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Kenosis Is A Form of Instruction/learning/wisdom Associated With Ascetic Withdrawal

Kenosis refers to ascetic practices of withdrawing from external influences to gain personal insight and wisdom. It originated from shamanistic rituals where spirits of the dead were consulted for guidance. Shamans combined magic, performance, and visual arts to influence medicine, politics, and society. Where shamanism became a formal practice, it focused on an internal spiritual framework while dropping overt spiritual references. Elements of shamanism still exist today in some cultures through practices like Voodoo that developed refined techniques from West African traditions.

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43 views1 page

Kenosis Is A Form of Instruction/learning/wisdom Associated With Ascetic Withdrawal

Kenosis refers to ascetic practices of withdrawing from external influences to gain personal insight and wisdom. It originated from shamanistic rituals where spirits of the dead were consulted for guidance. Shamans combined magic, performance, and visual arts to influence medicine, politics, and society. Where shamanism became a formal practice, it focused on an internal spiritual framework while dropping overt spiritual references. Elements of shamanism still exist today in some cultures through practices like Voodoo that developed refined techniques from West African traditions.

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KENOSIS

Kenosis is a form of instruction/learning/wisdom associated with ascetic withdrawal.


Generalizing, it can define the aim and goal of personalization of the studio process as an open
project, neither depending on external authority (although borrowing from it in eclectic and
unpredictable ways) nor resulting in demonstrations of “content” obeying the rules of “form.”

The historical roots of kenosis go back to shamanistic practices, in particular the ritual
relations with imagined spirits of the dead (“manes”) consulted at the hearth or grave — “sites
of exception” — to foretell the future or secure help and good luck. Later domesticated as the
Lares and Penates, the manes were the collective voice of the all those who had died, made
authoritative through their “insider relationship” to Hades, which literally means “the
invisible.” Every early culture developed its own procedures of spiritual consultation, and the
“divine” of household and clan divination preceded the more “secularized” consolidations of
gods with personalities. The manes remained at the level of the natural demonic — imminent
but invisible components of visible nature that controlled each plant, animal, and inanimate
object’s relation to each other and the cosmos in general. This element had to be “appeased”
in order to incorporate the substance into human life without bad side effects.

In some cultures more than others, shamanism resisted domestication; just as some peoples
resisted urbanization and settled agriculture. Their religions retained strong elements of
nature worship and spiritualism, and the expert consultants on these matters combined magic
with poetry, song, performance, and visual and costume art to create favorable conditions for
medicine, romance, politics, and trade.

Where shamanism was consolidated into a form of occult knowledge, it retained its spiritualist
topology while dropping its overt reference to ghosts. The topography was a “portable”
internal frame, able to transcend divisions of scale. The cosmos could be found inside a grain
of sand. All bodies contained minds (dæmon) but also were subject to collectivized dæmonic
direction (apophrades). In the secularization of shamanism, popular culture picked up many
elements of kenosis, but where these were consciously identified they were distorted, as in the
case of New Age romanticized spiritualism. The practices of Voudoun and Hoodoo, derived
from cultures of the West African diaspora, maintained a respectful distance from shamanism’s
knowledge base and refined techniques that are still practiced today in some form.

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