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Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion. New York: Dell Publishing, 1970.

Reviewed by John Bedell

In 1890 the Indians of the American plains were in desperate straits. The buffalo were dead, their soldiers had been defeated, and they had been confined to reservations on land no one wanted. The US government promised them food, seed, and tools, but nothing was delivered. They were dying of starvation, disease, and despair. Then a prophet appeared. A Paiute man named Wovoka preached that if the Indians abandoned the drinking of liquor, did no harm to any person, and danced in a way he taught them, the world would be convulsed by a great cataclysm. The whites would disappear and the Indians would dwell in a paradise on earth. The buffalo would come back, and the dead Indians would return to life, forever. The “Ghost Dance,” as it was called, spread rapidly all across the plains, and thousands of Indians dropped everything else to dance Wovoka’s dances and await the renewal of the world.

In 1919, on the opposite side of the world, the British protectorate in New Guinea was convulsed by another religious movement, dubbed by white observers the Vailala Madness. In the local dialect it was called iki kave, “belly-don’t-know;” in pidgin, “head-he-go-round” or “all-a-same-whiskey.” Cult members were regularly overcome by violent, convulsive, movements, accompanied by eye-rolling and moaning. These motions spread rapidly across the whole district. It seems that at first their meaning was mysterious, but within a few months the ideology of a classic “cargo cult” had grown up around them. The “head-he-go-round men” taught that soon an immense steamer would arrive from the land of the ancestors loaded with axes, knives, tobacco, calico, and food; in some versions the ship was also bringing rifles that would be used to drive the white men out of New Guinea. The cult incorporated a melange of native and European elements. A cult shrine was called “The Office” (in English), traditional dancing was discouraged and the old masks burned, but on the other hand the main ritual was a funeral feast for the dead that closely followed traditional native forms.

Anthropologists used to call these new religions “crisis cults,” because they arise in times of great crisis, or “acculturation cults,” because many of them have arisen when the tribal cultures of the world were subjugated by European imperialism. Anthropologist Weston LaBarre (1911-1996) was an expert on these crisis cults, and in The Ghost Dance he used them as a way to analyze the nature of all religion. La Barre was an atheist– it is interesting to note that the Chevalier de La Barre who was famously executed for blasphemy in eighteenth-century France was a distant relation– and also a trained Freudian analyst. He thought religious belief was a kind of neurosis from which a fully sane person would be free. In The Ghost Dance religion is coldly dissected using the tools of ethnography and psychology, and it is found to be a neurotic relic of primitive civilization, out of place in the well-adjusted modern mind.

The Ghost Dance has long been one of my favorite books, and I have been trying for years to write a review. My problem has been that I find the book so fascinating that my reviews grow to crazy length, studded with page-long quotations. There is just so much in the book that I want to share. I do not love the book because I agree with everything it says. On the contrary, I find La Barre at times positively maddening. Much of his Freudian psychology now seems about as useful and relevant as Aristotelian physics. Sometimes he is appallingly smug. The book is strangely structured and contains much that I find merely distracting. What makes The Ghost Dance wonderful is the amazing breadth of La Barre’s learning, which spans worldwide anthropology, Biblical studies, literature, the Greek and Roman classics, and psychology, and also his clear focus on what religion is for. It is commonplace now to read anthropological accounts of religion which deal entirely with its social aspects. Religion, these books tell us, arose to encourage group solidarity, or some such thing. While La Barre understands that religious institutions serve many purposes, for him religion is something that operates within the mind, and its primary value is in how it makes believers feel. We do not deal only with the world outside us, but also the world inside our minds:

Man lives in two worlds, a matter-of-fact one of common public experience, the other of mysteriously “supernatural” and compelling private dream or trance. More precisely, these two “worlds” of man are really two modes of psychic experience in the individual. (42)

The secular scrutiny of religion makes the Referent quite clear; and further study also explains the fearsome hiddenness, ambivalent projection, psychological ambiguity, and the strikingly individual and thenic variety of the Mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. The Mysterium is in a sense objective, and, in fact, has been experienced; but each individual has forgotten its erstwhile nature and original location. Religion *is* what a man thinks and feels concerning this unique unknown, and what he does with his ignorance. An understanding of the phenomenon embraces also the explanation of why religious response is uniquely human. The context is the universally human nuclear family, the condition is the individual human neotony. In religion the projected parent still stands, as of yore, between us and physical reality, and is still sometimes confused with it, the divine attributes being those of creator, ancestor, law-giver, protector, feared ally, lover and friend. At the base of every religion is the familial experience, and all religions consequently contain some basic oedipal story in their myths. . . .

But the term “crisis cult” can be criticized on two grounds: is not every moment in history in some sense a “crisis”, and does not “cult” imply invidious reality judgment? The only answer to the criticism is, yes it is, and yes it does. But that is what life is like, a chronic crisis, and that is what science is, making invidious judgments about competing hypotheses or belief systems. (96)

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