Feral Vision

“When you track an animal - you must become the animal. Tracking is like dancing, because your body is happy - you can feel it in the dance and then you know that the hunting will be good. When you are doing these things you are talking with God.”
- !Nqate Xqamxebe 1998, The Great Dance, A Hunter’s Story

I once had a conversation about the hunt in which I was asked, ‘what do you do to honor the animal?’. I fumbled the answer and tried to satisfy what they (a vegetarian) wanted me to say, which was that I did such-and-such ritual, and this, that, and the other thing - some magic mumbo jumbo. It quickly occurred to me afterwards how ridiculous the question was to begin with. The notion that something special needs to be done in order to honor the animal or the hunt is ludicrous, it asserts the “specialness” of spirituality. As though the spiritual were an aspect exclusive to particular times or places. The honor of the hunt is inherent in the hunt. It is inherent in the attitude of the hunter and in the very act of hunting. Honoring the animal is a matter of simply engaging in one’s contract with the animal. Any native person, anyone who is a part of their landbase, is engaged in a number of contracts with their food, their resources, in which they take what they need and they recognize and respect the sacrifice being made. There is no magic word, “special” spell, or ceremony that is done to honor the animal or the hunt. The honor is in the engaging in the natural lifeway along the guidelines of the evolved ecological contract with one’s relations. The only ceremony that is needed is the single, universal, most basic of ceremonies, which is simply the utterance or enactment of “thanksgiving”. Meister Eckhart, the German Christian mystic said that “If the only prayer you ever say in your’ entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” Thanksgiving is the most basic spiritual act. It is the founding pillar of “spiritual” life. I hesitate to even use the word “spiritual” because to even recognize its existence is almost to presume that anything is not or might not be spiritual. The basic assumption of any spiritualism is the existence of the other, and as far as animism goes that other suffuses everything. E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. The spiritual is the “invisible” analogue of all that occurs in this our primary reality, our world of primary experience. The only absence or lack of spirituality or the other is in the failure of the experiencer to recognize its existence. The sacredness of the hunt and the kill isn’t sacralized because the hunter dances around in a circle, cuts himself, or spills sand on the meat, or whatever ritual one performs, it’s because he engages in life as he was evolved to live it. He performs his evolved function. He fulfills his contract, his function. These actions are innate; they are built into the physical framework of the body, of the psyche, of the culture, and of the environment. The honor is in recognizing this, in simply saying that “this is holy” in making oneself “transparent to transcendence”, in saying “thank you”, by engaging sacred space, whether by intention or by necessity. Spiritualism, honor, sacredness isn’t something that emerges from a magical incantation or text or what ever else it is emergent from action because it is an emergent principal, it arises from the realization of an evolved function, because, as Derrick Jensen states in premise sixteen,…

Premise Sixteen:

“The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.”

Action is the incumbent principal, the primary reality, move in action and the rest will follow, which is not to say that chanting, fasting, praying, etc aren’t going to do anything or aren’t valid and useful practices but certainly they aren’t going to feed your’ village, they aren’t, as Tom Brown says, active meditations - the hunt is and the hunt will feed the village.

As !Nqate Xqamxebe says, “when you are doing these things you are talking with God”. When you are engaged in your’ ecological contract, your’ bliss, your’ function, then you are talking with God. The great dance is the realization of one’s function in action. When one is swept up in one’s bliss one is dancing. Tracking is the great dance, hunting is the great dance, the great dance is part of the human function.