As muitas quedas do céu

This essay arises from some concerns triggered by the reading of two important ethnographies for the understanding of American indigenous thought: The Fall of the Sky, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, and the series of accounts of Black Elk, a shaman of the Oglala-Sioux in North America, to the poet John Neihardt and the anthropologist Joseph Epes Brown. The general objective is not to summarize or synthesize the ideas contained in these ethnographies, but to outline, through a brief study of theurgic and magical ideas derived from the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, the possibilities within the so-called “Western” or Greco-Latin tradition of formulating a theory of culture capable of dialoguing with indigenous thought and thinking about the contemplation of nature and the natural world as a symbolic, analogical and theophanic language, revealing mysteries fundamental to the multi-ontological architecture of the world. The recovery of so-called “underground” currents of Greek thought, such as the aforementioned symbolist metaphysics of Iamblichus, would be especially relevant for contemporary discussions on interculturality and its relationship with the desacralization of the natural world and the debate on the opposition or complementarity between Western thought (supposedly of Hellenic origin) regarding nature and that of peoples called “non-Western”. The investigation will lead to a discussion of the revaluation of so-called “symbolic” or “non-dualist” ways of thinking and the appreciation of their interpretative axes regarding nature as a possibility of overcoming some of the theological, philosophical, ethical and aesthetic dilemmas resulting from the process of “disenchantment of the world”, a phenomenon that could be attributed to the metaphysical dualism inaugurated by certain interpretations of Platonism and Christianity.