Matthew Wood Institute of Herbalism

Seven Guideposts on the Spiritual Path

The Shamanic Story in Genesis

by Matthew Wood 

It makes no sense if you take it literally; it is nothing to do with persons called Rebecca, or Esau, or Jacob. It is all within you that this drama is unfolding.

            –––– Neville Goddard 

                    A Reading of Jacob and Esau(1959)

What could shamanism and the old story of Adam and Eve have in common? Everything, as it turns out. The sagas in the book of Genesis date back three thousand and more years, drawing on a time when oral history not only preserved stories of ancestors and the origins of the world but reflected the universal primal spiritual tradition of ancient times––raw experience, rather than theologically combed over second hand experience of later writing. The universal themes and spiritual technology of shamanism are all here: the coming-to-consciousness of the animal self (Abraham and the ram), the Castaneda-like wrestling with the spirit being (Jacob and the “angel”), the wisdom of Nature (Melchizedek), spiritual obedience and spiritual freedom (Ishmael and Isaac), warriorship (Tamar) and dreaming true (Joseph). There is no virtue in “believing” in these stories; they are to be experienced—“it is all within you.”    

    These stories are “hidden in plain sight,” not behind monotheistic glosses, but in wordplays designed to be unraveled by intuitive association, or recognition of similar events in one’s own life, not by rational deduction. The method of thinking in ancient and indigenous people is different from our own: understanding this method is itself transformative. Seven Guideposts turns up layers of meaning in the words of the ancient storytellers. Understanding the knowledge, so familiar but so forgotten, touches upon another world. And yes, there are seven guideposts on the spiritual path, the seven rungs on the “shaman’s ladder”––“Jacob’s ladder.”   

    Readers of Matthew Wood’s first book Seven Herbs, Plants as Teachers (1987), will find the same themes introduced in that book developed in greater depth, drawing on thirty years of experience and expansion of spiritual vocabulary.