Review of "Berserkers, Cannibals & Shamans" by Stone Age Herbalist
An appraisal of this diverse collection of essays.
When I was a teenager I stumbled upon a wonderful collection (not a complete one) of anthropology books at a used bookstore. I was particularly drawn to a book about the Bunyoro people in Africa precisely because I knew nothing about them. After I had purchased the book with the money I earned working cashier at a movie theatre, I was thoroughly enthralled by the stories of what Man is like apart from the industrial and post-industrial world that I had always known. I had heard of people living tribal “primitive” lives before the rise of technological modernity, of course, but it had always been the sort of trite we were all taught in school: “Before the white man came with his machines we all held hands and sung kumbaya around the fire in egalitarian harmony with each other and mama nature.” This particular piece of political propaganda is critical to how the liberal worldview operates, and so many assume that life could only have worked like this before The White Man changed the world. Since people living in harmony all day is boring, many do not ever bother to study what man was like before the advent of modernity. But as soon as you tackle that question with earnestness, one of the pillars upholding the artifice of modern liberal beliefs immediately tumbles. Modern Man in his natural state is not reducible to being a soft hippie.
The natural man does not live a Rousseau-eseque egalitarian life since tribal life is typically very hierarchical, and there is a high degree of co-operation within the tribe so Hobbes is not completely correct either, though he was closer to the truth, since savage unpredictable violence was a normal part of everyday life for the vast majority of men who have ever trod this earth, but pre-modern man often thrived in this reality and not just in spite of it. Since survival in this harsh chaotic world requires co-operation at least up to a certain point, there is still at least a small measure of spontaneous social harmony between members of a tribe without the help of a centralized monarch, so Hobbes is not completely correct. Rousseau was troubled by the formation of hierarchies, and Hobbes was troubled by the formation of social harmony, and both would be troubled to see how little the raw anthropological data bares out either of their broad sweeping claims about human nature and society. I think both would be troubled too by how fluid hierarchies and social co-operation both can be in the pre-modern times.
The book I read about the Bunyoro people had black-and-white illustrations depicting these primitive people. The flame of my imagination was lit by these images especially after hearing so many clear descriptions of how they lived. I was thoroughly gripped by a desire to live out that kind of primitive tribal life. It would be much better to live a life passionately intensified from being tinged by the ever-present danger of death than to continue this wretched bureaucratic regularity in school and in work.
But today I am not writing another anti-modernist screed, no, today I am writing about the book that brought me back to those memories: Berserkers, Cannibals, and Shamans: Essays in Dissident Anthropology by Stone Age Herbalist. You see, my dear reader, I had abandoned by interest in anthropology to study other things, especially since, in the environments I was in, the study of it was even more tainted by liberalistic madness than other fields, a concern for me since I was becoming increasingly aware of the realities of human bio-diversity (HBD). But when I found out that Stone Age Herbalist, who I was familiar with through X.com, had written a whole book about anthropology, I knew I had to return to these interests that I had shelved a long time ago. There are so many people out there producing such wonderful content on the internet, but I find my eyes get sore from staring at the screen for so long, and I have such little time to be on a screen, so I am always pleased when an interesting thinker with an online presence writes a book because that means they have organized their thoughts with enough confidence to present it as a book and the book format is more accessible to me. I also think we should not discount the notion that it may be more accessible to posterity as well: I suspect the diabolical oligarchs who have power in this anemic age may think it in their best interest to shut most of the internet down, so unless you ought to have physical copies of books and keep them in good condition, as well as download files onto flash drives.
A rich intellectual life involves returning to topics and entire fields of studies that you had long ago shelved every once in a while. Your intellect needs to be renewed by thinking about something other than your primary interest, which for me is in that intersection of philosophy, mysticism, and religion especially as it relates to the European peoples and the crisis of modernity. So while the anthropological, archaeological, and archaeogenetic focus of this book is not necessarily familiar ground for me, it was a wonderful journey into the macabre, the sublime, the odd, and the mysterious.
The first essay in the collection sets the tone for the rest of the book: “Human Sacrifice in the Modern World” examines the plain fact that human sacrifice, typically considered a savage superstition left behind by modern progress, is continued even from the recesses of the past directly into the modern world, even manifesting in places as modern as the contemporary UK because of African immigrant communities that are allowed to run amok by the anarcho-tyrannical and pseudo-matriarchal government of that once powerful but still beautiful land. The interruption of modernity’s rational processes by the abrupt manifestation of a primeval madness that modernity could never take into account or control even with all of its rigorous analysis and bureaucratic reach - this is what interests me.
The book continues stories that are sure to surprise you and fascinate you. Stand-outs include a scientific essay on the powerful rage of The Berserkers of Nordic yore, which ought to inform all speculation by contemporary Pagan practitioners on the nature of The Berserkers. Also included is the most accessible presentation on vitalistic philosophies I have yet encountered (Archetypes of Power: Anarcho-Fascism, Monarchism, and Primitivism) and I think that essay is a wonderful starting point for someone who has just started to think about the notion of a radically un-liberal vitalistic worldview.
You can already tell there is a fantastic range of topics in this essay. It’s got essays on the nigh-impenetrable (or completely penetrable, if wokeist liberals get their way) fog surrounding Australia’s pre-colonial past to Mozart’s shamanistic musical genius. But the two real standouts, for me at least, are “Cannibalism with Chinese Characteristics” and “The Metaphysics of Aztec Violence” which are sure to fascinate and disturb. The Chinese are known for their sophisticated love of order, but there is a dark side to their character that reaches all the way to the most subterranean depths of the human spirit. Perhaps no people have as much of a range of spirit as The Chinese who can reach high into the heights of tranquil moral order and low into outrageous wanton cruelty, even at the same time. I found the essay on The Aztecs to be a veritable fertile river-bank of ideas begging to be connected to other spiritual traditions in the Perennialist manner. In fact, I will soon (God willing!) be uploading an essay that is a preliminary look at precisely this question, how the Aztec religion is as much a component of The Sophia Perennis as Taoism, Hinduism, Christianity, or indeed any other Tradition.
There was only one small problem I had with this book, and this is not nearly enough to damper my enthusiasm for this compilation, which is that some of the essays are not really designed to be read in a book format. The author warns us in the beginning that the pictures can’t be put into a book format, because of the ways of Amazon and whatnot, but there are some essays in the collection that clearly refer to tables of glyphs or images that I can’t see. In my view, this somewhat defeats the purpose of even including these essays in the book at all. I think those essays whose theses or ideas were best presented with images ought to have just been left out of the book altogether rather than included in.
My brain was a afire with many ideas as I read this book. We are really building a new kind of intellectual culture here on the internet that is free from the sterile shackles of contemporary Academia. For a certain type of focused man with an independent mind, I think there has never been a greater time for intellectual freedom, even with all the censorship that happens now. This on its own is hardly enough to justify our way of life in this wretched Kali Yuga, but this goes to show that The Gods always give merciful consolations to mortal men in spite of everything.
"Berserkers, Cannibals & Shamans" by Stone Age Herbalist is a thoroughly delightful intellectual romp that comes highly recommended by me. Any truth-seeker who feels impelled to look under every stone and behind every blade of grass for some morsel of truth in this world of illusion is sure to enjoy themselves. I would hope that all of my readers are of that boundlessly curious sort. You can purchase this book on Amazon. Also, all of the essays in this book are available on Stone Age Herbalist’s substack.
Thanks for reading. If you’d like, check out some of my other book reviews:
“The Inspired Wisdom of Lalla Yogeshwari”
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