"ELEMENTS OF SHAMANISM" by Nevill Drury

The fox I am chasing is the design of experiences (called liturgies) that will allow people to confirm or challenge deeply held premises about the world. This is a matter of consciousness and so we come to the stinking holes where the shamans live. It is not the shamans themselves who stink -- it is the debris decaying around the mouth of their caves, much of it brought to the shaman in homage as well as bribery for their own purposes.

I’m going to devote this post to a book review: “The Elements of Shamanism,” 1989, by Nevill Drury, an Australian writer and self-publisher. It’s a true “pocket” book, 5” by 7.5”, 102 pages of text, with everything in the “resources” section at American addresses. It’s a quick inventory of the experts, the assumptions, and the names of identified shamans. It’s meant to produce profit. Exploiting shamanism is an old game.

Drury’s first assumption is that there ARE gods and that shamans believe they are relating to them, perhaps with the help of animal spirits. Then, making a quick tour of early cultures that have defined shamans, he collects typical tropes and methods: the tree, the mountain, the blood, the bones, flight, curing of the sick, bringing back the dead, crystals. and drumming. He is much influenced by Michael Harner, who uses drums and gourd rattles. http://www.shamanism.org/index.php If you’re into the paraphernalia, he’s your man.

Of course, once shamanism got mixed into New Age ideas, mind-altering substances became essential, so there is a discussion mostly based on identifying on some of the substances. He doesn’t spend time on the possible medical action of these enzymes in the brain, etc., because he is concentrating on primary ethnic contexts. He mentions the use of disciplines (starvation, thirst, cold, extreme exertion, pain) but doesn’t elaborate.

In the late Nineties, when I was first on the internet (to let you know how long ago that was, my computer was a LISA), I participated in a Native American “bulletin board” which was often preoccupied with discrediting “plastic shamans.” Some of the most notorious are listed in this little book. Black Elk is generally not attacked, though scholars will note that he seems to have absorbed quite a lot of Christianity. (They say the same thing about Percy Bull Child, who is not mentioned, and probably it is true.) Brooke Medicine Eagle, Sun Bear, and Lynn Andrews were regularly berated as fakes. Carlos Castenada and Luisa Tiesh are in this book but didn’t much enter the online discussion.

Echoing the notorious wars over writers who were or were not Native American, people got locked into jealous rages over the fakery, representing themselves -- the speakers -- as Ones Who Really Know and therefore the more legitimate objects of the adulation and prosperity. The most angry were often the ones of least blood quantum. (Which is a “red herring” anyway, since tribal affiliation is based on parentage, not the genome which was not known when tribes were defined.) Since it never really went anywhere, most of them have left the issue by now. This book is outdated.

The study of shamanism continues and I consider it both worthy and valuable. The ways of people who are still hunter/gatherers have a lot to teach us. In my experience, those who are considered shamans by their own people are rarely contacted by outsiders. Why would the People want a lot of tourists wading around in their sacred waters? Many scurrying little wannabes and outright charlatans end up killing people in plastic-tarped sweat lodges. There are people on this reservation, though death keeps weeding them out, who charge enormous amounts of money for outsiders to participate in half-invented ceremonies for people seeking magic rather than real inner change. That’s simply not what interests me.

What I want to think about is the management of consciousness. Shamans come into it as “technicians of the sacred” who in themselves experience something that belongs to a category called “dissociation” by psychologists. It is a brain state that includes out-of-body experiences, hypnotism, visions and hallucinations, schizophrenia, seizures, moments of high emotion or danger. Some people can control dissociation and others cannot.

A theory is that children who are extremely abused, both in terms of beatings and sexual invasion, can enter this state as a form of self-protection. Though “Sybil,” the girl with multiple personalities, has just now been discredited as making up her experiences, I suspect that there was a kernel of truth. There ARE instances of multiple personalities. Also of interest are people whose brains have been separated down the middle or who have had one half removed, usually in an attempt to stop disabling seizures.

It’s clear that something real happens in the brain that “presents” as a form of dissociation. The people who experience this may report they are in a different place -- truly and actually -- which they may or may not interpret in a religious way. Maybe because it was the first descriptions of shamanism that I knew (Campbell's and Eliade’s) I find the idea of bodily death, replacement of the bones with quartz stones, and a long flight on a horse over an abyss, the most gripping interpretations of the experience.

Much depends on what the shaman does with the experience. He may just hide it. He may try to take others to the same place. He may understand it as being chosen or as being damned. He may use art to explore and express it. Some try to make an institution and a dogma out of it, because they interpret the experience as religious and that’s what they understand religion to be. There might be money in it.

What interests me comes from the Sixties, when Bob Scriver and I sat with the Bundle Keeper circle of the Blackfeet in the Sixties. There was nothing “churchy” about it. It was more like a family reunion where traditions have been established. This is not to say it was trivial. What struck me most was the relationship to the ecology, the land and its inhabitants. This “Bundle Opening” was a ritual that tried to put everything into “right relationship” just as the season of the great thunderstorms began, for the sake of protection from lightning and floods. The materials were animal and bird skins, the songs were about the creatures, and the dances were imitations of them. Each man who danced, took the creature into his hands and rose to the circle with that sensory memory prompting him. In other words, if this were not your family and if you didn’t live out on the grass among the other creatures, you couldn’t really “get” the ritual. How could you feel it? It was an evoked heightened consciousness of each other and the great ecology in which they lived, based on experience. No amount of reading about it in books would really help you understand in the sense of shifting consciousness.

TRICKSTER & SHAMAN

What drives the commentors and critics crazy is that they want to know EXACTLY who Timothy Patrick Barrus really is. What category to put him in. What is his label? What is his pedigree, his class, his CV, his family tree, his job record, his antibody status, and so on until it’s no wonder he’s allergic to the topic. And it only makes him trickier. Journalists can make all the phone calls, interviews, investigations, computer checks, Googles, documentations they want. It won’t tell them much. The problem is not the availability of information -- it is their capacity to “get it.” As Tim says, “They see what they want to.” The category of “failed S/M porn writer” is in them, not him; and also the nurturing half-Navajo father called Nasdijj, to the same degree. Ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, metaphor, allusion and elision are his modus operandi. Check out his videos: now you see, now you don’t. Was that a blue heeler helping dog that just streaked by? Or was it a coyote? The human brain struggles to define and constructs an explanation: this is well-documented in the psychology literature. They call it “closure,” as in a closed mind. Trickster resists all closure -- Trickster looks for openings, whether they are porn, NA literature, or boys at risk.
In the end of “Trickster Makes This World” Lewis Hyde finally comes to a simple comparison of the two related archetypes of Shaman and Trickster. His way of thinking is that the Shaman is the one who had the extraordinary death/renewal experience that caused his guts to be replaced with quartz, which he can occasionally draw out crystal by crystal through his skin. (You can read this into Tim’s life.) But Trickster is Coyote, who says, “Sure, I can get something out of my guts, too!” And makes a big poop, with a lot of unnecessary sound effects and smells. He could as easily have made an ejaculation that was not verbal.


Trickster says, as in the title of that once-popular and always-relevant book, “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” Because if you put all your eggs in one basket (Don’t you love mixed metaphors? Trickster does.) you risk trying so hard to protect them that you won’t have a life anymore. When Buddha leaves off wandering, settles down, grows healing herbs, and does elegant tea ceremonies, his role has changed. Now he’s Shaman with a mystical embeddedness in creation. I’m happy to claim that role. Tim can be Trickster. I’m the One Who Watches, Tsalgiglalal. The stars wheel over my head. All the salmon I have eaten (a LOT) leap in the river that passes me.

Hyde tells us (p.292) that in 1964 Mac Linscott Ricketts suggested that “tales locate the trickster in opposition to the practice and beliefs of shamanism.” The shaman “bows before the spiritual world and seeks alliances.” Trickster “recognizes no power beyond it’s own intelligence, and seeks to seize and subdue the unknown with wit and cunning. Trickster . . . embodies an experience of Reality . . . in which humans feel themselves to be self-sufficient beings for whom the supernatural spirits are powers not to be worshiped, but ignored, to be overcome, or in the last analysis mocked.”

Continuing, Hyde says, “. . . trickster is an outsider. . . He has no friends in that other world” [the world of spirit] ". . . All that humans have gained from the unseen powers beyond -- fire, fish, game, fresh water, and so forth -- have been obtained by necessity through trickery or theft . . .” Unlike Shaman, Trickster “seems to need no friends: he gets along very well by himself.” “From the Shaman’s point of view, the rules that trickster breaks articulates the ideal world, but from trickster’s vantage point, if we think the ideal is the real we are seriously mistaken and won’t see half of what is right in front of us.”

But look closer at that Venn Diagram of two circles that is the friendship between Tim and Mary. In that overlap of the two identities is the shared Truth: desire for experience in the world, search for gates giving access to closed cultures, discovery of the plenitude and variety of what is there, and a lively flexible mind that can move among them. The story Hyde presents is that of Krishna as a crawling child cramming dirt into his mouth. When the baby’s mother looks in between his lips, she sees the enormous shining wheel of the universe and faints. This is spirit world, not a sci-fi or supernatural or magic world. Shaman knows this and surrenders. Trickster won’t.

Because the overlap between Tim and Mary matches the overlap between Shaman and Trickster (oh, the hubris of this idea!), we know that in Shaman there is a little Trickster and some healing Shaman in Trickster, like Yin and Yang. Physical distance and the difference in our pasts help us keep matters clear, but sometimes emotional intimacy and shared intensity bring us into a momentary embrace. Then I sit back down and Trickster goes merrily on down the trail. The moment is enlivening, even inspiring, but it passes. Still, I am faithful in my watching and do not leave. Trickster is as faithful in his traveling and will pass by again.

Why do you need so many facts? Why isn’t it enough to have the stories? The journalists scurry around in a scavenger hunt, looking in all the wrong places and finding all the wrong things. Or are they? Sometimes Trickster has left clues that are quite right, but deceptive in appearance. One of them is attachment to place. Another is the father. And then there's that Lost Son.

But don’t ask Shaman to explain beyond pointing to method, in the University of Chicago seminarian way. Shaman doesn’t do dogma, because she understands the shifting chimera of this seemingly real world. Tolerance of ambiguity, love of the search rather than the destination, deep appreciation of desire and the preciousness of its fulfillment are her hinge and her role as a gate, knowing there are many other gates in the articulation of the world’s bones. It is Trickster who suffers the pain of those joints.

TIM THE TRICKSTER RESPONDS:

Tim Barrus: The Sacred and Profane

I cannot tell you all my secrets. It would be like draining blood.

The difference between the two of us — the writer and the reader — is that I will tell you I have secrets. You dare not do it.

You pretend.

The bottom line is about who has the power.

Yet I am supposed to be the one so consumed with the enigmatic machinations of pretense.

I do not pretend not to see the world in different ways than you do. My experience informs me that if I were to share the things I see and know, you would be afraid, and out of that fear, you would attempt to destroy me. I do not trust you not to do it.

You speak of reality as if it were a given.

What you know of reality would fit inside the tip of a urethra.

And yet you pretend that your knowledge of reality is all-encompassing, absolute, unimpeachable.

There is a caveat to this assuredness. It is a nagging doubt, very small, a pinprick, hot as liquid metal, and it burns through you with the awareness that there is more out there than you can know.

You shove this away. You choose not to look at it. You swallow it. But you know.

I am easily dismissed.

I am supposed to care.

I know this: there is too much richness in the vast chaos to focus however briefly anything whatsoever — even the subliminal, the minute, the seemingly irrelevant — on what it is you know. You are the audience. It’s not about you. The chaos of what is reality, the breathtaking complexity of reality as a living thing, embodies such interpretations as chance and wisdom; leaves you as a pedestrian left behind in a wind of subatomic particles racing through the universe at speeds you cannot even imagine even as they pass through entire planets as if that solid mass did not exist. What the audience sees, what the reader knows, what the pedestrian asserts, is smaller in its context or a plethora of them than a neutron to its point of reference. A quark is even smaller. We are not even sure (no one has ever seen one) that the quark exists. We simply assume it might. We can find no shape or structure to the thing. And yet from this we surmise that a quark could be a point in time and space that needs no structure. You are shaking your head, yes. But another reality suggests the concept of something that significant yet that small is not, in fact, a reality the human mind can quite grasp or put its arms around.

What I know and what you pretend to understand is chaos. Even now, you are thinking of chaos as being that which is disordered.

You would be wrong. The obvious is an illusion.

Chaos is about an underlying order in what appears to be perfectly random.

Beyond God, the universe is utter chaos. Universality is and it isn’t.

From a distance, I observe Mary Scriver (http://prairiemary.blogspot.com) making assumptions about my life and person and then testing those assumptions against historical analogy.

There have been many times when I wish I could have given her a big bear hug and told her to stop worrying: it’s all ok.

My life is just a quark. It is a point in time and space. It has no structure. It can only be assumed to exist at all. It is a mistake to assume it has evolved from one determinism into another based on what can be measured. Determinism being the purely philosophical (since there is no structure to the thing) belief that every event or action is the inevitable result of preceding events and actions. Thus, in rationality at least, every event or action can be completely predicted in advance, or in retrospect.

But if time is measured in the number of rotations around a particular star, what is space if a quark can pass through the object (a planet) as it rotates. Let us assume the obvious: That these mathematical orbit equations are deterministic means, of course, that by knowing the initial conditions—-in this case, the positions and velocities of the planets at a given starting time—-you find out the positions and speeds of the planets at any time in the future or past.

I would argue that there is no such thing as the past. Only our ideas of it.

Of course, you reject that out of hand. Without the past, where would that leave the reality of the present. It is supposedly theoretically possible to obtain nearly-perfect predictions for the behavior of any physical system.

You only imagine the past. Making long-term predictions to any degree of precision at all would require giving the initial conditions to infinite precision.

You only imagine infinite precision. Your assumption that there is such a thing as the past assumes we can predict if not necessarily the future, then we can at least apply deterministic values to the present.

But what if one gets drastically different results each time. Thusly the separation between the human animal and his behavior. Even when we add up everything we know about the biology of the human animal, his genealogy, his genetic structures, his variable demographics, his sociology, gradually the smallest imaginable discrepancy between two sets of initial conditions would always result in a huge discrepancy at later or earlier times, the hallmark of a chaotic system.

Those quarks that travel through the planets, travel through the human animal as well.

None of this is hocus-pocus. All of it is basic physics.

What we think we know (and is thusly safe to assume) is sacred.

What questions the fundamental nature and structure of the above is the profane. Our brains can’t even build a template where something (like an electron) can exist in two places at the same time.

I would argue that I can exist in twenty places at the same time.

Not only are persons spread out through worlds, but they, like everything else, are quantized through time in any given world. Time is a series of moments, and a person who exists at a moment exists there forever in four-dimensional spacetime, rather than being transformed continuously through the flow of time. Such change and flow are mythical. The argument doesn’t strictly require the multiverse hypothesis, because deterministic physics since Newton has implied that the openness of the future is an illusion, and consequently that free will is an illusion.

So what is real.

Chaos is real.

Human existence as we know the animal — Homo sapien sapien — supposedly can be traced back in time 100,000 years. A mere blink of an evolutionary eye. I read Mary’s analysis of who I am and note she keeps it open-ended. Both of us can agree that reality is complex enough to be the trickster of all the tricksters. Personally, I just don’t buy the historical analogies to mythology not because they are too old and superstitious but because they are not old enough. Mary and I travel at different speeds toward some of the same destinations. Time travel is assured by Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which says that an observer who accelerates or decelerates will experience less time than an observer who is at rest or in uniform motion. This time dilation could make an astronaut’s flight very short and the duration on Earth very long, but such a trip to Earth’s future would be irreversible as “no amount of time dilation can allow a spaceship to return from a flight before it took off.” As for past-directed time travel, it is possible as a sort of sidestep from one universe to another, requiring a path between the two universes that is “hard-wired” into the structure of the multiverse. Whether such paths exist or not is an unresolved empirical question. What we know is safe. What we do not know causes us to regard both the past and the future with some amount of anxiety and fear.

I believe in evil. Mary doesn’t.

Power. Who has the power. It’s not about Mary and it’s not about me. It’s about you and who has the power.

What I believe about evil is that it’s simply another way of perceiving and seeing the universe. It only is. But it’s definitely there.

It’s you. That is how I see the universe.

Most of you as observers and not participants are evil. Your assumption that you are not participating is erroneous.

I am accused of employing smoke and mirrors. The reality is that I do not need them. Reflection is everywhere and it’s only information. It can be obfuscated at any point along the way toward recognition and that includes all the boxes and categories that you keep it in.

Mary believes that there is such a thing as good, practical, common sense. I believe that common sense is an illusion and that the human animal is capable of knowing very little of what is actually out there in much the same way a slug exists under a rock. The slug barely knows the slug exists. But what does it know and how much does it know about the rock.

A person should be grounded in good, practical, common sense. Both feet planted firmly on the ground.

A slug has no feet but it can wiggle.

Even as the ground spins through space and what we know is but a grain of sand in a urethra, and what we do not know is the rest of the bleeding universe. I reject analogy (especially to mythology) in the same way I reject the idea of the past.

You can’t go back and change anything until such time as you can fathom exactly what time is. You can’t go forward and change anything until such time as you can assume the physical attributes of a quark. A you in the form of a nothing but a you as a fixed point in time and space. All you are left to work with as best you can is right here right now this very moment. What is awesome about that reality is that you are responsible for what happens in it even as the rest of the organic and inorganic universe spreads itself out into endless and infinite variations of its kind, and flies apart into the vast unknown.

MICHAEL TWO HORSES: Hero

Prowling around the Internet, with a little help from Maggie Dwyer, another extraordinary research librarian like Dave Lull and George Lessard, as well as a fellow member of the nineties Nat Lit listservs, I was hoping to find out what happened to some of those folks. I came across this:

Obituary for Michael Two Horses (1950-2003)

Michael Two Horses, Sicangu Lakhota/Crow Creek Dakhota, passed away recently at his home in Blacksburg, Virginia. He was fifty years old. His death was unexpected and peaceful.
Mr. Two Horses was Visiting Instructor in the American Indian Studies Program and the Humanities Program, within the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He was also a member of the Virginia Tech Commission on Equal Opportunity and Diversity. He was a doctoral student in the University of Arizona American Indian Studies Programs. His emphasis was on societies and cultures, law and public policy, and American Indian history.

Mr. Two Horses was born in San Diego to Alberta Mariana Bertino and David Two Horses Jordan, and adopted at six months of age by Edward and Sadie Lou Tieri. He served in Viet Nam with Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group, stationed first at Tay Ninh, then at Long Tranh, and was Petty Officer 2nd.

He is survived by his father, Edward Tieri of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, his brother, Albert Tieri of Palm Springs, California, and a large community of friends and colleagues.

Mr. Two Horses will be remembered for his exhaustively brilliant research and writing and his passionately honest dedication to human rights, particularly with respect to American Indian treaty rights, spiritual rights, and cultural rights. During the Makah whaling controversy, he formed CERTAIN, the Coalition to End Race-based Targeting of American Indian Nations. He went repeatedly to Neah Bay while anti-whaling forces were threatening school children, harassing the Makah people, and threatening the lives of the whalers. With CERTAIN, Mr. Two Horses engaged the opponents of the Makah's treaty rights in dialogue, countering their arguments in the media, taking photographs and witnessing to protect the Makah from further physical attack, and acting in conjunction with the Washington Human Rights Commission and the US Coast Guard to protect the lives and rights of the Makah people.

Mr. Two Horses was equally engaged in expanding the scholastic dialogue. He persistently pointed out elements of racism in the dominant cultural perspective on American Indians, in the face of pedagogical tendencies to trivialize these concerns. He declined to acquiesce to that marginalization in the discourse.

He investigated the growing rift between mainstream environmentalists and tribal nations across the US and Canada, and the way that much environmental writing fails to consider the role of indigenous peoples in shaping the so-called "wilderness." "They did not want to acknowledge," he wrote, "in much the same way as colonial writers did, that the human hand has always shaped this continent, and that in creating false constructs of 'pristine wilderness' and of cities as 'fallen' areas, such writing tends to avoid completely the contested lands where members of marginalized races or classes live, and fails to deal with the concept of 'national sacrifice areas' in human terms, inasmuch as the Indians, Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, and poor Whites living in those areas are sacrificed as well. These are zones where uranium mines and coal mines and their pollution of groundwater, or toxic waste dumps are located, without exception in proximity to marginalized peoples)."

He was ruthless toward "plastic shamans," people white or native who hawk Indian spirituality. "They abstract bits of our culture," he said, "and then they sell them as the genuine article, something along the lines of taking parts of the Catholic liturgy and extracting the 'cool parts' and then performing those parts for money. This is the deepest essence of what they do, and it is comprised of both 'snake oil sales' and of a deep disrespect for Native cultures."
__________

Michael was a lawyer/soldier whom I very much respected though I never met him. He stood apart from a ragtag and opportunist pack of hounds that tried to make their own reputations by destroying others over the identity politics of Indian intellectual property. He was clear about what he was doing and careful about drawing lines. Unlike others.

It’s true enough that there have always been opportunists who were both Indian and white and who capitalized on the public’s near-worship of Indian spirituality. But the plastic shaman hunters just added another level of opportunism to build their own prestige. The worst (least restrained and most self-serving) of the plastic shaman hunters in those days were female. low-quantum, urban, somewhat educated. Margaret Mead said that armies should never allow women to join because they don’t know when to stop. I’d have to reject that as a truth statement, but there’s some observed evidence in it.

Sherman Alexie, who carries weight because his name is known from his movies as well as his books, attacked Tony Hillerman (white, writing about Indians) in his novel “Indian Killer,” but the accusation fell flat. Later he accused Tim Barrus of “stealing his heritage.” Naturally, he didn’t mean that his own heritage included child rape and abuse. At the most extreme the local “director of culture” here forbade anyone to take photos of Chief Mountain because it is sacred to the Blackfeet. I agreed with the policy to keep hikers off the mountain.

I’m not sure what good all the pursuit of the “immorality” of certain writers did, except that a lot of people -- including a lot of very talented Indian writers -- simply walked off to avoid all the blaming and rivalry. It just wasn’t worthwhile, spiritually or any other way, but the persecution revives now and then to settle scores or give a little leverage to an insecure achiever. Some of the victims are personally known to me, like Adolf Hungry-Wolf, whose four-book accumulation of First Generation material has been stiffed by scholars but remains the best single source of material on the Blackfeet anyone could have, most of it unmediated by interpretation. (Oh, those middlepersons!)

Changing the focus, Neah Bay, the topmost leftmost corner of America (except for Alaska) is a tough little rez with a hardy bunch of people. I’ve visited several times, but only in “pacific” intervals. In the midst of the true danger and need of the Makah attempt to hunt whales in the old way and though he’s in Seattle, only hours away, I never once heard Sherman Alexie comment nor do I think he went there. Michael Two Horses did.