept of the "ghost dance" being a common, core theme throughout, but the chapters tend to degrade into case-study- and name-dropping. There was this and this and this and this, with very little synthesis between themes.
I think with a little less subjective smugness on the treatment of religion by a serious science as nothing to be treated seriously, La Barre would've benefited by tightening up his subjects, relying less on oedipal- psychobabbly trajectories, and giving us more of the meat of the supposed origins of religion.