Feelings on the Brain

In Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon popped out of hyperspace and nearly ran into the Death Star. Han Solo looked at the looming space station and famously said

I've got a very bad feeling about this.

Let's talk about feelings -- but not the way you think. Let's talk about food and intuition and the subconscious -- and demolish some cherished myths. And in the end, the truth will -- as usual -- be stranger than fiction. That's my gut instinct anyway.

And what is a "gut instinct"?

A visceral reaction -- an immediate, emotional, instinctive response to something. That's viscera, the Latin word for the body cavity and its entrails. Innards. Guts. The Dantian, in Qigong and Taijijuan.

Comedy is visceral: The belly laugh. Side splitting. Rib tickling. Gut busting.

Do you stop eating when you are stressed, or do you eat because you are stressed? Ever get "butterflies" in the stomach, or intestinal cramps, before an important event?

Ever wonder why antidepressants (which work on the brain) cause stomach problems?

Food.

Long ago, food was the one important thing in life: eat, rather than being eaten. So the first nerves to develop were in the esophagus, stomach, small intestine and colon. This is the limbic system, what Carl Sagan liked to call the reptilian brain.

Eventually this brain developed a satellite brain, in the skull. Both brains still develop from the same source, called the neural crest. But the old brain still rules. It has more nerves than the spinal cord. And like the spinal cord, the old brain transmits and processes messages.

That is why injuries to the "vital organs" are so devastating -- they are actually brain injuries.

The brain in your gut is the enteric nervous system. And when one brain gets upset, the other does, too.

Dr. Michael Gershon, a professor of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, said that in the bad old days, people with ulcers, people who had problems swallowing or who suffered chronic abdominal pain, were told that their problems were all in their heads.

See a psychiatrist.

Doctors were right in ascribing these problems to the brain, Dr. Gershon said, but they blamed the wrong brain!

Not so long ago, the so-called Maalox moment of advertising fame showed how the old and new brains really interact, according to Dr. Jackie D. Wood, chairman of the department of physiology at Ohio State University in Columbus.

Brain diseases also show how the two brains interact. Victims of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's suffer from constipation, showing that the nerves in both brains are very sick. Epilepsy, migraine, and autism are all linked to ailments in the old brain. Acid reflux disease is related to Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, which are actually psychoses of the gut.

The bowel may not misbehave because a person is crazy, but a misbehaving bowel can drive anyone mad. — Dr Gershon

But is it really misbehaving? Or is one wise in years and experience having a tough time getting through to the noisy, oblivious youngster upstairs? After all, the old brain has a history of millions and millions of years of successful independent living. It has its own ways of learning, and its own ways of remembering.

Already know you that which you need. — Yoda

Your enteric brain could be the repository of that "still, small voice" that speaks to us when it is quiet, as the prophet Elijah said. Dr. Candace Pert showed how molecules known as peptides give us emotions and memory. More than 20 years ago she hinted that the brain in your gut is actually your subconscious mind.

The gut's brain and the head's brain act the same way when they are cut off from the world, says Dr David Wingate, a professor of gastrointestinal science at the University of London and a consultant at Royal London Hospital. While you sleep, the head brain and the gut brain synchronize their 90-minute cycles of slow waves and their separate periods of rapid muscle movements. People with bowel ailments often have abnormal REM sleep.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!  — Ebenezer Scrooge to the ghost of Jacob Marley, in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

The old brain affects our dreams, when the noisy kid upstairs finally shuts up. And the gut brain is an old animal, so it communicates like one: in images, feelings, smells, actions, and noises -- even archetypes, because Jung believed archetypes were a biological inheritance.


Archetypes may be the gut bacteria we inherit from our parents and those around us.

In Conclusion

You have two brains. So do other vertebrates. We all enjoy food and probably share a sense of humor.

One human brain agonizes over what wine to serve for dinner, while the other brain rumbles its displeasure and would be happy eating the dinner rolls. The noisy brain announces dinner is just fabulous after two bites. The quiet brain will get back to you -- when you least expect it.

What else do we know?

Breaking bread with people, and hearty laughter, are more meaningful than we thought.

Food is medicine. The way to a man's deep thought processes evidently is through his stomach. And, perhaps most importantly, if you are having a lot of headaches, or a lot of Maalox moments, it's time to ask why.

Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Eco-kosher and Fengshui

In the hour when the Holy One created the first man, the Holy One took him and let him pass before all the trees of the garden of Eden, and said to him:  "See my works, how fine and excellent they are!"Now all that I have created for you have I created."Think upon this, and do not corrupt and desolate my world; for if you corrupt it, there is no one to set it right after you."
— Eccles. Rabbah VII.28 

Pico della Mirandola borrowed this for his De hominis dignitate in 1486, a work emblematic of the Renaissance spirit

What is "Eco-Kosher"?

The word was invented in the late 1970s by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, founder of the P'nai Or Religious Fellowship. Eco-kosher is an attempt to redefine Kashrut (kosher practices) in terms of broader values and obligations to the planet that stem from Jewish tradition and echo modern environmental concerns.

Judaism is the West's closest equivalent to a traditional belief system. It is a codified ethical civilization combining traditional indigenous beliefs with more modern revelatory and scientific truths. The spiritual values at the heart of Judaism are shared by many traditional societies, who believe that the natural world is a living and vital being and who express certainty of an inextricable link between themselves and the natural world.

Interestingly, it is this same traditional worldview that is presumed by science to have provided humans with their only ecologically sustainable lifestyles — and yet people insist on calling the traditional worldview and societies "primitive" and "superstitious," and heap scorn and ridicule upon Jewish beliefs and customs.

The traditional worldview is considered by many scientists as having an evolutionary advantage. As Stephen Kellert says in The Biophilia Hypothesis:

It may be sufficient to suggest that a biological advantage is conferred on those who experience a profound sense of psychological well-being, identity, and self-confidence produced by the conviction of an ultimate order and meaning in life.

Like the belief systems of other traditional cultures, Judaism addresses the earth's essential role in our existence and our ultimate reliance on planetary health. It takes seriously the limits on our ownership of any part of the world, but it also understands that a full spiritual life is the only way that people will come to respect those limits.

Eco-kosher maintains awareness of the unhappy truth that humans must kill plants and animals to live. It aids our acknowledgement of the fact that whatever we do to stay alive poses some danger to the planet that gives us life. Judaism has always believed that we might be more inclined to exercise self-control if we are consciously aware of the truth and incorporate it into our daily life. Like most traditional cultures, much of Jewish life is built around this awareness of responsibility and guidelines for right conduct in the world, especially in our dealings with that which is alive but not human.As the late Andree Collard said,

Apathy, thoughtlessness, and the denial of responsibility and choice are moral transgressions; they allow for the overall pollution and destruction of the earth, the oppression of people, the atrocities committed on animals … and the objectification of wildlife in general.

Stephen Kellert puts it this way:

The moralistic experience of nature encompasses strong feelings of affinity, ethical responsibility, and even reverence for the natural world. This perspective often reflects the conviction of a fundamental spiritual meaning, order, and harmony in nature.

In Jewish spirituality, along with Native American and other indigenous traditions, the moralistic view of nature is paramount and governs the individual and society as a whole. Some of these practices are codified in Kashrut. Kashrut's concerns with the gathering, preparation, and consumption of food exhibit Jewish solutions for solving the moral dilemma of killing other life forms so humans can survive.

Eco-kosher determines that actions bearing considerable risk of habitat or ecosystem destruction or death of species are treyf ("unfit," "not kosher," and many other negative connotations). Actions to protect habitat, species, and ecosystems are rewarded and encouraged. Likewise, actions likely to irreparably alter or destroy distinctive human cultures or communities are prohibited. It's the Jewish concept later given broad coverage as Star Trek's Prime Directive.

Eco-kosher offers Westerners the traditional approach to interactions with our planet and its nonhuman inhabitants, but this tradition is also firmly grounded in the here-and-now. The principles of eco-kosher imbue the Rio Summit Declarations, whether by design or unconscious acknowledgement of what the drafters knew in their hearts to be right.

We're postmodern. We understand that people need mythology and a mythos to live by. People are not satisfied with the Enlightenment promise that rationality is going to be the whole answer. The rational world produced Nazis. We're no longer accepting this Western "enlightenment" model as being "the most superior model of all time.
— Moshe Waldocks

An exploration of eco-kosher involves traditional Jewish and modern concerns.

Tzaar baalei chayim (Literally "distress of those who possess life")

This is traditionally interpreted as respect and compassion for animals. Care of and kindness to animals is not generally mentioned in the same breath as the Ten Commandments, but the concepts are codified in the Decalogue. Torah prohibits the torture or causing of pain to any living creature. It's also a moral obligation to show kindness to animals and to avoid actions that would cause them anguish or suffering.

A famous rabbi was cursed by God because, when a terrified calf sent to slaughter broke away and came bleating to him for protection, he returned the animal to the butcher rather than spare its life.

People are supposed to consider the feelings of the animals in their care — and sometimes the animals' feelings come first. For example, one who is responsible for animals is forbidden to relax until their animals are watered and fed.

A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.
—Proverbs XII, 10

In the Jewish worldview — not unlike the world of a physicist, Eastern philosopher or scholar — it seems that all life, whether human or not, forms an organic whole. Certainly Psalm XXXVI, 7, and Jonah IV give the impression that there is no break in the chain of sentient life.

In Genesis (VIII, 1) and Jeremiah (XXI, 6), domesticated animals are regarded as part of the human community. What a far cry from pagan cultures. The bloodthirsty rites of the Roman arena were a clear indication of the inhumanity which prevailed in what we tend to call the "civilized" world during the Talmudic period.

Christianity ignored that part of the Ten Commandments touching on the treatment of animals, and it dropped the other concepts entirely. We see this occur in Paul's mocking rhetoric: "Is it for oxen that God careth?" That's why it took until the late 1800's for animal cruelty laws to make it to the lawbooks of civilized Christian society, though Jewish law accepted it as fact with the Covenant.

Hunting as a sport has historically been looked upon with disdain as a violation of the spiritual intent of Judaism, particularly if there is no utilitarian purpose, for it invariably involves an element of cruelty to animals. There are also extremely specific rules regarding the consumption of animals for food. One story insists that the rules are rigid because The Eternal One originally planned for humans to be vegetarians. However, strict compromises to the rule had to be created for those humans who begged to be allowed to eat meat!

Age-old moral constraints codified in Judaism are part and parcel of the indigenous worldview, where animals used for food are treated with dignity even at the time of death. Nothing from a slaughtered animal is wasted, and out of respect for animalkind humans only kill what they absolutely need.

Jewish law covers the methods of animal slaughter; the rules were devised with the intention of providing an easy death for the victim.

The traditional view is expanded under eco-kosher to prohibit factory-farm conditions for animals and the eating of meat from animals raised under such undignified and cruel conditions. Some extend eco-kosher to respect the identity of plants by restricting pesticide use and recombinant genetic practices. Eco-kosher rules the drug Premarin to be treyf because of the appalling conditions experienced by pregnant mares (and their offspring) used to obtain Premarin's primary ingredient.

Bal taschchit (Literally "not ruining the earth")

This is generally interpreted as a divine commandment to protect the environment, beginning with the directive in Deuteronomy against cutting down an enemy's trees. Property has a moral aspect in Judaism, as in "the Earth is the Eternal's, and all the fullness thereof." The Sabbatical Year (Leviticus XXV, 1) and other biblical injunctions on the treatment of tilled ground also relate to this concept of gentle and considerate treatment of the land that gives us life and sustains us.

Eco-kosher extends Bal taschchit to all trees and other aspects of nature, such as a prohibition against pesticides that poison the earth as they produce food. Bal taschchit concepts were written as non-binding cosiderations into the Rio Summit's declarations. This ancient spiritual law continues to influence people in subtle ways: organically grown fruits and vegetables doubled their sales in the U.S. from 1989 to 1994.

Protection of one's own body (shemirat haguf)

Within the confines of eco-kosher, this principle is used to justify not eating foods that contain harmful chemicals or other substances. This directive determines that BGH and other hormones, along with known carcinogens, are rendered treyf (unfit for consumption), as are tobacco and overdoses of alcohol. Attention is also paid to life-threatening eating disorders such as compulsive overeating, anorexia and bulimia.

Tzedakah or righteous sharing

One of the hallmarks of Jewish tradition is regular charitable work and contributions. In a vastly unequal world, "righteous sharing" takes on a new importance. In 1984, the richest one-fifth of the world's people had 59 times the income of the poorest one-fifth. It's easy to see why tzedakah is extended under eco-kosher to include a prohibition against eating meals that do not include a proportionate share to buy food for the hungry.

You can mend the cosmos by anything you do — even eating.
—Yesod ve-Shoresh ha-Avodah by Alexander Susskind

Eco-kosher has even deeper repercussions, however. In a world where protein is not distributed in an equitable fashion it is unjust to eat meat at all when the grain used to feed meat animals could directly feed larger numbers of people.

Seventy percent of U.S. grain production, says Alan Durning, goes to feed animals raised for food, and 66 percent of U.S. grain exports are consumed by meat animals.

"Food is oil," says Richard Manning.

Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1.

About 58% of US corn production is used as livestock feed, according to Michael Graboski of the Colorado Bureau of Mines, and it takes 13.8 gallons of crude oil to raise a steer to become your dinner (if you ignore the energy expended in transport of livestock to slaughter, meat processing, packaging, and final transport to markets).

According to a report by The Worldwatch Institute, the average U.S. family of four eats enough beef in a year to burn 200 gallons of petroleum.

The Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University calculates that if everyone ate a largely vegetarian diet with only minor supplementation from fish and range-fed animals, equally distributed planetary food rations would support roughly 7 billion well-fed people — and create a sigificant reduction in fossil fuel consumption.

Berakhah and Kedushah

These are the Jewish traditions related to consciously affirming a sense of holiness and blessing in life. For this reason, before and after eating those gathered for a meal stop and give thanks to Makor HaHayim (the Source of all life) for the bounty of the planet.

Eco-kosher and Money

Money consciousness is part of eco-kosher. Money reveals and conceals the interactions between humans and the earth. When we think of money as a metaphor for the bounty of our planet, it becomes a spiritual issue.

There are currently 1.3 billion people, or almost 20 percent of humanity, who live on US $1 or less a day.

These things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism... these things do not only sound like a fairy tale, they are an actual fulfillment of every — or almost every — fairy tale wish.
—Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents

In older models of economies, certain aspects of the earth are not factored in because they are considered "productive," while others are left out because they are considered "relational." These days it is more realistic to include the value of the planet in economic calculations — to assign a value to what is generally considered a nonvalued secular transaction.

Putting a value on biodiversity requires an assessment of biological resources and an estimate of changes in biodiversity in economic terms.

Charles Hall, a professor at Syracuse, calculated that every American dollar or its equivalent spent anywhere on the planet triggers a series of events that generally consume a half-liter of petroleum. A gallon of oil when burned releases 5 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. Buy a bottom-of-the-line Lexus and there's several thousand pounds of carbon lofted into the Earth's atmosphere. A $20 book equals a couple gallons of oil.

With every normal action in a consumer society we nudge the thermometer a little higher.
—Bill McKibben

GNP is now largely distrusted as a means of mirroring human "progress." Herman Daly, once employed by the World Bank but now a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, suggests that instead we should use the Genuine Progress Indicator as an indicator of what is really happening. This system incorporates environmental factors — including "depreciation of natural capital" like soil erosion — into GNP. And when that happens, economic figures change dramatically.

Based upon GPI figures, economic welfare in the U.S. is deteriorating.

The GDP has overestimated the health of [the US] economy by $7 trillion. Ironically, one of the key factors contributing to this over-counting is the expenditure that have resulted from the accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Anderson and others.

"Ecosystem services," or what the planet does to sustain life for us as well as other species, work something like economic services. According to researchers, ecosystem services could be valued around $20 trillion a year — about equal to the annual gross global production of humans.
Ecosystem services include

• Provision of clean water and air
• Pollination of crops
• Mitigation of environmental hazards
• Pest and disease control

According to the Ecosystem Services website and available scientific evidence,

• Ecosystem services are essential to civilization.
• Ecosystem services operate on such a grand scale and in such intricate and little-explored ways that most could not be replaced by technology.
• Human activities are already impairing the flow of ecosystem services on a large scale.
• If current trends continue, humanity will dramatically alter virtually all of Earth's remaining natural ecosystems within a few decades.

In 2006, the World Conservation Union warned that the world faced 'the sixth great extinction of life on earth' as mammals, amphibians, birds, insects, fish and plants were being lost at 'unprecedented rates'. One in four mammals and one in eight bird species have been labelled 'threatened'. In 2007, the Union's research shows that because of climate change, alien predators, hunting and the loss of their homelands, thousands of species currently in danger of extinction in the wild are likely to survive only in captivity.


It does not have to end like this. We can still mend our selfish ways. But all of us must do our part.

Myth: "Feng Shui is based on Shamanism"

In 1998 the Feng Shui Journal printed my two-piece article "Shaman, I Am." The research suggested that "shamanic" aspects of feng shui emerged from ancient astronomy and calendar-keeping.  I was horrified when my articles unleashed a torrent of "shamanic feng shui" marketing.

Fritz Perls commented that mental and emotional hunger is

responsible more than anything else for the excessive stupidity we find in the world.

That certainly holds true for "shamanic feng shui." Readers seized on the word shaman, which is a much more romantic (lucrative) term than "astronomer." (Being a "shaman" also requires less education than being an astronomer.)


Shaman feeds into the hunger for mental and emotional sustenance exhibited by people who prefer the New Age version of feng shui. Although feng shui isn't a "faith heritage," in American culture it doesn't take much for an idea to become a religion, thanks to people's emotional hunger.


Any gimmick will suffice:

• "Shamanic Roots of Feng Shui" by Helen and James Jay. The article, along with advertising for their book Paper Dragons: The Shamanic Roots of Feng Shui, appeared following my articles
• "Feng Shui Shamanism" classes taught by Alex Stark
• The "shamanic feng shui" of self-styled Mr. Feng Shui (Gary Hawkes)
• The article "Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui and Shamanism" by Jeffrey Ellis, a self-styled practitioner of "sacred architecture" — whatever that might mean in southern California

What is a shaman?

In the anthropology of counter-culture, primitive consciousness is epitomized by the shaman, a figure who has light and power but never pays electric bills.
— Anthropologist Marvin Harris

A shaman is more of an exotic essence, a romanticized version of Western rationalism, than a scholarly category that can stand up to any sustained interrogation.
— Nicholas Thomas & Caroline Humphrey: Shamanism, History, & the State

The word shaman comes from Tungusu-Manchurian language and describes Central Asian and North Asian religious practices. Shamans are a vital force in the religious life of hunting communities. They are ritual specialists possessed of special powers; they act as intermediaries between humans and the shadowy world of spirits and the supernatural.


Feng shui had been in use for at least 3,000 years before shamanism was invented. There's no authentic evidence of shamanic activity until what Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age, which began around 1800 BCE.

Shamanism is concerned with personal and political power

The need to dominate others is a way to handle personal insecurities and alienation. Hierarchy stabilizes the insecurity. As Morris Berman points out in Wandering God (2000), a person damaged in childhood uses prestige as a substitute for love. That person also uses shamanic healing or becomes a shamanic healer and manipulates the rest of the tribe to accept the shaman's dominance-submission system.

Ceremonialism and shamanism grow in proportion to the need to control large groups. Ritual enforces group participation in hierarchies. (This largely explains how shamanism developed, and how shamanism functioned during the rule of the Shang.)

Shamans are usually recruited by a calling much like fundamentalist Christians are "called" by Jesus. Some become shamans because it runs in the family. That suggests a genetic component.

Shamans in some cultures developed the technique of possession trance. An authentic shaman is believed to have the gift of letting his soul leave his body and ascend to higher or lower worlds. Such altered states of consciousness are defined by psychologist Barry Beyerstein as the modification of specific neural systems by repeated stimulation, disease, mental manipulation, or chemical ingestion so that self-perception and perception of the world are profoundly altered.

 The physiological component is essential for shamanism.

• The majority of traditional shamans suffer from epilepsy (though the expected trance has nothing to do with this disease)
• Other shamans were born with a caul
• Some are struck by lightning
• Some suffer from a chronic illness other than epilepsy — any handicap may suffice.

A clan recognizes an aspirant shaman only if the individual convinces that he can achieve a suitably deranged trance (after all, magic is a consensual phenomenon). The intensity of the spiritual experience may separate shamans from the rest of their community, but they are also separated from the healthy population by their disease. The handicap helps them manipulate social relationships, control of crops and luxury goods, and other elements of the group.

Shamans are considered pious frauds because their techniques consist of sleight-of-hand and similar gimmicks that hunter-gatherer cultures consider manipulative, egoistic, and antisocial.

The dead can dance

Having contact with the souls of the dead implies that the shaman is also dead. When an authentic shaman is initiated, the rituals stress

• The shaman's seclusion from the rest of society
• The wearing of funerary masks (representing the ancestors) and/or body pigments mimicking the pallor of death
• Death, dismemberment and cooking of the shaman
• Burial and rejuvenation into a new life
• Symbolic descent to the land of the dead
• Physical ordeals reminding the new shaman to forget their former life

An Inuit shaman explained to the explorer Rasmussen that true wisdom is obtainable only when humans are far from settlements and creature comforts.

Privation and suffering are the only things which can open the mind of men to those things which are hidden from others.

These aspects of shamanism do not mirror the lifestyles enjoyed and promoted by "feng shui shamans." They want the privileges of the shaman without the ordeals and isolation — that is, they "want the gain without the pain."

It is no surprise that "feng shui shamanism" was invented in America.

Yes the dead can dance, but with a few restrictions

Transvestitism was the shamanic tradition of Scythians, Siberians, Thracians, and Galloi, along with certain Anatolian tribes. Thracian goddesses Kotys and Bendis were celebrated with shamanic rites presided over by men dressed as women. It was a missionary faith from Thrace that brought the enthousiasmos — ecstatic rites — to westerners. Herodotus noted how Scythian diviners (enares) traditionally wore women's clothes. He assumed they were also eunuchs. He could assume this based on his travels.

Many shamanic cults in his day included ritual castration as part of their initiation:

• The great goddess Kombabos demanded castration of her priests so they would not be debauched or disloyal.
• The mythical hermaphrodite Agdistis castrated herself and assumed the name Cybele. In the ancient "Story of Two Brothers" the youngest, Atys, also castrated himself.
• Atys was a deified shaman later known as the premier priest of Cybele. The priests of her cult castrated themselves at the climax of her festival and were given women's clothing by the fanatici.

Cybele's eunuch priests were shamans with gifts of healing and divination. They were trained to understand dreams and to read bird flight and song as auguries. Many wandered the countryside in gowns, makeup and jewelry; they performed ecstatic dances and uttered prophecies while in trance.

It would be difficult to imagine the "feng shui shamanism" types embracing the shamanism of western heritage.

Chinese shamanic traditions

Some feng shui people market themselves as heirs to ancient traditions from a distant Chinese past, because they believe that past is shrouded in the mists of history — so it is easy for them to invent one. Documents written by the ancient Chinese prove the sham in "feng shui shamanism." 

Longshan culture (approximately 2500 BCE) developed from Yangshao culture (5000 to 3000 BCE) and both cultures used some forms of early fengshui in their ceremonial and funerary precincts. (Puchan or oracle bone making was developed by Longshan culture.) The Xia "kingdom" developed from Henan Longshan culture, and the Shang succeeded Xia around 1766 BCE.

Shang shamanism

Shang began as the name of the ancestral capital of the Shandong Longshan culture that supplanted Xia, but grew to mean the theocratic augurs who ruled a confederacy of tribes. A rudimentary form of feng shui was used to site their tombs at Anyang and Xiaotun. The Shang royal line consisted of religious specialists, the ruler (who was military leader, political leader, and head of the religion), and the clan of which he was a member.

As religious leader the king and his priestly relatives shared in the divinity of the spirits they consulted; that's how they obtained their power. Shamanism was the prerogative of the state. The rulers were the only ones who could communicate with Di ("Heaven," called Tian by the Zhou). In this era it was believed that only the kings had souls. The religious specialists of the Shang were the relatives of the ruler or his clan, and they were organized in guilds:

• The Dui group of diviners used scapulimancy, and performed numerology with reeds and stalks.
• Zhenren were diviners who interpreted scapulimantic cracks and recorded the outcomes of divinations for their masters. Jiaguwen were used by these court officials to consult ancestors of the royal family and celestial deities. The bones describe divinatory rituals and techniques used at court. Access to writing was the key to predictive power because knowledge from the past (such as histories) linked the living and the dead.
• Shi diviners were ritual impersonators of the dead.
• Wu specialists could call souls and their spirits, and travel to the four directions. They were magic healers, exorcists, prophets, fortunetellers, rainmakers, and dream interpreters; they used music and suggestive dance in their rites. The wu correspond to what westerners think of as shamans. Unfortunately, westerners mistakenly lump many types of Chinese religious specialists together and call them "shamans."

Diviners cast in lots of five and ten to account for all parts of the world and time elements; this may have helped in the development of the Five Element Theory (wuxing).

Bring the entire family!

Anyone in the court of the Shang king shared the his responsibilities for the spiritual and economic well-being of the state. Those responsibilities included the establishment of new settlements and cities. In the central part of Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang, archaeologists found burials of 852 humans (including children), 15 horses, 10 oxen, 18 sheep, 35 dogs, and a few chariots. All of these had been sacrificed to dedicate seven buildings in the heart of the city.

Shang kings regularly sacrificed "human offerings" (renshen) in their daily ceremonies honoring the ancestors, Di, the sacred mountain and river. These could be slaves, prisoners of war, and people from tribes other than the Shang that they captured in raiding parties. They sacrificed animals such as elephants, rhinos, buffalo, oxen, sheep, deer, dogs, and tigers.


When the situation demanded, anyone related to the royal family could become a sacrifice.


The most powerful sacrifices were the wu, which the "feng shui shamanism" crowd apparently have adopted as their "ancestors." The Shang prayed for rain by exposing a sacred cripple or a woman wu to the sun or by burning them alive, in part because nuwu represented metaphysical water in human form.

For funerals they buried the living: family members, pets, horses, prisoners, and slaves as "companions in eternity" or renxun. These sacrifices may have been an attempt to control and direct natural violence — but as Mark Lewis notes, they were most definitely attempts to reduce the level of stress and politics in the ruling elite.

Visiting the "spirits"

During ceremonies, Shang kings drank ritual cocktails of stalactite water called "sucking on the teats of the Celestial Bell" (the knobs on ancient bronze bells symbolize these teats). This was supposed to give the kings a long life.

The Shang "shamans" (including the king) ate and consumed mass quantities of alcohol until they went into trance (or got drunk, whichever came first). Even during the Han Dynasty it was believed that alcohol transported humans into the land of the immortals.

Descendants of the Shaanxi Longshan culture called the Zhou assumed the Mandate of Heaven and instituted widespread moral reforms that curbed the drunken "shamanic" rites and many other religious practices. The Han government also suppressed shamanism around 9 BCE through 30 BCE, and tried to stop the locals from sacrificing humans as late as 25 CE.

Daoism, fangshi, and shamanism

The aim of Daoism is to conform to the laws of nature. Ancient Daoists observed, recorded, and contemplated natural phenomena and cycles to better understand the laws humans should live by. Daoist emphasis on an understanding of human place in nature generated technology and natural science. Daoist alchemy led to the invention of gunpowder. The Daoist search for elixirs of immortality led to modern medical chemistry. But feng shui is far older than Daoism.

Early Daoists — especially those immersed in the Way of the Celestial Masters — prohibited most forms of sacrifice plus competing spirit mediums ("shamans"), forms of medicine, and forms of divination.

Feng shui was regulated by Daoists as they attempted to reserve the dispensation of these items as the prerogative of Daoist priests. During the Han era, shaman-like figures from the northeast region of Yan looked for magical techniques to achieve immortality. They practiced "methods"or "techniques" (fang). They were able to drop into trance and rely on the spirits.

Sima Qian did not see a link between fangshi and what his father called the School of Dao. He bluntly noted that fangshi claimed to transmit Zou Yan's teachings (Huang-Lao Daoism), "but were unable to understand them." When one fangshi presented his dietary and other teachings to ]Emperor Wudi, the fangshi linked his work with worship of Zhaojun, the god of the fireplace.

Toastmasters of ancient China?

Fangshi did possess varying technical skills in medicine, divination, and magic. They were known for their quick wits, storytelling talents, and oratory skills. Many performed as court jesters or stand-up comics. They were royal entertainers, wittily performing at banquets.

Fangshi techniques developed from astronomy and calendrics, the practices of earlier mediums and conjurers, and pharmaceutical and hygienic medicine. Virtually all of the fangshi people famous enough to be mentioned in dynastic histories specialized in a single area. Of course it was astrology and calendrics that most interested their patrons.

Yes and no

Prof. Kenneth DeWoskin noted that famous fangshi mastered one or more of the following texts:

• Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor (medicine)
• The "Great Plan" chapter of the Book of Documents (divination based on some early astronomy)
• "The Spring and Autumn Annals of Mr. Lu" (Lushi chunqiu) (science and history)
• Huainanzi (Huang-Lao philosophy and science)
• "Myriad Dewdrop Commentary" on the Spring and Autumn Annals (science, history)
• Commentary of Ching Fang in the Yijing (most fangshi divined using the Yijing)

Other techniques found in Han-era biographies of notable fangshi are listed below. Some of these techniques were also popular with esoteric Daoists and Buddhists.

• Artistic sexual techniques to achieve longevity
• Arts and Systems — the notorious shu-shu or occult knowledge (fangshi often downplayed their skills in this specialty because wu had a seamy reputation — most clients were women)
• Astral Influences — projections from sky readings
• Astrology — general astrology divination
• Auspices — bird calls and movements
• Bamboo Twisters — a type of puchan where the official breaks bamboo and reads the cracks
• Buddhist arts — Buddhist or Indian practices
• Calendric computation — correlations of time systems
• Celestial offices — reading the celestial bodies and their movements (astronomy) and correlating them to officials in the court (astrology)
• Celestial rulers — astronomy and correction of the calendar
• Charts and apocrypha — analysis of charts and texts
• Charts and tallies — study of symbols and tables
• Conjury — projection of images (shadow puppets)
• Computational arts — general numerological arts, especially Yijing numerology
• Crack-making — cracking of shells and bones (puchan)
• Dream divining — analysis of dream (not Freudian or New Age; illegal for anyone but the ruler)
• Esoteric arts — general fangshi arts
• Evading stems — analysis of the sexagenary cycle according to the six branches that never come into contact with any stem — one of the major interpretive techniques of Stems and Branches
• Exorcism — control and removal of demons (appropriated by Daoism)
• Fetal breathing — minimum respiration used to prolong life
• Fasting — avoidance of grain products (a trait shared with shaman-priests of Cybele) or complete avoidance of food (like ariterians)
• Graph dividing — analysis by character dissection
• Heavenly patterns — general astrological arts
• Lo River Script — analysis of the jiugong
• Longevity study — for long life, youth, and rebirth
• Magical martial — magic weaponry, skills and strategies — these experts were typically high-ranking staff of army officers
• Medicine — healing in the Yellow Emperor tradition (Huang-Lao)
• Medium healing — healing in the shamanic tradition
• Meetings and greetings — as yet no researcher has determined what techniques were involved
• Meteorognostics — meteorological divination
• Orphans and voids — analysis of the ganzhi according to the "orphans" xu and hai (11 and 12). The voids are 5 and 6, the opposite branches in a circular projection of the twelve branches. In any ten-day period, two branches are orphaned. This technique was widely used by military staff
• Pitch mastery — detection and analysis of sound
• Primal pneuma — cosmology
• Prognostication — general strategy and persuasion
• Physiognomy — face-reading
• Stalk divining — milfoil and hexagram analysis
• Six day seven division — numerological analysis of times according to Ching Fang's commentary on the Yijing. Correlated the five tones and related meteorological phenomena with ganzhi and hexagrams
• Spirit medium — spirit communication and control (appropriated by Daoism)
• Spirit way — superior integration with the cosmos
• Yellow River Charts — analysis of cryptographic diagrams
• Yin and Yang — analysis of events according to Yin Yang Theory

Notice there's no mention of feng shui. That's because feng shui predates Daoism and the fangshi. The closest relation any of the techniques have to feng shui is the calendrical computations and divination.

There is currently no direct link between the religious specialists of the Shang and any early practices of feng shui, although it was used in Neolithic China. While the Shang clan members dedicated buildings with sacrifices, it appears at this time that the building specialists were feng shui experts. In modern terms, this is like hiring architects and building contractors to construct structures after a ground-breaking ceremony. 

Another ceremony — like a modern ribbon-cutting ceremony that dedicates a building — would include sacrificing one's wife and children, relatives, servants, and pets.

Dragon Tales

In The View Over Atlantis John Michell claimed that, without techniques used by traditional feng shui practitioners, humans can't locate auspicious sites even if they spend their entire lives trying. We simply cannot find any kind of geomagnetic field using our instincts or intuition — our limited senses force us to use a geomagnetic sensing device such as a Luopan.

Carl Jung acknowledged our species' shortcomings when he wrote

Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend on the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. By using scientific instruments he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses.

John Michell argued in The View Over Atlantis that Chinese long-mei (dragon lines) and British leys are virtually the same because Chinese believe that long-mei can be found all over the world. In the 1920s when Alfred Watkins first published his concept of leys (The Old Straight Track), he envisioned them as dead-straight lines running through and emphasized by megalithic sites and prehistoric earthworks, bodies of water and other landmarks of the British skyline.

However, Watkins and later ley-hunters can't tell the difference between prehistoric changes to the landscape and the straight lines and monocentric symmetry that formed the basis of Europe's premodern landscaping style. John Edwin Wood of the Royal Archeological Institute joked that careless siting rules for leys make it possible to find them anywhere using only a big map and a long ruler.

If you believe in leys, consider the story of the railway line built by Europeans in 1876 between Wusong and Shanghai. The straight rail lines, roads, and telegraph lines cut across Chinese graves, violated natural features, and otherwise dominated the landscape much like a ley. This upset locals, who believed that sha travels in straight lines (which is why torturous roads, winding paths, walls, and sharp corners were built everywhere to confound it). The sha produced by the railway portended great natural disasters and ominously assisted the Europeans. This railway and its bad feng shui proved so unpopular that the Chinese government bought the railway, tore the line up, and dumped everything into the ocean.

Die, dragon, die!

More cultural misunderstanding exists on the subject of dragons. Eurowest cultures stress a theme of dragon-killing — epic battles such as the one between Marduk and Tiamat, St. Michael's hilltop triumph, or the many escapades of the knights of the Round Table.

Buried deep in the Eurowest psyche is the belief that dragons are the embodiment of evil and their deaths are warranted. Modern books and movies — from reissues of Beowulf to Alien — tell a story that was new 6,000 years ago.

For many the Eurowest dragon symbolizes chthonic life force and the ancient wisdom-serpent of the religion of the Goddess. Serpents and dragons combine the generative and destructive powers of earth, fire, and animal-kind (whether the animal nature of humans or other species). Dragon slaying is often equated with half-remembered psychological or military campaigns to stamp out native Neolithic cultures and earlier religions, just as the slaying of the old Spartan snake-king became a moral tale of the passage from the old Earth cult to the worship of humanized deities.

The implication in the new story is that whatever is out of conscious control constitutes what is feminine — a negative reflection on the old religious beliefs. Sometimes people still refer to an assertive woman as a dragon lady, which can be traced from Tannit or Tannittu (literally, the One of the Serpent, Lady of the Serpent) — a Canaanite term for a great goddess of the sea and waters. Anything feminine or animal became chaotic, destructive, demonic, and to be feared and mastered — thus the need to conquer particular sites for the new faith.

In Eurowest myths the natives' local and clan deities fought the invaders with megaliths and uprooted trees, but were eventually banished to their earthworks (where they jealously guard their treasures and vex humans to this day). Earlier rituals were replaced by stories of battles lost to a manly dragon-killer.

Like Cecrops, Nu Gua, and Fuxi, the losers were portrayed as giants and as humans with the bodies of snakes and fish. The conquerors also altered the cycle of religious celebrations. The original fertility cycle lasted nine years; the new religion demanded more frequent ceremonies.

According to British folklore, every May Eve a horrible scream rendered everything barren. The scream erupted during subterranean battle at the center of the island between the native dragon and a foreign intruder.

Inevitably, cyclical renewal was characterized as a final battle between dark and light, with the old ways portrayed as ways of darkness. The medieval Dragon of the Apocalypse is sometimes accompanied by a rider identified as the Whore of Babylon. Water sprite Melusine is often depicted as a dragon-fish-woman.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail poked fun at "watery tarts" inhabiting lakes and rivers and possessing the power to make kings, but raised a good point: the ladies are remnants of the old religions. Most were portrayed as half-human, their animal halves composed of creatures once sacred to the earlier deities.

Sometimes the waters of the underworld (usually presented as a dragon) were held down by a huge stone dropped by the conquering hero. This symbolism extended to the New World, for the Nahuatl word Deguatlashupee that Spanish ears heard as De Guadalupe means something like trampled stone serpent.

But not in China

Contrast the European killing spree with an eastern dragon, which is a force of right and good — and documented as such for better than 7,000 years.

Daoist dragons symbolize the search for wisdom, happiness, and immortality. The only evil dragons in Asian lore were added later by Buddhists, who were reflecting monks' run-ins with fierce mountain tribes.

On rare occasions when a Chinese dragon was "killed," a stupa or tower was built on the spot as a commemoration. These Chinese ko, all Buddhist interventions, were once believed to harbor evil spirits chained in their basements or fixed under their foundations. When excavated, quite a few ko were found to conceal sacred Buddhist texts and opals (Buddha's tears) in their foundations.

Chinese dragons also hibernate! This refers to their particular constellation, which is not visible in the winter sky. Dragons do not reappear until the second month (our February) to herald the spring. Long (dragon) in astronomical context means "rising of the moon."

So that's what they meant

At one time Huo the Fire Star (our Antares), the central star of the Dragon constellation (Canglong), reached its zenith at dusk on the summer solstice. (The written character for the constellation combines radicals for moon and dragon.) During the Han, the moon rose between the horns of the Dragon constellation just as a pearl (the moon) often accompanies dragons in Chinese art.

Long also relates to Yellow River sturgeons, which by tradition swim upstream on the third moon of the year and transform into dragons while Canglong is visible in the sky.

A difference in values

In one sense John Michell is correct: east and west both associate dragons with mountains — but there the similarities end. By tradition, Chinese are hostile to the idea of a mountain as a site of human triumph and possession because mountains manifest the cosmic spirit. Small rocks in Daoist gardens echo sacred mountains like Kunlun, but in a compressed form.

The Han conceived a passion for world-mountain incense burners, and additionally compressed the mountain to serve as the foundation stone in a building. All these symbols enact the primordial creation and serve as anchors to the center of the world.

Here we go again

Western feng shui practitioners try to convince people that a dragon-shaped mountain forms a basic theory of feng shui, but can't explain why Buddha is often shown riding a dragon — the same Buddha who forbade his disciples to use Vaastu Shastra and feng shui!

Buddha rides a dragon because hills and mountains are only interpreted as dragons. Mountains are interpreted as dragons because they serve an important function in the process of condensation and precipitation (a form of qi) — and dragons are water-loving creatures. Noted skeptic Wang Chong covered this in one of his discourses in the first century CE.

Mountain ranges also contain magnetic fields, so kanyu shia (feng shui adepts) "chase the dragon" by walking them and using a Luopan. That's how the Hong Kong dragon lines were transferred onto GIS overlays.

Sorry, only a little right

Overall, John Michell is somewhat right. We truly can't use our intuition to find auspicious sites. Chinese do believe that long-mei (as geomagnetic and astronomical features) exist elsewhere in the world. However, Michell's other ideas aren't supported by any reasonable evidence.

Interesting similarities can be found between European megaliths and Yin houses (burial sites) studied by E.J. Eitel, but the particulars haven't been studied. There's no proof that Europeans had access to feng shui before its introduction by Jesuits in the late seventeenth century.

The First Dragons of China

Dragons are fascinating emblems of the Chinese people. The association is very old, and increasingly worth a lot of money to the cities where dragon remains are uncovered by archaeologists.

Three sacrificial victims lay sprawled at the tomb's lower end. Their heads had been smashed in with blunt objects so they could join their master in the next world. The big man himself was lying north to south. He was flanked on each side by a two-meter animal design fashioned from clamshells. To his east was a tiger; a beast revered by primitives for its fierceness and power. To his west was a dragon.¹

The Yangshao-era grave at Puyang, nearly 6500 years old, illustrates the history of Chinese astronomy, especially the four mega-constellations of Dragon, Bird, Tiger, and Turtle. Puyang hints at the age of feng shui as well. The grave is a contemporary of the Yangshao village of Banpo, where houses were aligned to the asterism Yingshi (Ding) when it appeared overhead.

Officials of the Forbidden City Museum call the tall chieftain's grave at Puyang the site of the First Dragon of China.

The Yangshao dragon will soon be joined by a China Dragon Garden:

The cultural park will be studded with dragon structures — bridges, gates, pavilions, pillars and so on — and will include just about every imaginable dragon-themed attraction.²

You could dress in dragon suits and be married in a dragon temple. You could be showered with dragon-themed gifts. Or you could come here to learn more about dragons from the Dragon Research Institute (construction begins in late 2007). As the developer says, learn from the Americans: mice are "disgusting," but Americans built a multibillion-dollar industry from Mickey Mouse.

Perhaps you'd rather not suffer the death of a thousand trinket-dragons. If you would prefer one big dragon, travel about 150 km south of Puyang for the beginnings of a 10-story-tall cement dragon on the side of Mt Shizu, one of the legendary birthplaces of Huangdi.³ The unfinished business illustrates the rapid changes in China. Today Mt Shizu is an environmental park.

People question whether it is appropriate to construct an immense cement dragon in an ecologically sensitive area. The unfinished dragon-homage to Huangdi awaits an uncertain future. According to one local, Huangdi "doesn't need this tacky crap."

Will the real First Dragon please fly forward?

Right now it appears that the winner is a Xinglongwa culture site at Chahai (5712-5530 BCE), near the city of Fuxin, Liaoning province (Manchuria). In 1994, archaeologists unearthed a dragon made of cobblestones that is 19.7 meters long.^4,5,6 The early houses were arranged in a way that suggests some early aspects of feng shui were involved. They were set in straight rows,⁷ with the largest house of each row typically located in the middle. Sometimes the bigger house was in the middle of the village.

References

1. "Battle for the dragon's lair." The Standard. Saturday, May 26, 2007. "Big man" is no exaggeration: the chieftain was six feet tall. Otherwise, this lurid account has a few problems with its facts: the dragon is on the east side of the body. In the north, next to the body's feet, is an assemblage of animal bones and items meant to resemble the Dipper or Ladle (Beidou). The companions in eternity are sometimes claimed to be children or females.
2. Ibid.
3. "One of" because Huangdi's title of Youxiong (Keeper of Bears) has been associated with Hongshan cultures, and lately those in Liaoning with pig-dragon or bear-dragon jades. The late archaeologist Su Bingqi once said, "In terms of both time and location, only the Hongshan culture can be matched up with the legend of Huangdi." According to Sima Qian, Huangdi was an animal trainer: black bears, grizzly bears, foxes, panthers, lynxes, and tigers.
4. Paola Demattè. The Chinese Jade Age: Between antiquarianism and archaeology. J. of Social Archaeology. 2006; 6: 202-226.
5. Randy Anderson. Applying Anticipated Mobility to Sedentism Analysis of Pre-Hongshan Cultures in North-East China. Eras. 2004; Edition 6.
6. Guang Wen, Zhichun Jing. Chinese neolithic jade: A preliminary geoarchaeological study. Geoarchaeology. 2006; 7:3, 251-275.
7. Not unusual, as the penchant for north-aligned tombs is common in settlements as old as Majiabang.

','Dragons are fascinating emblems of the Chinese people. The association is very old, and increasingly worth a lot of money to the cities where dragon remains are uncovered by archaeologists.

Three sacrificial victims lay sprawled at the tomb's lower end. Their heads had been smashed in with blunt objects so they could join their master in the next world. The big man himself was lying north to south. He was flanked on each side by a two-meter animal design fashioned from clamshells. To his east was a tiger; a beast revered by primitives for its fierceness and power. To his west was a dragon.¹

The Yangshao-era grave at Puyang, nearly 6500 years old, illustrates the history of Chinese astronomy, especially the four mega-constellations of Dragon, Bird, Tiger, and Turtle. Puyang hints at the age of feng shui as well. The grave is a contemporary of the Yangshao village of Banpo, where houses were aligned to the asterism Yingshi (Ding) when it appeared overhead.Officials of the Forbidden City Museum call the chieftain's grave at Puyang the site of the First Dragon of China.The Yangshao dragon will soon be joined by a China Dragon Garden:

The cultural park will be studded with dragon structures — bridges, gates, pavilions, pillars and so on — and will include just about every imaginable dragon-themed attraction.²

You could dress in dragon suits and be married in a dragon temple. You could be showered with dragon-themed gifts. Or you could come here to learn more about dragons from the Dragon Research Institute (construction begins in late 2007). As the developer says, learn from the Americans: mice are "disgusting," but Americans built a multibillion-dollar industry from Mickey Mouse.Perhaps you'd rather not suffer the death of a thousand trinket-dragons. If you would prefer one big dragon, travel about 150 km south of Puyang for the beginnings of a 10-story-tall cement dragon on the side of Mt Shizu, one of the legendary birthplaces of Huangdi.³ The unfinished business illustrates the rapid changes in China. Today Mt Shizu is an environmental park. People question whether it is appropriate to construct an immense cement dragon in an ecologically sensitive area. The unfinished dragon-homage to Huangdi awaits an uncertain future.According to one local, Huangdi "doesn't need this tacky crap."

Will the real First Dragon please fly forward?

Right now it appears that the winner is a Xinglongwa culture site at Chahai (5712-5530 BCE), near the city of Fuxin, Liaoning province (Manchuria). In 1994, archaeologists unearthed a dragon made of cobblestones that is 19.7 meters long.^4,5,6 The early houses were arranged in a way that suggests some early aspects of feng shui were involved. They were set in straight rows,⁷ with the largest house of each row typically located in the middle. Sometimes the bigger house was in the middle of the village.

References

1. "Battle for the dragon's lair." The Standard. Saturday, May 26, 2007. "Big man" is no exaggeration: the chieftain was six feet tall. Otherwise, this lurid account has a few problems with its facts: the dragon is on the east side of the body. In the north, next to the body's feet, is an assemblage of animal bones and items meant to resemble the Dipper or Ladle (Beidou). The companions in eternity are sometimes claimed to be children or females.
2. Ibid.
3. "One of" because Huangdi's title of Youxiong (Keeper of Bears) has been associated with Hongshan cultures, and lately those in Liaoning with pig-dragon or bear-dragon jades. The late archaeologist Su Bingqi once said, "In terms of both time and location, only the Hongshan culture can be matched up with the legend of Huangdi." According to Sima Qian, Huangdi was an animal trainer: black bears, grizzly bears, foxes, panthers, lynxes, and tigers.
4. Paola Demattè. The Chinese Jade Age: Between antiquarianism and archaeology. J. of Social Archaeology. 2006; 6: 202-226.
5. Randy Anderson. Applying Anticipated Mobility to Sedentism Analysis of Pre-Hongshan Cultures in North-East China. Eras. 2004; Edition 6.
6. Guang Wen, Zhichun Jing. Chinese neolithic jade: A preliminary geoarchaeological study. Geoarchaeology. 2006; 7:3, 251-275.
7. Not unusual, as the penchant for north-aligned tombs is common in settlements as old as Majiabang.

Magic in the Lagoon

Decades ago I saw an aerial photograph of Mexcaltitán in a book by John Michell.¹ It wasn't so much what Michell claimed for the place (because his books are academic fiction) — it was the way the photograph made you feel. The photograph is of a lagoon with a cosmic anchor point.

One of the magical villages of Mexico, Mexcaltitán is a wonderful destination if you are a birder or nature-lover, or simply like to visit interesting places.

Some say it is the birthplace of the Méxica ("Aztecs"). Jesus Jauregui² of INAH notes that no one has undertaken serious fieldwork in the village, so the truth still awaits discovery.

That doesn't stop anyone from looking at aerial photographs and wondering about the place.
Mexcaltitán is sometimes known as the Venice of Mexico because during the rainy season the streets become canals, and people punt around town. It is a lovely way to commute — except for the mosquitoes!

One of the "avenues". Photo by Cate Bramble, all rights reserved.

Actually a better candidate for Venice was ancient Tenochtitlán because the streets were permanent canals, according Bernal Diaz de Castillo:

we saw that from every house of that great city and of all the other cities that were built in the water it was impossible to pass from house to house, except by drawbridges which were made of wood or in canoes … ³

Tenochtitlán was divided into four sectors, just like Mexcaltitán today. A central plaza, like the Great Teocalli, contains the church and museum. Mexcaltitán could be an old city. The state of Nayarit (which contains Mexcaltitán) was a nice place to live during the Neolithic.

The world is a flower with four petals in the cosmology of ancient Mexico. Tenochtitlán before the coming of the Europeans

had a huge temple at the ritual cenre of quadrants: beneath the temple was the underworld filled with the sacrificial bodies of celestial and terrestrial animals.⁴

Nobody knows whether there was an intersection in ancient Mexcaltitán that had to be fed regularly, as there was in Tenochtitlán. But foursquare is classic Neolithic thinking.⁵ The Maya bacab (jaguars) anchor the sky at each cardinal point:

• East is a red jaguar
• North is a white jaguar
• West is a black jaguar
• South is a yellow jaguar
• The center is green.

Ancient Chinese used the foursquare philosophy very early in their cosmology. Because precession shifts the cardinal points westward 30 degrees over roughly 2000 years, humans developed mythologies of worlds "dying," "drowning," and the like, and being reborn. Astronomer Nu Gua established a new calendar and cardinal directions using the sawed-off feet of a huge turtle — she reset the heaven-round, Earth-square "mandala" (tianyuan difang) for the stars of her time. Yao would do the same around 2300 BCE.⁶ This would be repeated throughout Chinese history.

It is Nu Gua's turtle that made me look again at Mexcaltitán.


This turtle recorded a lunar eclipse of 27 March 1373 BCE for King Wuding of the Shang. (You get a sense of the beginnings of Five Element Theory in Shang China: sacrifice to the cardinal directions while crack-making.)

The cosmic turtle in numeric form.

The cover of Sarah Allan's book shows one way that the cosmic turtle was interpreted, and it included a directional scheme.

Long before King Wuding, Chinese were creating the Cosmic Turtle as a schematic, like the famous jade below, that Li Xueqin links with feng shui.

Famous Neolithic jade linked by Li Xueqin to the Luopan.

Ao, the Great Turtle, had the head of a dragon, the back of a tortoise, and the tail of a qilin (which, depending on the times, might be interpreted as the tail of a giraffe, a lion, a horse, or other animal). Ao was allegedly defeated after 72 battles (72 is an astronomical number), and transformed into a dragon.

The tale of Ao explains why there is a "snake" wrapped around the body of the Mysterious Turtle (the circumpolar region or "Central Palace," the most sacred part of the Chinese sky). Ao indicates a time between the autumnal equinox and the spring equinox — the yin part of a year — for the qilin signifies the west, the turtle signifies the north, and the dragon identifies the east.

Now that we have his position in the sky we know that Ao moves with the apparent path of the sun, and he is facing south.

In astronomy at the time of the Han, only two lunar mansions or xiu — Xu and Wei — were associated with the turtle. When the other xiu came to be added to the system, Ji (which is the seventh xiu of the Green Dragon) contained the ancient Bie (River Turtle) constellation (Corona Australis). Thus Bie was tangled in the Dragon's tail.⁷

For a later age, the River Turtle was "born" as an intertwined dragon tail (a snake, which is a "little dragon") and a turtle. After all, Tengshe (alpha Lac), the "snake of heaven," mated with river turtles (Bie) and tortoises (Gui).


You may recall the old story that Fuxi discovered the Luoshu on the back of Bie, the River Turtle, who crawled out of a tributary of the Yellow River (in this case, the Celestial River or Milky Way). Ao and Bie are the same turtle, but explained for the skies of their times.

You can't tell time by the clocks (or the streets)

Without archaeological analysis, it is difficult to know whether those who originally oriented the Mexcaltitán streets did so with any precision. Google Earth is no help because the resolution is poor. You have to look at the shape of the village, look at photographs, and try to compose the city in your head. (You would have better luck knowing the original designers of Manhattanhenge.)

In the lagoon. Photo by Cate Bramble. All rights reserved.

Everywhere the ancients used sightlines: people observed where the sun or stars met a feature of the landscape (the sacbeob in some instances). Consider the precision of measurements elsewhere in Mexico. 

With the flatness of the lagoon, where would the sightlines originate on the neighboring hills? You couldn't see the hills for the vegetation, unless the landscape was very different then.


Maybe accurate solar alignment was not a concern. As some researchers have observed,⁸ once the cosmology is in place, you need only approximate conditions for people to see the world in terms of sacred geography.

Which leaves us right back where we started: a cosmic anchor point in a lagoon.

References

1. John Michell. The Earth Spirit: Its Ways, Shrines, and Mysteries. New York: Avon Books, 1975.
2. Jesus Jauregui. Mexcaltitlan-Aztlan: Un nuevo mito. Arqueologia 67.
3. Miguel Leon-Portilla (trans.). The Broken Spears. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
4. David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce: Inside the Neolithic Mind. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
5. Ibid.
6. Sun Xiaochun and Jacob Kistemaker. The Chinese Sky During the Han. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
7. Ibid.
8. James J. Aimers and Prudence M. Rice. Astronomy, Ritual, and the Interpretation of Maya "E-Group" Architectural Assemblages. Ancient Mesoamerica (2006), 17: 79-96.

"Mother Earth is really busy right now..."

Charlie Chan observed that

Insignificant molehill sometimes more important than conspicuous mountain.

Sounds great, doesn't it? What you don't see is the terrifying law of life buried deep in the philosopher-detective's remark.

Its old name is ganying, Chinese for "resonance." Malcolm X poetically called it "the chickens come home to roost." You may know it as "what goes around comes around." Its scientific nickname is the Butterfly Effect.

Years ago I was introduced to ganying-resonance by a Ray Bradbury story ("A Sound of Thunder") about a time traveler who callously squashed a creature in the Cenozoic or some other well-traveled era of Earth's past. He thought nothing of his actions until he returned to his own time and found it horrifyingly unlike the era he'd left behind.

This theme also worked for an episode of "The Simpsons" ("Time and Punishment," which was part of Season 6) where Homer craved cooked Pop-Tarts but somehow rigged his toaster to work as a time machine. Both time travelers searched frantically for the path back to the beginning of their stories, but succeeded only in making matters worse. Homer eventually settled for a Simpson family with snake tongues, because it was the least frightening of his choices.

Resonance is at work in Martin Teitel's book Rain Forest in Your Kitchen, which links the mass extinction of wilderness, animals, and peoples to our choices at the supermarket. Resonance haunts me when I shop, for I am blessed to share my life with some of Earth's most endangered rainforest birds. I must be mindful of my shopping selections so that their relatives may simply be allowed to live.

And by extension …

Clients often ask practitioners to manipulate their surroundings for greater wealth or prosperity, two terms serving as metaphors for the bounty of our planet. Accept this responsibility: when you ask a practitioner for wealth or abundance or more disposable income, you are asking someone to manipulate our beleaguered Mother on your behalf.

… each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.  -- Jared Diamond

The better sort of practitioner has been trained in ethics and knows the appropriate response to these requests. You may or may not have your request fulfilled, based on an appraisal of your ability to do the right thing (according to the practitioner's training). Get used to this idea and be glad of it. 

Mother Earth is busy enough fighting mass extinctions, global warming, and a growing gap in the ozone -- issues we should be helping her fight, rather than whining about our lack of disposable income.

On a moral or spiritual level, at some point you may discover you're not all that happy having more stuff or more travel. Trying to meet non-material needs by material means is stupid and futile. Every faith tradition that I know decries materialism.  -- Amory Lovins

Practitioners with less or no training in the ethics of this ancient craft may indeed manipulate your Mother so you get what you ask for -- a nasty little technique I call spiritual strip-mining. According to Daoist ethics, they assume responsibility for these actions. Your request comes with a hefty price tag unlikely to be reflected in the payment to your practitioner.

Two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be killed off by 2050 -- and the entire population gone from Alaska -- because of thinning sea ice from global warming in the Arctic …  -- Associated Press, 9 Sept 2007

Resonance is at work: that awful law of life that none of us can escape. Our seemingly insignificant choices are veritable chickens coming home to roost. When we manipulate Earth to gain more wealth (that is, more of Earth's bounty), we detract from Earth's ability to fight the really important fights, like the fate of the rainforests, the melting of the polar regions, the increasing acidity of the oceans.

The environmental footprint of high-fructose corn syrup is deep and wide. Look no farther than the dead zone in the Gulf [of Mexico], an area the size of New Jersey where virtually nothing will live because it has been starved of oxygen by the fertilizer runoff coming down the Mississippi from the Corn Belt. Then there is the atrazine in the water in farm country -- a nasty herbicide that, at concentrations as little as 0.1 part per billion, has been shown to turn male frogs into hermaphrodites.  -- Michael Pollan

Try instead to seek ways to live in greater harmony with Earth. Make wise choices in selecting a Feng Shui practitioner, in what you ask of that person, and in what you demand from your Mother.

Don't know much about "energy"

This article was written in the 1990s and reprinted in Manual do Autentico Feng Shui by Raul de Soroa (Editora Gente, Sao Paulo 2000).

Back to School!

An Idaho boy took the honors at his local science fair for a unique experiment. He canvassed 50 people with a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide. Accompanying the petition was a list of facts about this substance, including its incorporation in acid rain, its ability to cause burns in its gaseous state, and the fact that it is found in tumors of cancer patients.

Out of 50 people there were 43 happy to sign the petition, six who were undecided, and only one who recognized the chemical as water. (Penn and Teller repeated this stunt with hilarious results. They also had a lot of fun with feng shui.)

Feng shui's often-dubious associations with "energy" are very much in the same vein as the tale of dihydrogen monoxide. What are practitioners talking about when "Feng Shui" and "energy" are used in the same sentence?

Feng Shui derived in part from Daoist philosophy, which is primarily concerned with

• Understanding the nature of the universe.
• Harmonious integration of human activity and communities within nature and the cosmos.

Daoists who were involved with Feng Shui were the theoretical physicists of the ancient world -- part mystics and part scientists, their keen observations of and hypotheses about nature are the closest thing the ancients had to modern scientific inquiry, surpassing the Greeks by a considerable margin. Part of Daoist belief is that everything is transmutable, which sounds pretty close to the Law of Conservation (that energy can't be created or destroyed, only transformed).

Paul Halpern, a physicist at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, says it's true that energy persists forever. It's neither created nor destroyed but is converted from one form to another. It's also true that all people (and all things that are warmer than their surroundings for that matter) emit photons.Most of these photons are absorbed by air or other objects before they reach space.But Halpern adds, "these photons would not carry much information about us at all, except perhaps our temperature."

Knowing that Feng Shui has a solid basis in observation and fact should render its practitioners capable of discussing "energy" within a modern scientific framework, right?

Get real.

There are far too many discussions of Feng Shui and so-called aetheric energy, a gas supposedly pervading the universe. This concept was developed by the Greeks, who also believed that

• Celestial bodies were gigantic crystals made of a fifth incorruptible element ("quintessence")
• Women's reproductive organs wandered around their bodies ("hysteria").

The ideas of "aether" and the wandering womb were hot topics in the Middle Ages and influenced early Western scientific thought.

The Aether Bunny Lives?

"Aetheric energy" was regarded as superfluous by Einstein in his famous 1905 paper, and eventually demolished as even a remote possibility in one scientific experiment after another. Nevertheless, repeated proofs of aether's nonexistence never entirely stopped the most diehard dreamers (though these days believing in aether is like believing in the Tooth Fairy).


"The material aether does not exist," says physicist and professor Arthur Zajonc in his wonderful book Catching the Light. "It was a hypothetical fiction born of a materialistic imagination."

Then there are those Feng Shui practitioners who insist that Feng Shui deals entirely with metaphysics. They never learned about Feng Shui's scientific roots, or they don't know about the sometimes metaphysical nature of modern physics.Feng Shui isn't "beyond physics," to use the literal meaning of metaphysics. In some cases, quantum physics is far more mystical than authentic Feng Shui. Certainly Eugene Wigner's ideas about universal cosmic consciousness, Bohm's quantum potential and even the Casimir Effect offer a great deal of interesting metaphysics.

Energy was one thing to the Greeks and quite another to Daoists -- and, as it turns out, the Daoists were right. Traditional Feng Shui "energy" is the same energy you studied in school, though few practitioners appear willing or able to talk about it that way.

There's nothing aerie-faerie about energy unless we're talking theoretical physics like hyperspace theory or superstring theory (the latter-day version of Kaluza-Klein theory), which sounds like Daoist philosophy and advanced Feng Shui formulas in the language of Star Trek. "Energy" is concerned with the way molecules are arranged, whether we're talking about kinetic energy or chemical, heat, or electric energy; and work is just a transfer of energy.

As the old commercial says, "You're soaking in it."

Facts are facts, and will not disappear on account of your likes. -- Jawaharlal Nehru

Theoretical physicist Fred Alan Wolf hypothesized in The Eagle's Quest that shamans have an understanding of the universe akin to physicists'. Shamans know that the universe is one huge wave and particle dance -- that everything is vibrations, like quantum wave functions or vibrations of probability. Shamans' mental construct (paradigm) involves what is called "spirits" which is what physicists call "quantum physics." Shamans even have their version of nonlocality (Edward Lorenz' Butterfly Effect) that any scientist will immediately recognize.

However shamans are mystics, not scientists. They lack a physical and mathematical principle to explain their work.

Feng Shui, by contrast, does have physical and mathematical principles for its hypotheses. Yin Yang Theory, after all, is one of the oldest philosophical and mathematical systems on record, and continually astounds those who delve into its properties. Feng Shui relies on Yin Yang Theory and its corollary, the "Five Activities" or Five Element Theory, characterized by Professor Liu Yanchi as systems-level theory.

• Feng Shui's methodologies work like Western scientific inquiry. Practitioners observe and record, formulate mathematical models of structures, and report findings in both technical and layman's language. Any other sufficiently-skilled practitioner can access (and assess) the work — and replicating results is essential to any truly scientific system.
• A competent Feng Shui practitioner can track energy potentialities in a structure over great spans of time, if given basic reference points. The initial conditions are critical to calculations. In other words, tell a practitioner the construction date of a structure and its precise orientation, and he or she can calculate its energy potential at any point in the past or future.
• A practitioner can track bifurcation points or nodes in phase space, and offer potentialities. That is, a practitioner can take a building's mathematical model and track energy shifts based upon remodeling or other outside interventions -- such as one-, twenty- and sixty-year cycles.

It may not be couched in the same mathematical formulas and terms a physicist or complexity theorist would use, but it's definitely a scientific explanation of what goes on in a structure over time.

So what's the problem with Feng Shui practitioners' use of the term "energy"? Do we rely too heavily on fuzzy logic -- the shamans' approach?

We'd certainly gain more credibility by siding with the scientists instead of the mystics. After all, to put it bluntly, the basis of Feng Shui is environmental science, physics, and mathematics -- more the theoretical physicist's outlook than the curandero's.

Back to High School, Part 2

There are four forces at work in the universe:

• Strong nuclear force (the energy at an atomic level that fuels the stars)
• Weak nuclear force (an atomic-level force that governs certain forms of electromagnetic decay, from dental X-rays to isotopes in power plants)
• Gravity (what binds the galaxy, keeps planets in orbit, and enables them to hold an atmosphere)
• Electromagnetic force (electricity, magnetism, light -- the main force at work at a planetary level, how our planet receives most of its energy from the sun).

We know these exist because we use them and are influenced by them throughout our lives.

Electromagnetic waves are produced by rhythmic variations in electrical and magnetic fields, and vibrate in a plane at right angles to the direction of flow. Within the electromagnetic spectrum is everything we take for granted in modern life -- everything from generated electricity, television, visible and invisible light, energy that cooks food via radiant heat or microwaves, the power that gives us suntans (and sunburns), photosynthesis, photographs and air currents.

This is the "energy" used by authentic Feng Shui practitioners.

Our compasses are tuned to the planetary magnetic field, and our methodology enables us to determine other terrestrial lines of force, to use Faraday's term for fields. Yin Yang Theory gives us the primary wave theory (the ancients' version of S-matrix theory) and the Five Elements explain temporal and systems-level manifestations of electromagnetic wavelengths. Luoshu and Hetu provide us with nonary specifications for phase space/physical modeling with the various formulas. It's a beautifully integrated system.

Of Potatoes and Kim Basinger

Potential energy is stored by an object, whether living or nonliving.

A potato works for you like a battery does for an iPod. A potato contains energy that can be converted by the system capable of unlocking the energy and using its calories -- in this case, your digestive tract. Our systems can break down potatoes, etc., into usable energy, while another digestive system -- say, that of Celeste in My Stepmother Is An Alien -- may find the iPod's battery far more nutritious and satisfying.

At first glance it seems that Feng Shui's use of electromagnetic energy concerns itself with convection --after all, some practitioners talk at length about the ability of live plants to conduct qi around a room. What the plants are doing is called photosynthesis, and breathable air is a byproduct of this essential function. Without photosynthesis nothing would live on the planet. Universal qi would still exist, but planetary qi would not because it is the activity of life.

Practitioners say that plants in a house store qi, which is a reference to potential energy (remember the potato -- or, if you prefer, Celeste), but the subject once again is convection when talk turns to windows and air flow. Cold air is denser and its molecules move more slowly. Warm air's molecules move faster and carry heat around a room, moving more rapidly the hotter they get. Warm air molecules expand, rise, and occupy a larger volume; trapping denser, cooler air into a compact area. That cold spot people sometimes feel in houses is our bodies' reaction to this function of convection.

Interestingly, modern Feng Shui case studies lend credence to the ancient texts' theory that this phenomena occurs more frequently in homes determined to have a particular mathematical model and energy potential.

Winds are planet-sized convection currents set in movement by Earth's spin. Ancient sources tell us that planetary qi rides the wind.

Electromagnetism and the "Big Five"

The "Five Activities" (as the ancients generally called them) or the Five Elements, as they are generally known today, offer explanations of temporal and systems-level manifestations of electromagnetic wavelengths. Because these are our basis for remedies to homes and environments, let's look at how electromagnetism can be interpreted within Five Element Theory.

Earth

According to Hanshu and the Yijing, the Earth Element is a buffering agent -- what we'd call an insulator. Everyone knows that the Earth is used as a ground in electricity.


The Earth Element's associative color is yellow, which falls into the pure spectral range of 5770 to 5970 angstroms. If we include orange, the range jumps from 5770 to 6220 angstroms. (Remember, the lower the frequency, the longer the wavelength.)

Metal

Metals are great conductors of energy. Polished surfaces of metals make good reflective substances.

Qian (6) is the hot, white light of the heavens on a sunny day. Dui (7) is the image of sun reflecting off the surface of a placid lake, both white and metallic all at once -- an image of the synthesis of red, green and blue, the primary colors. It is evocative of the entirely of the visible spectrum for humans.

Water

At once reflective and refractive, water is also involved in evaporation and condensation. This is hinted in the Yijing by Kan, which is also the Abysmal, the great depth of the unknown.

The primary color associated with water is blue. Black, one of the other colors associated with Kan, hints that we are at the edge of our visible spectrum at night, when only the rods in our eyes function and our vision is in black and white. Or it may imply that we are in the absence of light in deep space, where there are no objects for light waves to fall upon.

Another color sometimes associated with Kan is violet, also at the end of the visible spectrum for humans. Violet has the shortest wavelengths, 3900 to 4550 angstroms.

Wood

The Wood Element was associated with the Ministry of Agriculture in ancient China -- a terrific mnemonic for vegetative life and potential energy (like the potato), photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration. Its associative color is green, and the pure spectral color falls into a range of 4920 to 5770 angstroms.

Fire

The color of the longest wavelength (6220 to 7700 angstroms) is associated with the Fire Element, which makes sense considering it is identified with noon, the sacred direction of south -- where radiant heat originates in Chinese thinking. The next color on the spectrum lower than red is infrared, which has its own associations with heat.

Fire Element is concerned with induction (heating metals), radiation (emission of light waves invisible to human eyes) and heat energy, and the combustion process (which releases energy when a chemical is burned in air).

Class Over

Feng Shui practitioners employ the Five Elements to remedy model-based or self-evident problems. Systematic approaches based upon the old texts, teachings from masters, and our modern understanding in the framework of science will make it easier for us to make the right decisions on adjustments for the good of our clients and the planet.