Origins
Experiencing Archaic Crete’s
Sacred Trance Poses
Robinette Kennedy, PhD
In 1990, I read a fascinating article about yoga-like poses that people used during ancient rituals to go into trance.
At the time I read the article, a “developer” had begun illegally to bulldoze roads for a mobile home park next to the swampland in South Georgia where I had spent my summers as a child. My family had alerted various environmental agencies and filed several lawsuits, but the situation appeared hopeless.
When I read about trance poses that supposedly offered a method of receiving divine guidance, some friends and I gathered to follow the article’s instructions. While I was in the trance pose, I experienced a vision that clearly assured me that the swamp was going to remain intact. A few days later, in a series of miracles, the development was stopped, and a stranger bought the threatened land to preserve it.
A few weeks later, I flew to a workshop offered by the anthropologist profiled in the article. At the workshop, I was introduced to the visionary effects of five different trance postures. My life was forever changed.
Before I learned about trance poses, I had worked for a decade as a clinical anthropologist in private practice in Atlanta. Although blessed with rewarding, meaningful work, I felt something was missing. I was often frustrated that, according to the culture of the USA, the purpose of my work didn't include intervening in how an individual’s values and lifestyle choices support the USA’s materialism, violence and ecological destruction. And, even if such a goal were appropriate, what approach could I offer my clients?
As I began regularly experiencing trance visions through these poses, I saw how my experiences were creating greater ecological and spiritual balance in my life.
Because the existence of trance poses was unknown in modern Western consciousness until the late 1970s, how they were rediscovered is all the more remarkable. The story begins shortly after the turn of the twentieth century when Felicitas Goodman was born into a German family living in Hungary—a country where the taltos (Hungarian shaman) was still part of everyday life.
When she was 18, Felicitas and her family left Hungary and returned to Germany. Just after World War II, Felicitas married and moved to the USA. Throughout her life, ancient spiritual traditions remained her primary interest, and in the late 1960’s, after thirty years as a medical translator, Felicitas entered a Ph.D. program in psychological anthropology.
As a graduate student fluent in 17 languages, Felicitas soon was working in Mexico on a landmark mental health project that focused on the various altered states of consciousness that are common in non-Western cultures.1
While attending Pentecostal church services in a Mexican village, Felicitas noticed that after the clapping and singing began in the church, the Mayans started making unusual sounds. As a linguist, she recognized that these vocalizations didn't fit the definition of a culturally based “language.” She suspected that she was witnessing a biological phenomenon, an example of one of the altered states that her research team was hunting.
Eventually, Felicitas documented this altered state caused by listening to specific rhythms that awaken sensations in the brain. These sensations produce a mildly euphoric feeling as well as movements in the throat. The Ancient Greeks' onomatopoetic word for this altered state of consciousness is glossalalia: which means tongue “lah-lah” or speaking in tongues.
By 1972, Felicitas had become an anthropology professor at Ohio’s Denison University. Her students, having grown up during the sixties, were eager to experience the “new” altered state of consciousness described in her recently published book about speaking in tongues.2 Thus began Felicitas’ search that led to the re-discovery of trance poses.
Summering near Santa Fe, New Mexico, Felicitas frequently attended local Pueblo Indian rituals where she noticed that rhythm played a key role in producing trance like states for the Indians, as it had for the Mayans during their religious experiences.
Felicitas—who was trained as a violinist—easily memorized the beat of the dancers’ gourd rattles, which she hoped to duplicate in her next trance experiments in Ohio. Felicitas spent the next four years rattling a gourd rattle as she had heard the Pueblo Indians do, trying to duplicate for student volunteers the Mayans’ method of entering a light trance state.
During these sessions, Denison students were invited to close their eyes and sit, stand, kneel or lie on the floor in any comfortable position they chose while she rattled her gourd. Although most volunteers reported noticing slight changes in their awareness, their experiences varied widely. This was confusing and frustrating to Felicitas.
She had assumed that, since everyone’s central nervous system is physically the same, if each person is hearing the same rhythmic patterns, each person should respond similarly and experience visions as the Mayans had. Felicitas had assumed that the basis of the Mayans’ trance experiences was physical. Now she wondered if this was incorrect.
Were the Mayans’ visions not sparked by hearing the same clapping and singing rhythms, which caused changes in their brains, but due to their similar Pentecostal Christian beliefs (common to people who speak in tongues) about what happens when someone receives the Holy Spirit?
In 1976, Felicitas presented a paper about her experiments to the Ohio Academy of Science: “The trance experience itself is vacuous. If no belief system is proffered, it will remain vacuous.” She later told me that, as far as she was concerned, this was the end of the discussion.
Yet, some time later, she recalled that five years earlier she had read an article by a Canadian psychologist who had pointed out that each Eastern meditation discipline consists of a belief system, accompanied by its own specific body pose that affects breathing, heart rate and even digestive processes during meditation.3
After rereading the Canadian’s study, Felicitas realized that she hadn’t placed any student volunteers in a particular pose. Was this the missing ingredient? In what pose would she place them?
“Because I’m a natural scientist,” Felicitas explained when we met, “fortunately, it never occurred to me to try and make up a position. I assumed that if such postures had existed, I’d find them in studies of pre-agricultural, rural, non-Western cultures.” But after surveying 250 years of ethnographic research (in 17 languages!), she found no mention of the role of the position of the body in indigenous rituals.
Felicitas then turned to photographs of aboriginal art. Her eyes were arrested by a late 19th Century wooden carving, from a Pacific Northwest American Indian culture, of a tiny shaman embraced from behind by a large Bear Spirit.
To Felicitas, who had carefully watched changes in the faces of Mayans while they were speaking in tongues, the shaman’s countenance was “like that of someone in trance.”
Answers to her next question became her major contribution to the field of psychological anthropology. As she put it, “I wanted to know what was happening in the body of that shaman while a Bear Spirit was embracing him.”
In 1977, now retired from university life but still dedicated to her research interests, Felicitas gathered more volunteers and met with each one individually, so that one person’s experiences wouldn’t influence another’s.
Felicitas knew that traditional pre-agricultural societies begin their rituals by respectfully inviting their Ancestors and Spirits, so she too opened each session by offering cornmeal and sage smoke to the sacred realms. During these sessions, after demonstrating a body position found in a prehistoric religious statue, she would rattle her gourd, as she had heard the Pueblo Indians do, at approximately 200 beats per minute, for about 15 minutes-the length of time that she estimated that anyone could comfortably hold a particular pose.
Rhythm and special positions of the body was the magic combination, and volunteers’ trance experiences sprang to life. Later, using the same procedure, she arranged a group of volunteers in the position of the shaman embraced by a Bear Spirit shown in the nineteenth century American Indian carving. When Felicitas finished rattling, although none of the volunteers had previously viewed the photograph of the carving, most of them described having seen a similar “landscape.” Many volunteers said that in their visions they had encountered a bear.
In the 1980’s, Felicitas asserted that, beginning at least 30,000 years ago and lasting at least 20,000 years, visionary artists around the world (most of whom had had no geographical contact with each other) had created identical statues that preserved a technique for entering religious trance.
By the 1980’s, Felicitas began presenting to the general public the ancient method that she had reconstructed for entering ecstatic trance. She received especially wide acclaim in Hungary, Germany and Austria, where one newspaper reviewer described her work on trance postures as the equivalent of deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Felicitas and I met in 1990, when she was enjoying the recent release of her second book about trance postures.4 After I began regularly practicing the postures and completed a period of training with Felicitas and others, I started teaching the trance poses. By that time, my visionary experiences were profoundly affecting my life (during and between trances.) Still, I was vaguely uncomfortable about practicing a spiritual technique that originated in non-Western cultures. As a person of European heritage, I longed to reconnect with my culture’s indigenous trance traditions. But how?
I was familiar with the sparse numbers of figurines from Northern and Eastern Europe that Felicitas believed were trance postures. Other social scientists insisted that these were artifacts of “goddesses,” despite there being no archaeological evidence to support such a view. As far as I knew, if an intact trance-based European cultural tradition ever existed, it had vanished without a trace.
One day, my attention returned to the Greek island of Crete, where I had first lived in 1975, gathering research for my dissertation on women’s friendships in a traditional mountain village.5
In 1991, during a visit at Felicitas Goodman’s home in New Mexico, looking at her collection of photographs of trance postures, I saw the famous white marble sculptures from Neolithic Crete and nearby islands. In talking to her, I was stunned to realize that the Greek statues were identical to figurines of ritual trance poses found thousands of years later in pre-historic cultures of North America.
On various visits from 1975 to 1990, I had spent countless hours in museums on Crete, breezing past dozens of tiny bronze, marble or terra cotta statues of people, often in unusual poses. Archaeologists traditionally refer to these miniature sculptures (unearthed in tombs, sacred sites, caves and mountain sanctuaries all over the island) as “worshippers” or “votive figurines.”
My mind raced through images of other figurines I had seen in various museum displays around Greece. On my many trips to Greece since 1972, had I been surrounded by prehistoric statues of people in trance-in the mother culture of Western civilization?! I couldn’t wait for my next trip to Crete, where I could look at these ritual artifacts through my new “eyes.”
Back on the island in 1992, I recognized several trance postures common to other cultures. What I didn’t expect to find was how numerous and varied are the types of trance postures from pre-historic Crete that are found nowhere else in the world.
If the first European culture had been nourished by a trance-based tradition that spanned 6,000 years, why had the significance of this information—so blatantly preserved in tiny statues placed all over the island—been erased entirely from Western consciousness for the past 3000 years?
While I was on Crete in 1992, word spread through my network about what I was up to, and a group of Greek women friends asked me to show them how to experience their indigenous ritual practice. I felt honored to help reweave a tear in an ancient sacred fabric. I also began to grasp a larger purpose for my having spent so much time in Greece since 1972.
As I began my own research, one question was always in the back of my mind: how might experiencing trance postures from Crete change the consciousness of people whom American Indian activist Russell Means calls “mental” Europeans-people of any heritage who support the values and politics of a typical USA lifestyle?
In 1997, Felicitas Goodman and women from mainland Europe, the USA and Crete joined me on Crete for two weeks to explore that question. Of her time there, Trish Mashburn said, “I was living in several dimensions of reality at once: the daily life of the village where Robinette lives on Crete; visiting Bronze Age ritual sites where the postures were originally performed; and experiencing ancient visionary realms from the beginning of European culture.”
Recently, I’ve begun to learn about the cultural role that trance postures played in Minoan life around 4,000–3,000 years ago, when Bronze Age culture was winding down. Faced with circumstances remarkably similar to ours today, the first Europeans reached a crossroads in consciousness. The lessons of what they decided at that point is the focus of the book I’m writing.
How Do You Feel When You're in Trance?
The French actor Jeanne Moreau said, “We have so many words for states of the mind, and so few words for states of the body.”
Ecstatic trance (from ancient Greek: ecstasia) is the scientific term for this religious altered state of consciousness. The word ecstasy literally means “being out of one’s customary position.” The sensation occurs because of several pleasant physical changes affecting the brain, heart, blood pressure and endocrine system. One immediately noticeable effect is heightened sensual awareness.
Like most mental Europeans, I’ve been trained not to focus on non rational states of awareness or sensual aspects of my existence. Although I have been experiencing the effects of trance and integrating them into my everyday life since 1990, it’s still hard for me to describe the subtle sensations of trance. I like how a participant at one of my retreats described her first trance experience: “like someone was gently waking me up.”
Imagine that, as you listen to the rattle, while remaining in your ordinary, everyday awareness, you start to dream. Inside your dream, (as you may know if you’ve ever had a lucid dream), while aware that you’re already awake, you experience a heightened state of awareness and clarity.
Trance may also be described as a sensation of feeling the most awake you’ve ever been: relaxed, rested, calm, and safe. While your awareness is expanding, maintaining a paradoxical state of dual consciousness, you drift into trance and receive a vision, simultaneously remaining wide awake in your ordinary ego state and conscious of the sounds of everyday life occurring around you.
Just before the rattling ends, you sense that your vision is complete—with a beginning, middle and end, like a story. When the rattling stops, you leave the trance state on cue, feeling more alert and aware than you’ve ever felt.
Later, in silent reflection, you realize that you’ve just re-connected to your own sources of visionary guidance. You suddenly understand your life as you never have and are certain about the next steps to take on your life path.
Trance experiences affect not only your awareness. They also create changes in your body. Released during trance are brain juices called opioid peptides (from the Greek word for juice: opiois that is also the root of the word opium.)
The effects of these substances in the brain are similar to the effects of actual opium. These natural, non-toxic “juices” fill you with a sense of kindness toward all life forms and a give you a light-hearted, balanced, optimistic view of the world. You are also given the ability to see things in a new way—a sensation that usually lingers for weeks, occasionally months, and sometimes forever.
After trance, as you begin seeing things through your newly awakened vision—especially if you’ve been living a typical USA lifestyle—you may feel as if you’ve just come out of a culturally-induced “coma.”
Experiencing visionary trance also reactivates your dormant intuition, spiritual wisdom and creativity. Gradually, a new perspective begins to guide you to deeper truths about your life purpose.
As the subtle effects of visionary trance became a regular part of my life, I realized that our European culture teaches us to dull our senses so that we can concentrate on thinking. Thinking about life is different from living through our senses as an integral part of nature. Many of us have forgotten that difference, and we long to be nurtured by an embodied spiritual practice that enlivens our awe of nature, teaches us how to maintain our ties to the Spirits and Ancestors and physically re-"minds" each of us of our visionary purpose.
Current events, the prophecies of various spiritual traditions, and environmental scientists show us that this is a crucial moment in the earth’s story. By the actions or in-actions of ordinary people living in the USA during this period, the world’s future will be determined. Many of us feel an urgent need to restore balance to our own lives, to our families and to our culture. But how do we do that? Where do we begin?
I am often overwhelmed by such an absurd task. How does anyone restore balance to the most out of balance culture in history? But then I remember all the changes that I’ve seen in my life and in the lives of people I’ve met who’ve experienced the short and long-term effects of visionary trance. Because of these changes, I’m convinced that almost anyone’s consciousness is capable of being trance-formed so that their everyday lives may be realigned with their spiritual purpose.
After all, as ecologist Paul Shepherd pointed out, since humans walked out of the last Ice Age, only our minds have been tamed. The integrity of our gatherer/hunter central nervous systems remains gloriously intact, still biologically wild, and ready to be reawakened. Through the effects of reconnecting with the consciousness of trance, it may be possible that our species can rejoin the rest of nature to create a sustainable future for all earth’s creatures.
Have trance postures reappeared in the nick of time to restore spiritual and ecological sanity to mental European consciousness? This possibility gives me enormous hope, and I am gratefully devoting my energies to fulfilling this imperative.
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