Avram’s Shamanic Voyages -We Can Trance If We Want To
Thumbnail art: “Shaman Star” by Raymundo de al Rosa
Last week, I shared that Noah, as he is portrayed in the non-canonical Book of Jubilees, may provide the emerging Jewish psychedelic community with a mythic model for using plants as medicine, but on a deeper level, to inspire a greater investigation of the nature of healing from a Jewish perspective. There are other early writings which attempt to expound on the knowledge Noah received from a divine source, which I will share another time.
What other models of Jewish psychedelic experience can we turn to within our sacred literature? In these very early stages of a Jewish psychedelic collective awakening, there is somewhat of a popular fixation on identifying certain Biblical passages as having some kind of Israelite Jewish entheogenic resonance. The Garden of Eden, the Burning Bush, the manna eaten by the Israelites in the desert, the various herbal ingredients used in Temple worship by the high priest. It tracks in some way–many of these sacred stories have a theophany in proximity to consumed plant matter. While I follow the shitah of Dr. Rick Strassman that these conclusions are neither necessary nor sufficient to make positive assertions from the text of Hebrew Bible or the extant archaeological record*, they are part of a wider body of narratives which express a primary religious experience of our ancestors in great and varied detail–the shamanic trance.
In his excellent book, Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah, scholar Jonathan Garb goes into great detail about the theoretical issues with defining and using the terms “shaman” or “shamanic” outside of specific contexts, and opts to maintain its use to refer to a transformative process in pursuit of revitalization and empowerment. This phenomenon describes humans who move beyond the “normal experience of the world taken, for granted within their social and cultural context, precisely in order to view these very contexts from the outside, operate on them, and rebalance them” (p. 22). Often, this rebalancing occurs as a result of inhabiting a trance state, achieved through natural or learned capacity and diverse ritual practices which may also include psychoactive plant medicine. These trances “can be described as the deconstruction of ordinary perception as the habitus of quotidian interactional patterns and customary organization of time, all in order to empower the subject to experience the accustomed life-world in a more vital manner.” In other words, new knowledge or healing of a person or community comes through the subject of the trance attaining power which lies beyond human notions of time, space, and place.
Enter Avram, the first Biblical figure to venture within two unique shamanic trance states at the beginning of his journey as the mythic father of the nation of Israel. Avraham’s Divine election as the progenitor of a new civilization is an interesting choice given his formerly-Chaldean landlessness and nonagenarian lineage-lessness. While later traditions try to identify qualities or actions to make him the supreme candidate for such a task, perhaps, given the shamanic reframe stated above, it is Avram’s physical and geographic vulnerability which allow God to demonstrate the possibility for the Jewish people to reverse any perceived finality of consensus reality:
Some time later, the word of YHVH came to Avram in a vision:
“Fear not, Abram,
I am a shield to you;
Your reward shall be very great.”
Avram’s first shamanic vision begins Genesis 15. The text announces that, while God has spoken to Avram several times since their initial encounter, this exchange will occur within Avram entering into a unique kind of consciousness. Different from the narrative structure which precedes dialogue that we have seen since the beginning of Genesis, human or Divine–“And X said to Y…”--verse 1 begins “The word of Adonai came to Avram in a vision,” announcing a direct transmission of prophetic or shamanic knowledge that occurs beyond speech. While several prophecies are announced throughout the Hebrew Bible with this phrase, only Avram receives them ba’mahazeh–“in a vision.” Strikingly, within the movement of transitioning to an inner space of vision and the content of a prophetic message of Divine protection, Avram finally speaks back to God for the very first time. Not with a prayer of gratitude or a confirmation of his mission, but with a question of disbelief:
But Avram said, “O YHVH Supernal, what can You give me, seeing that I shall die childless, and the one in charge of my household is Dammesek Eliezer!” Avram said further, “Since You have granted me no offspring, my steward will be my heir.”
Perhaps it is only in this inner visionary setting that Avram can finally articulate his misgivings about the earthly limits which prevent the Divine promise to take hold: without progeny, any material reward or blessing from God will ultimately be inherited by his majordomo, ultimately a futile act:
The word of YHVH came to him in reply, “That one shall not be your heir; none but your very own issue shall be your heir.” [And then] took him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them”—continuing, “So shall your offspring be.”
The reiteration of the promise of genetic offspring is again stated as a prophetic transmission, this time, however, with a shift in “imaginal geography”, moving from “inside” to “outside.” The transition in space, into darkness, is met with an adjuration to witness the endless mass of universal potential as a kind of visible cue to what God is able to do, regardless of the limits of the human imagination.
This spatial shift is intensified in the post-Biblical literature, heightening Avram’s visionary transition to go outside as leaving the earthly realm itself. In Bereshit Rabbah 44:12, “Rabbi Yehuda said in the name of Rabbi Yoḥanan: He took him up above the dome of the heavens,” meaning that Avram didn’t merely step outside and look at the stars as he commonly would, but exiting human reality and witnessing it from above, expanding his knowledge of what is and what is possible. In an earlier apocryphal text, The Apocalypse of Abraham, Avram is guided to Heaven by angel Ya’oel, and taught a celestial song in order to enter into this visionary realm. Angelic songs of praise, described in other prophetic books of the Bible and later Heikhalot texts, are reserved for angelic praise of the Cosmic Majety–but here, Avram is empowered to view not only the vast universe, but the entire world-picture:
And I saw beneath the surfaces of the feet, and I saw beneath the sixth heavens and what was therein, and then the earth and its fruits, and what moved upon it and its animate beings; and the power of its men, and the ungodliness of their souls, and their righteous deeds [and the beginnings of their works], and the lower regions and the perdition therein, the Abyss and its torments. I saw there the sea and its islands, and its monsters and its fishes, and Leviathan and his dominion, and his camping-ground, and his caves, and the world which lay upon him, and his movements, and the destructions of the world on his account. I saw there streams and the rising of their waters, and their windings. And I saw there the Garden of Eden and its fruits, the source of the stream issuing from it, and its trees and their bloom, and those who behaved righteously. And I saw therein their foods and blessedness. And I saw there a great multitude—men and women and children [half of them on the right side of the picture] and half of them on the left side of the picture.
In this fascinating text, Abraham’s ecstatic trance allows him to see the entire Jewish cosmology, what came before and what will come after him, the nature of good and evil, and its ultimate destruction in the messianic period. The text is not concerned with what Abraham will do with this vision and the knowledge and empowerment he has received through it, but we may guess that like Jubilees’ description of Noah imparting his Divinely-instructed pharmacological knowledge to his descendants, Abraham could have shared taught these methods of empowerment and transformation to his wives, his children, and souls he gathered along the way.
After this night vision which ultimately culminates with Avram receiving “trust in YHVH,” Genesis 15:7 continues with another encounter between Avram and God, although it is unclear if it immediately precedes what has come before it or some time passes. As with Genesis 15:1-2, God’s introductory promise to Avram, now regarding possessing the land of Canaan, is met again with vexation:
Then [God] said to him, “I am GOD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to assign this land to you as an inheritance.”
And he said, “O YHVH Supernal, how shall I know that I am to inherit it?”
As with the potential for offspring, the promise of inheriting the land has been made many times before, yet Avram still does not understand ba’meh eh’dah–by what means shall he know for himself that this foreign land will truly come into his possession? Before transmitting this knowledge, God asks Avram to prepare the setting for its disclosure through a ritual act that has been demonstrated several times over to share similar forms with the covenantal oaths and treaties found in other ancient Near Eastern cultures:
Came the reply, “Bring Me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young bird.” He brought all these and clove them in two, and each set their part opposite of the other; but he did not cleave the bird. Carrion birds came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away.
In the 8th Century BCE, King Ashurnirari V of Assyria had a treaty with his vassal Mati’ilu written up: This spring lamb has been brought from its fold not for sacrifice, it has been brought to sanction the treaty between Ashurnirari and Mati’ilu. If Mati’ilu sins against (this) treaty made under oath by the gods, then, just as this spring lamb, brought from its fold, will not return to its fold, Mati’ilu will not return to his country, and not behold his country again. This head is not the head of a lamb, it is the head of Mati’ilu, it is the head of his sons, his officials, and the people of his land. If Mati’ilu sins against this treaty, so may, just as the head of this spring lamb is torn off, the head of Mati’ilu be torn off.
Whether there is a bold or dotted line to draw from these parallels to our text in Genesis, the implication of the reversal of the motif with regard to Avram could be shocking–God, the more powerful party, will make a covenantal promise to Avram. If it is not fulfilled, will Divinity be as rent as these animals before them?
As the sun is setting, standing in between life and death, the conditions of this promise, Abram is once again brought into another state of consciousness before receiving the second Divine disclosure:
As the sun was about to set, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a great dark dread descended upon him.
This tardeimah–falling unconscious–is most often Divinely induced, and like the mahazeh from Avram’s previous shamanic voyage, can be a visionary state, as it is used in Isaiah 29:10 and Job 4:13. The directional quality of tardeimah, indicating descent is significant here, and amplified by both the sun going down, as well as the trepidation that “falls upon'' Avram. The vision to be shown here is not like the symbolic vaunt of heaven, but in knowing the terrible, albeit temporary, fate of the very descendants Avram was told he would not be able to enumerate. Without more to work with textually, and without the desire to import other cultural forms, there does seem to be a waft of a visionary descent to witness the terror of Egyptian enslavement for the sake of redeeming them, much like the shamanic motif of soul retrieval.
With the promises made–descent and ascent of the people, Avram dying well, and the land secured, the oath ritual is completed or sealed in the darkness of night with the appearance of fire dancing between the cloven animals and within a mysterious smoking oven. In the Apocalypse of Abraham, this mysterious image transforms into a full-on vision of the burning Throne of Heaven, a cacophonous mash-up and widening of Isaish’s vision of the angelic chorus and Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot. Through the flames, God discloses the purpose of allowing evil to persist as the ultimate catalyst at the end of history. Perhaps it is with this knowledge that, when reabsorbed back into ordinary consciousness Abram can teach his family a secret of Jewish survival–through enslavement, exile, persecution, and one traumatic event after another–with through embodied knowledge of the purpose of suffering, they may still patiently trust in the Divine without fully abandoning their end of the covenant, either.
At times when trance states were more natural and available to Jewish people throughout their outer geographies, perhaps these and other visions were inspirational or aspirational vectors for their own journeys of inner space. As Jews begin to reclaim this territory, through the use of psychoactive substances, breathwork, shamanic visioning, and other modalities, let us return to the fundamental intention of exiting our current predicaments, where they be personal, communal, or planetary, to see them in bold and unexpected ways, in order to return and rectify what we can, with many more visions of what is possible for our world.
Shabbat shalom.
