Cosmological bridges and comparative religion

Abstract

In this paper, I propose to undertake a brief comparative analysis between the current cosmology of the Argentine Chaco Toba people and Eastern religious traditions such as the Yoga of India. My analysis includes native drawings about the “Cosmic Tree”, and the notions of force, energy, consciousness, health and illness. In this regard, the work of Mircea Eliade bridges the gap and allows a dialogue between these two disparate cultural horizons. Both seem to share common “structural” features as well as remote historical connections. The religious and cosmological imagery of Yoga appears as useful in providing new images and metaphors to assess Toba shamanism and world view vis-a-vis the classic ethnographic literature of the area. To sum up, this intercultural exploration aims at finding structural and ontological analogies that can enrich the theoretical and empirical background of phenomena little known in the Argentine religious geography.