From Tom Robbins' "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues"

No buts about it. Spiritually, I'm a rich man. Because of my Asian ancestry, I've inheirited a certain amount of spiritual wealth. But--and you and Debbie and the pilgrims and would be pilgrims have got to understand this-- I CANNOT SHARE THIS WEALTH. Why? Because Eastern spiritual currency is simply not negotiable in your western culture. It would be like sending dollar bills to pygmies. You can't spend dollars in the African jungle. The best use the pygmies could make of dollar bills would be to light fires with them. Throughout the Western world, I see people huddled around little fires warming themselves with Buddhism and Taosim and Hinduism and Zen. And that's the most they can ever do with these philosophies. Warm their hands and feet. They can't make full use of Hinduism because they aren't Hindu; they can't really take advantage of Tao because they aren't Chinese; Zen will abandon them after a while--its fire will go out because they aren't Japs like me. To turn to Oriental religious philosophies may temporarily illuminate experience for them, but ultimately its futile, because they're denying their own history, they're lying about their heritage. You can hook a rainbow to a goofy vision, but you can't hook a rainbow to a lie.

You Westerners are spiritually poor. Your religious philosophies are impoverished. Well, so what? They're probably impoverished for a very good reason. Why not learn that reason? Certainly thats better than shaving your noggin and wrapping up in the beads and robes of traditions you can never more than partially comprehend. Admit, first of all, to your spiritual poverty. Confess to it. That's the starting point. Unless you have the guts to begin there, stark in your poverty and unashamed, you're never going to find your way out of the burrows. And borrowed Oriental fineries will not conceal your pretense; they will only make your lonely in your lie.

Sissy elevated herself on her elbow, keeping her anal compass pointed into the sun. "But what can a Westerner do, then, in his or her poverty?"

"Endure it. Endure it with candor, huimor & grace."

"You're saying it's hopeless, then?"

"No. I've already suggested that the spiritual desolation of the West probably has meaning and that that meaning might be advantageously explored. A Westerner who seeks a higher, fuller, consciousness could start digging around in his people's relgious history. Not an easy task, however because Christianity looms in the way, blocking every return route like a mountain on wheels."

"I don't get it. I thought that Christianity [i]was[/i] our religous heritage. How has it blocked...?

"Oh, Sissy, this is really tiresome. Christianity, you ninny, is an [i]Eastern[/i] religion. There are some wonderous truths in its teachings, as there are in Buddhism and Hinduism, truths that are universal, that is, truths that can speak to the hearts and spirits of all peoples everywhere. But Christianity came out of the East, its origins highly suspect, its dogma already perverted by the time it set foot in the West. Do you think there was no supreme deity in the West prior to that Eastern alien Jehovah? There was. From earliest Neolithic days, the peoples of Britain & Europe--the Anglos and Saxons and Latins--had venereated a deity. The Horned One. The Old God. A bawdy goat-man who provided rich harvests and bouncy babies; a hairy, merry deity who loved music and dancing and good food; a god of the fields and woodlands and flesh; a fecund provider who could be evoked through fornication as well as meditation, who listened to songs as well as prayers; a god much loved because he loved, because he put pleasure ahead of of asceticism, because jealousy and vengence were not in his character. The Old God's principal feast days were Walpurgisnacht (April 30) Candlemas (Feb 2) Lammas (Aug 1) and Hallowe'en (Oct 31st) The holiday you know call Christmas was originally a winter revelry of the Old God (historical evidence points toward Christ being born in July). These feasts were celebrated for thouasands of years. And veneration of the Old God, often disguised as Jack-in-the-Green or Robin Goodfellow, continued surreptitiously long after Christianity closed its chilling grip around the West. But The Christian powers were nothing if not sly. The church set out to willfully transformthe image of Lucifer, whom the Old Testament informs us was a shining angel, one of God's chief lieutenants. The Church began to teach that Lucifer had horns, that he wore cloven hooves of the lecherous goat. In other words, the leaders of the Christian conquest gave to Lucifer the physical traits--and some of the personality--of the Old God. They cunningly turned your Old God into the Devil. Thats as the most cruel libel, the greatest slander, the worst malicious distortion in human history. The President of the U.S. is a harmless carnival con man compared to the early Popes."

"If I--if we Westerners dug back into our heritage, what would we find there? Something valuable? Something as rich as your Oriental inheiritance? What would we find?"

"You'd find women, Sissy. And plants. Women and plants. Often in combination.
Plants are powerful and harbor many secrets. Our lives are bound up with the plant world far more tightly tahn any of us might imagine. The Old Religion recognized the subtle superiorities of plant life; it tried to understand growing things and pay them their due. One of the most highly developed orders of of the Old Religion, the Druids, took its name from the ancient Irish word [i]druuid[/i], the first syllable of which meant 'oak' and the second syllable, 'one who has the knowledge.' So a Druid was one who had knowledge about oak trees--and about the allegedly poisonous mistletoe that grows on oaks and that was sacred to the Druids.

Every village in the olden times had at least one Wise Woman. These ladies had profound expertise in botanical matters. Mushrooms and herbs were their intimates. They used plants to heal the body and to free the mind. These women were nuturers and nurses. Many of their herb remedies, such as digitalis(foxglove) and atropine(belladonna) are still in use today...(snipping some, getting tired of typing)

So there is plenty of treasure in your antiquity, if you could get at it. How it compares to mine is another matter. Maybe where it is lacking is in the realm of light. Buddha and Rama and Lao-Tzu brought light into into the world. Literal light. Jesus Christ also was a lving manifestation of light, although by the time his teachings were exported into the West, Saint Paul had trimmed the wick, and Jesus' beam grew dimmer and dimmer until, around the fourth century, it went out altogether. Christianity doesn't even have any warmth left; it probably never was very calorific. The Old Religion, on the other hand, was profoundly warm. It decidedly was not lacking in heat. But it was a heat that generated very little light. It warmed every hair on the mammal body, every cell in the reproductive process, but it failed to switch on the golden G.E. buld that hangs from the loftiest dome of the soul. There was enough pure sensual energy in the Old Religion that had it been directed toward enlightenment it surely would have carried its followers there. Unfortunately, it ws subverted and eneverated by Christianity before its warmth could be widely transformed into light. Maybe that's the path that needs to be completed, thats the logical goal for Western man. And the United States of America is the logical place for the fires of paganism to be rebuilt--and transformed into light. Maybe. Icould be wrong. But I can say for sure, there is plenty of treasure in your antiquity if you can get at it."

"But we can't go back," said Sissy. "We can't dwell in the past."

"No, you can't. Technology shapes psyches as well as environments, and maybe the peoples of the West are too sophisticated, too permanently alienated from Nature to make extensive use of their pagan heritage. However, links can be established. Links [i]must[/i] be established. To make contact with your past, to re-establish the broken continuity of your spiritual development, is not the same as a romantic, sentimental retreat into simpler, rustic lifestyles. To attempt to be a backwoods homesteader in an electronic technology may be as misguided as attempting to be Hindu when one is Anglo-Saxon. However, your race has lost many valuable things along the road of so-called progress and you need to go back and retrieve them. If nothing else, to discover where you've been may enable you to guess at where you're going."