Walt Whitman is widely known as the father of American poetry, a radical abolitionist, sexual liberator, poet of the common people and democracy, and he has a remarkably positive perception of a strong creative global religion, which he called Spiritual Democracy. Many today probably share his criticisms of conventional religion and are seeking positive alternatives. Whitman’s shamanistic vision is an experiential contrast to the world’s major religions. This contribution is important, because it anticipates modernity. Whitman viewed his visions of democracy as equal to, not greater than, anyone else’s, since equality for him forms the basis of the religious democracy that he has faith in and hopes will help to develop the spirituality of the future. Whitman’s visions of Spiritual Democracy include therefore all religions. One of the ways he accomplished this was through his access to shamanism, which is deeply archaic, thus deep in the collective soul, and powerful. At the age of ten, Whitman had an opportunity to listen to the Quaker spiritualist Elias Hicks give a sermon with his parents, and I think this was the first time he was transported by the ecstasy that came upon him while listening to this preacher, who happens to have been half Native American, half Black. So there was this cross-cultural influence, you see, through an earth-based wisdom tradition, coming through Elias Hicks that deeply spoke to him and carried him shamanistically forward; he also saw Native Americans on his home base on Paumanok, the Indian name for Long Island, where he grew up as a boy.

As a poet-shaman, Whitman put forth his own personal vision of religion and his aim, as we shall see, is to lead readers to experience the soulful roots of all poems, by stopping to read him: “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems” (Whitman 1992, p. 189). The origin of all poems as the starting point of world religion is ultimately what he teaches. In Section 43 of “Song of Myself,” Whitman sings:

I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,

My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,

Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern, /…

Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt / ….

beating the serpent-skin drum,

Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly

that he is divine. (Whitman 1992, pp. 236–237)

The “origin of all poems” is found in shamanism, and Whitman beats his serpent-skin drum for Spiritual Democracy here, where the “greatest of faiths and the least of faiths” are each placed on an equivalent level together, side by side. This is Whitman speaking at the inception of American poetry and as a poet-shaman. The drum is his driving instrument that sets his rhythm, like the rhythms of the sea, the breath, and the human heart.

Whitman never sought to destroy institutions. He sought to open readers up to the sound of the drum, to heal us from our industrialized disconnection from the Cosmos and Nature, Earth and Sky. The new religious attitude that can help heal our Global Village is what he offers; he calls it Spiritual Democracy:

I say to you that all forms of religion, without excepting one, any age, any land, are but mediums, temporary yet necessary, fitted to the lower mass-ranges of perception of the race—part of the infant school—and that the developed soul passes through one or all of them, to the clear homogeneous atmosphere above them—There all meet—previous distinctions are lost—Jew meets Hindu, and Persian Greek and Asiatic and European and American are joined—and any one religion is just as good as another. (Whitman 1984, p. 2089)

We may not know what the new religion is, but Whitman says we are each building on it, in our own ways. We each have a part to play. When he calls the religions “infant schools,” however, we have to ask: what is he getting at here? As we have seen, Whitman is attempting to enclose “ancient and modern” to make the world more democratic. Like Emerson before him, Whitman provides a method for achieving transcendence, regardless of one’s religion, whether Deist, theist, or atheist. This method is widely known today as American free verse, which he helped create. Through poetry creation, Whitman brought religion down to the physical domain of sex and the body for cosmopolitan society. And not only did Whitman divinize the body as the temple God dwells in, he embraced it, in “all ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes” (Whitman 1992, p. 318).

The cross-cultural objectivity Whitman achieves is what makes him so shamanistic. This spiritually crowned athlete’s trance – striding towards transcendence – is rooted in shamanism. Whitman never sought to replace the world religions with a new foundational ontological vision for society. He sought rather to jolt the churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples of the world with his own athletic spirit, to electrify them with living energy of the Bi-erotic soul and body he stood for, the scented herbage of his breast, his tongue, and his breath. He sought to broaden our views of philosophers, theologians, and priests of the world, to open us all to the wisdom body. As a shamanic seer, visionary, and healer of the human tribe, Whitman arrives at the origin of all poems and therefore all religions; beating his serpent-skin drum, he serves as transport to broad vistas of spiritual seeing. “Why has it been taught that there is only one Supreme?” he asks. “I say that there are and must be myriads of Supremes” (Whitman 1984, p. 2043).

Whitman’s theology is not theistic; it is shamanistic in its instinctive (downward) and spiritual (upward) Ground/Sky. Shamanism is for him the divinizing factor in man. Whitman puts it this way: “There is nothing in the universe more divine than man. All gathers to the worship of man” (Whitman 1984, p. 2043). Not God, but man, is his final Spinal thought on the subject of religion:

The whole scene shifts.—The relative positions change.—Man comes forward, inherent, superb.—the soul, the judge, the common average man advances,—ascends to place.—God disappears.—The whole idea of God, as hitherto, for reasons, presented in the religions of the world, for the thousands of past years, or rather the scores of thousands of past years fifteen or twenty thousand past years of lands disappears—. (Whitman 1984, p. 2097)

While this may appear to contradict my earlier idea that his intention was not to replace religious traditions, here he means to supersede all creeds with a new revelation of his own that is based on science. Whitman does not attempt to achieve an upward ascension of the soul and hover above the body in Bliss alone; he sinks down into the bodily regions of soul, where body and soul cannot be distinguished: where soul is the body and body is the soul, and he speaks out of this oneness of the soul’s body—out of the language of the body which is the soul language. Listen:

The smoke of my own breath,

Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread,

crotch and vine,

My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the

Passing of blood and air through my lungs,

…………………………………………

The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from

bed and meeting the sun. (Whitman 1992, p. 189)

This is Whitman’s greatest teaching as a man in whom the Bi-erotic imagination is fully integrated, in whom spirituality is not divorced from sexuality, nor sexuality from spirituality, nor religion from athletics; for in “Song of Myself,” body, soul, and spirit are integrated as one. This oneness of a dynamic spiritual force thrusting evolution of the human species forward towards increasing consciousness, or superconsciousness, is Whitman’s greatest achievement.

And not only humans have a soul, in Whitman’s view. More, in “Song of the Redwood Tree,” Whitman chants: “I swear I think now that everything without exception has an eternal soul! / The trees have, rooted in the ground! the weed of the sea have! the animals!” (Whitman 1992, p. 557) Whitman writes further:

After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist,

the geologist, ethnologist,

Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,

The true son of God shall come singing his songs. (Whitman 1992, p. 534)

Whitman’s contributions to world religion and modern psychology are spiritually relativistic. His vision is an outgrowth of shamanism; yet it cannot be limited to shamanism or any established religion, for it is essentially contemporary, democratic, post-scientific, and new. He provides for us a living bridge between East and West. “Joyous,” he says “we too launch out on trackless seas, / Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy we sail, … / Ah more than any priest O soul we too believe in God, … / Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee, / I and my soul to range in range of thee” (Whitman 1992, p. 537).

Whitman’s extension of shamanism is not a “new” religion, in the formal sense of the word. It’s a method of ecstasy and visioning which may lead to an eclaircissement of the way we suppose religion might evolve in the future. By wedding traditional world religious with the nontraditional vision of a feminine Deity, Santa Spirita, Whitman intuited a Masculine-Feminine Divinity as our “base and finale too for all metaphysics” (Whitman 1992, p. 275), “One common indivisible destiny for All” (Whitman 1992, p. 348). This is the final meaning of his term for his religion: “Spiritual Democracy.”

See Also