Spirit(s) of Place, Part 1

J.N.B. Hewitt, 'Orenda and a Definition of Religion,' and the metaphysics of will.

I was responding to a listener comment on What the Lake Wants (thank you

Amy B

!) and realized that, in the course of being a mopey bastard, I had neglected the positive case for staying in place.

As I wrote before—here on the shores of Cayuga Lake, we live in the footprint of (something like) a titanic entity that is, perhaps, supremely pissed off at us.

However, it’s also true that we live in a place with enormous potential for thriving. They’re both part of the same reality. It’s impossible to separate one from the other. The lake could wake up in a bad mood and wipe us off the map one day; the lake is also (partly) responsible for the aliveness that animates the landscape here. That aliveness transcends both our materialist notions of ecosystems, and the built environment that we’ve imposed on them; more importantly, it will persist long after everything we’ve built has fallen into ruins. It’s something that we often take for granted, but—I think—is part of our understanding of a “good place,” whether it’s articulated or felt subconsciously.

We used to have better words for this.

It’s a frustrating case of not having the right language, and needing to clumsily borrow from more enlightened cultures in order to talk about this stuff. This inherent potency in the landscape (as I understand it) has been a fundamental concept in phasmatopian¹ cultures for a very long time. It would be dumb for me to try listing all the terms that people have used for it, in different times and places, because 1) I’m not an expert, and will probably misinterpret how the term is used academically, and 2) the “experts” who originally coined the terms, in their misguided rush to taxonomize every goddamn thing on the planet, probably misunderstood what their primary sources were saying anyway—and may have made up the word entirely.

A good example of this is the (allegedly) Haudenosaunee concept of (something like) orenda.

J.N.B. Hewitt and orenda

The term orenda comes to us from John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt (1859-1937.) Despite being saddled at birth with one of the whitest names in Christendom, Hewitt was actually part Haudenosaunee—Tuscarora and Oneida, on his mother’s side. He was orphaned young and adopted into a Tuscarora family; he grew up on the Tuscarora Reservation, on land that had once been Seneca Nation territory, in what is now western New York.

And this is exactly where terms like “native,” “indigenous,” and “traditional” break down. Hewitt was certainly “indigenous” to the land where he grew up, with some nominal access to his “traditional” culture. But despite the biographical facts of his birthplace, we have no way of knowing if he was properly educated in the cosmology his people had inhabited prior to being colonized. His tribal land had been stolen by the colonists; the reservation where he lived was, itself, built on land taken from an entirely different tribe. His foster parents, whether by choice or compulsion, seem to have been determined to assimilate. Both parents spoke fluent Tuscarora; still, young John was brought up speaking English. He didn’t learn his “native” language until he was eleven years old and conversing with his Tuscarora classmates in school. We’ll never know what else he wasn’t taught about the world his people lived in—or what was stripped away from him.

As an adult, Hewitt was raised up as an interpreter of his people’s culture. He was one of the first conscripts in the burgeoning science of anthropology: in 1880, when he was twenty-one years old, Hewitt was plucked off the rez by the Bureau of Ethnology, for the purpose of explaining to the enlightened, rational thinkers of modernity what all these primitives kept jabbering on about. His worth in the colonial system was dictated by his ability to translate “native” thinking into “modern” understanding. He spent the next fifty years using the sharp blade of academic definition to plane the rough edges off of phasmatopian cosmologies—making them slide more easily into the little boxes that modernity had built for them. He had a long and successful career as a linguist and an anthropologist. He died at seventy-eight years old, a modern man in a modern city: living in Washington D.C., a member of the Unitarian Church, married to a white woman, far from his ancestral home.

And who can blame him? It’s better to be at the right hand of the Devil than in his path.

As a professional academic—despite his cultural roots—Hewitt seems to have wholesale adopted the anthropocentric, hylotopian² perspective. This makes him an unreliable narrator when it comes to the “traditional” “indigenous” concept of orenda—which, again, was probably just a close-enough word anyway, designed to spoon-feed much larger concepts to a spiritually retarded modern audience.

This leaves one of Hewitt’s most famous works, Orenda and a Definition of Religion, absolutely chock-full of clangers like this:

From the monody of savagery to the multitoned oratorio of enlightenment, the way is truly long. To the inchoate mentation of primitive man, music held close relationship with this subsumed magic potence. To savage mind, so beastlike in its viewpoints, singing or to sing had a significance and a purpose which greatly differ from the meaning and the motive associated with it today by the average cultured person of modern civilization and enlightenment…

Behold: anthropology, in all its scientific glory.

According to Hewitt, these “savages” (his parents’ people, remember) “believed” that this “magic potence of will” was the underlying foundation of reality—“held to be the property of all things, all bodies, and by the inchoate mentation of man is regarded as the efficient cause of all phenomena, all the activities of his [sic] environment.” Unfortunately—according to Hewitt—there was no word in English for this concept. It was a lacuna in the modern, scientific understanding of the phasmatopian worldview. Hewitt helpfully furnished the Academy with the term orenda:

Now, this subsumed mystic potence has no name in the English language that adequately defines it. The term “magic,” which at first sight might suggest itself as already embodying that notion in its denotation, signifies something quite different³. Now, this subsumed magic power is called wakdⁿ, or mahópa, or xube [sic] by the Siouan, manitowi by the Algonquian, pokunt by the Shoshonean, and orenda by the Iroquoian tribes. And it is suggested that the Iroquoian name for the potence in question, orenda, be adopted to designate it. In proposing the term, it may be said in favor of its adoption that its signification, or, speaking with the logicians, its intension and extension, is better defined than that of the other terms mentioned. In further justification of the introduction of this neologism into the language, it may be said that it denotes a discrete idea, clearly defined and prolific in he tongue whence it is taken. Moreover, it precipitates, so to speak, what before has been held in solution. Orenda is of easy utterance and of simple orthography, and so is readily enunciated. So, until a better name for the mystic potence under discussion is found, let orenda be used for it.

I freely admit that I have absolutely no understanding of the cosmology that brought forth orenda. But I also find myself lacking a word for this “magic potence of will,” albeit for different reasons. I don’t want to be accused of cultural appropriation. But Hewitt, as a putative envoy for his people—as well as an academic authority—seems to have surrendered the word for the use of simpletons like me. I’ll take that as permission granted.

Moreover, I’m occupying the same land from which the word originated. So when I talk about the “subsumed magic potence” of the place where I live, orenda is part of the land—this land, here, the earth beneath me—even if it’s not part of my culture.

Orenda and will

Interestingly, we do have a word in English that seems to mean something like orenda: “will,” as in “to be willful or strong-willed.” Presumably, the reason why Hewitt didn’t put this forth as an analogue for orenda is that “will” is understood to be an internal faculty that only humans possess. Possess is an important word here: our will is something that belongs to us. It’s contained inside our bodies. We will something to happen because we have brains that can think, and bodies that can act, and language to command or describe what we want to happen. We gather our willpower from inside ourselves, through some combination of thinking and feeling. But then, from a materialist point of view, it goes nowhere, unless we physically enact it by performing an action—by speaking or moving in the physical world. This disqualifies it from being orenda, because orenda is enacted within metaphysical space first, with the consequences precipitating into the material world.

The problem, then, is not that there was no word in English that means something like orenda: it’s that the existing English world, will, has been denatured of its metaphysical qualities.

Hewitt provides a number of different examples of orenda in action. If we substitute will for orenda, we can see how it works:

A shaman is one whose will is great, powerful; a fine hunter is one whose will is fine, superior in quality; when a hunter is successful in the chase, it is said, “he baffled, thwarted the will of the quarry”; conversely, should the huntsman return unsuccessful, it is said, “they (the game) have foiled, outmatched his will”; if a person in a game of chance or skill defeats another, it is said, “he thwarted, overcame the will of his opponent”; at public games or contests of skill or endurance, or of swiftness of foot, where clan is pitted against clan, phratry against phratry, tribe against tribe, or nation against nation, the shamans—men reputed to possess powerful will—are employed for hire by the opposing parties respectively to exercise their will, to thwart or overcome that of their antagonists, thus securing victory to the patrons of the successful shamans.

Now, for English-speakers: does anything about the preceding explanations not make sense?

The word itself is not the problem. Substituting will for orenda still produces a grammatically correct paragraph. It’s only because we think will is limited to materiality that we need a different, bigger, more exotic word.

Orenda is not held in separate containers. It flows through everything. Individuals can catch hold of orenda, can shape and direct it, but its existence doesn’t depend on their expression of it; if they don’t use it, or use it poorly, it will flow somewhere else. Orenda can be directed through non-physical means to effect change in the material world. Animals have orenda, but so do gods and spirits; a skillful person can join his orenda with the orenda of those other entities—using techniques that we refer to as “magic”—to produce a compounding effect.

So why can’t will do those things?

Even today, after we’ve supposedly evolved beyond the “monody of savagery” and into the “multitoned oratorio of enlightenment,” there are still people who believe recognize that their will can be thwarted by the opposing will of inanimate objects. Christians talk freely and regularly about “God’s will,” the motive force behind all of Creation. We still have animists and occultists and parapsychologists—not out in the wilderness, but in modern society, using the Internet and everything—who still believe recognize that will is not just a human mental faculty, not entirely constrained by materiality or biology.

Even today—we still have an understanding of somebody “losing their will to live.”

Setting aside all other metaphysical considerations, that alone is significant: if will is powerful enough to sustain the biological functioning of human beings—or end a life sheerly by its absence—then it must be something very much like a “subsumed mystic potence.”

But maybe that’s not quite right.

Maybe orenda is the precursor to will: “will” is the word we use in English to describe when orenda is made manifest in a particular way.

In that sense, orenda is to will what magma is to lava. Lava and magma is the same stuff. But depending on how it emerges, we have two different words for it: when it erupts above the surface, it’s lava, but while it’s still beneath the Earth’s crust—still underneath every potential volcano—it’s magma.

Likewise, will is what we call it when a (usually human) person focuses their intention to do something in the world, but orenda is the metaphysical precursor, the “subsumed mythic potency” that allows everything to act in accordance with its nature. Humans can draw from this source; according to the Haudenosaunee (and many other phasmatopian cultures) so can everything else—animals, plants, storms, spirits, gods, everything.

If we accept that as true, just for the sake of argument—are there some places where orenda is closer to the surface of the material world, more accessible to humans? When we’re determining what makes a place “good to live,” are we somehow looking for a place that has strong orenda? Most importantly—if we, as individuals, get to the point where we need to restore our “will to live⁴,” should we try looking to our environment for the orenda to bring us back?

This feels intuitively true to me. I think we can get there by reversing the polarity in Hewitt’s interpretation of orenda and his “definition of religion.” I’ll tackle that in Part 2.

1. I’m experimenting with using “phasmatopian” in place of “indigenous” or “traditional” because those terms don’t really say anything useful about the cultures they’re pointing at. They’re entirely relative and (this tag gets badly overused but sometimes it’s deserved) colonialist: “indigenous” just means “the people who were there when we showed up.” Likewise, “traditional” means, again, “what people were doing before we made them stop.” While it might just be my own hubris—phasmatopian seems to be (for me) a more useful descriptor, since all of these cultures saw themselves as living under the jurisdiction of a complex spiritual hierarchy that interpenetrated the material world.

2. From the Greek root word hylo-: literally, “wood,” but also “matter, substance.” (The literal meaning of materia, the Latin root word, is also “wood.”) As opposed to phasmatopian, “modern civilization” would be hylotopian, “in accordance with the dominion of matter.” Which seems as good a placeholder as any for “all the dumb shit we’ve gotten up to since we stopped recognizing anything beyond our own temporal authority.”

3. Evidently, young John never had the opportunity to learn any real magic while he was growing up on the rez; otherwise, he might not have seen it as completely unrelated to orenda. A topic for a future essay.

4. As somebody who periodically suffers from something like depression, this is of particular interest to me.