06/29/2026
« With the help of his local guide, the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres is studying the most remote tribes along the tributaries of the Amazon. The two of them are making a boat trip downstream and back. The river divides tribes which are actively at war with each other. Some of them have never seen other people.
On the way back, Clastres and his guide make a stop and are hosted by one of the riverside tribes. From another tribe they’ve brought a batch of a sacred root which has psychotropic effects and is used in local rituals. Rejoicing at this encounter, the tribe decides to arrange a festival. Another tribe, fully armed, comes from out of the depths of the jungle to join. After a whole day of ceremonies, scenes, and rituals, after sunset and by firelight, the men of the two tribes consume the root and arrange a ritual dance with their spears, bows, and knives.
Somewhere off to the side, Pierre Clastres is sitting and watching. This is in the 1960s. There are no satellite phones, no telegraph, and no roads. For hundreds of kilometers in every direction, there is only jungle and warring tribes. There is frankly nowhere to run, and in this very moment Clastres is absolutely cut off, excluded from, and lost to his own civilization. No one in the world even knows where he is and whether he is alive. He is in the midst of an archaic ritual, an ecstatic dance of warriors, which has been performed for thousands of years on these shores under the oversight of local spirits.
An absolutely modern person has come into contact with the bare nerve of authentic life and under the most direct threat of death. It is difficult to imagine the existential rapture and horror that Pierre experienced that night. This scene from his book The Archaeology of Violence is one of the strongest images and contrasts in anthropology.
In relation to our own tradition, we should be not only our own “Pierre Clastres,” but also boldly tear off our shirts, sink our teeth into the root of the spirits, and throw ourselves into the barbaric dance of spears to the music of blades. So that the river’s water might wash away the “traces of modern man” from the shores of our consciousness. »
— Askr Svarte, What the Gods Have Left (PRAV Publishing, 2024).