Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (2015) — a Short Book Review

© 2016 Peter Free

 

10 February 2016

 

 

A New Age-like, frequently blathery but workable prescription for expressive grieving

 

Martín Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust Grief and Praise is a flamboyantly flowery prescription for community support during the psychic discombobulation that constitutes “natural” grieving. The book will work exquisitely well for readers comfortable with shaman-esque ritual.

 

However, for scientifically minded and (perhaps) even just rationally inclined readers, Smell of Rain on Dust can require an active suspension of disbelief in some its major passages.

 

 

The book’s core premise is inarguably true — grieving the lost stages of life

 

As here:

 

 

[I]n every stage of a normal existence, just when we begin to feel expert and comfortable, that is exactly when the nature of life’s restless heart forces us to move completely out of that previously comfortable era into one in which we are hopelessly inexpert. In every stage, it is as if we have to learn how to live all over again. Though normal and unavoidable, often these natural life changes can be experienced as deep losses.

 

[T]hough natural, common, and anticipated, it is also just right that we should deeply express these changes as losses through grief.

 

© 2015 Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (North Atlantic Books, 2015) (at page 9) (extracts)

 

 

Much of the book is focused on healingly mourning the death of a loved one

 

Prechtel argues that volubly expressive grieving is necessary, both as praise to the departed and the energetic conveyance of that soul’s journey to its cosmic resting place.

 

This latter idea is not anthropologically and religiously uncommon. Prechtel provides two mechanistically similar spiritual perspectives.

 

Here is the first:

 

 

[T]he first thing I would do would be to feed the soul of the dead and to spiritually notify your mother’s last happy ancestor in the other world to get ready to receive her. The problem, I said, is that all of this generally involves the entire family, as it needs everyone and should be a group effort.

 

The next main thing is a fire has to be kept going gently, non-stop, without ever flagging.

 

The soul of the dead needs the people to care about them, out loud, but in such a way as to make sure their spirit doesn’t linger about. Your mother’s soul needs to start to travel to her new ‘home’ away from here. To do this the spirit needs to ‘ride’ the story of her people’s origins back to their spiritual origination place ancestrally.

 

She will get to that place of origin by someone singing or speaking the story of their origins from the beginning all night long from sundown to sunup. This is called paddling home. The sun should rise just as the story of her passing is added on to the old story.

 

© 2015 Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (North Atlantic Books, 2015) (at page 33) (extracts)

 

And the second:

 

 

The old understanding is that when a person dies, the person’s spirit needs to begin travelling away from the shores of this beautiful flowering earth across the ocean of time, without ever looking back, to arrive on the concentric shores surrounding and facing this reality we live in called the Beach of Stars, where ideally this being is met by their last happy ancestors.

 

These old ancestral spirits pull the newly dead spirit into a period of ritual initiation inside the “other world,” which lasts traditionally 400 days (or so).

 

After this time the dead person becomes officially an ancestor whose “person”ality has been gestated into a “nature” reality. As this point we among the living can see those who have gone on returning to visit us. Some come as clouds that bring life-giving rain, others as the power of roots to cure the living, or as plants that grown and bear fruit, or even giant unexpectant [sic] runs of fish and more.

 

The energy that impulses the dead person’s precious “seed heart,” i.e. their soul, their life germ, their core, over the “ocean of all time gathered” to the Beach of Stars, has to come directly from the grief expressed by the living, by those have honestly loved the dead person.

 

The dead person’s soul is kept viable and literally lives, albeit in another dimension, off the life force expressed by the living during the canoe of tears.

 

© 2015 Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (North Atlantic Books, 2015) (at pages 65-66) (extracts)

 

Prechtel provides specific, object-manipulating ways of dealing with grief.

 

Even just read about, these Shaman-like procedures have obviously appealing psychic power. Readers as scientifically minded as I, but less imaginatively empathetic, may very legitimately disagree.

 

 

These pagan descriptions presume a cosmology that is quite different than those belonging to the world’s major theistic religions

 

They are contrary also to science’s requirement for evidence-supported probabilities. The shamanistic narrowing of Prechtel’s perspective on grief weakens the book, in my estimation. I found myself having to skate through levels of apparently set-in-stone un-reason in order to distil the author’s more universally applicable messages.

 

 

One insight — the soul-damaging personal and national harm of war

 

Prechtel devotes a significant number of pages to war and its spiritual harms. If one can tolerate the sometimes obscure ways in which he presents this idea, what he says is (I think) true:

 

 

When all three kinds of ungrieved losses — the loss of his companions and people, the loss of those he has destroyed, and the loss of who he was before not being allowed to grieve when having killed — combine together, they become a collective phenomenon in a warring culture. Then you have a big problem . . . .

 

For in the instance of one war being declared “finished,” all of these ungrieved situations continue ungrieved and therefore, psychologically, the destruction of war never ends for the people. All the people and places lost are buried in a shallow mental mass grave of temporary amnesia in the collective mind. Temporarily out of sight this does nothing to metabolize the immensity of any war’s losses, and nothing to return the people back to a life without the prospect of another war always looming.

 

© 2015 Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (North Atlantic Books, 2015) (at page 95) (paragraph split)

 

Regarding his post-war metaphor for healing warriors:

 

 

Anyone who had killed an enemy would have to go through a big change before being allowed back in the village. Any man who hadn’t been with the war party, who was spiritually directed by his dreams to do so, would come out from the village and ritually adopt one of the returning men who had killed an enemy. They were considered twins.

 

The two of them would have their original names ceremonially erased and new ones assigned. After a lengthy initiation into the village society of warrior priests, administered by men who had in the past been initiates, men who had themselves also killed in the past, these two men were mystically turned into a different kind of human altogether.

 

As changed beings, they would then assume their place inside the society of warrior priests, as society of other war-changed beings in charge of doctoring all those men returning from war wounded or deranged, working to heal them until the returning soldiers were well enough from the harshness of war to once again reenter village life as farmers, husbands, parents, and civilians.

 

Anyone maimed during any man made violence whatsoever was required to be doctored by and magically cared for by these warrior society men.

 

The most astounding requirement for these same doctor-warrior-priests who had all killed in the past was that as a group they were also put in charge of taking good care of the souls of all those enemies they had personally killed, inheriting as well all those souls that had ever by ancestral villages in the past before their times!

 

Their secret ritual responsibility meant the society members were aware of the worldwide truth that anyone you attack, wound, or kill will end up eternally entangled with you. So those who had killed became healers of both killers and their victims.

 

© 2015 Martín Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (North Atlantic Books, 2015) (at page 100) (paragraph split)

 

The war healing prescription makes intuitive sense

 

Yet the cynic in me wonders whether the quasi-elite status of the Doctor-Warrior-Priests will encourage yet more war-making, so as to grant younger generations a means to join the Priests.

 

Certainly from a historical perspective, there is nothing in the record of warring tribal societies to suggest that war stamps itself out via the methods that Prechtel suggests.

 

 

The moral? — A potentially valuable book, provided that . . .

 

. . . one is mentally equipped to set aside its occasionally New Age (in tone) hand-waving.

 

Being scientifically and historically minded, I am struck with how much gullible credence is frequently granted to mental constructs taken from the distant human past — as if those are necessarily superior in content and wisdom to ones we have developed with some evidentiary effort since.

 

That said, Martín Prechtel’s psychic prescriptions seem to be on point for many people. I do have reservations about the cosmological cocoon in which he presents them. This reservation hints that the book may work for some people and not others.

 

I additionally doubt that the mystically based war recovery metaphor he suggests will do anything substantial to reduce our human tendency toward warmongering. Anti-war wisdom seems to limit itself to only a proportion of warriors that suffer through combat.

 

There is no blanket cure for the human condition. Martín Prechtel’s perspective on grieving is probably most useful to us in individual practice, with (just as he emphasizes) the active support of our families and friends.