The Metaphorical Shaman

THE METAPHORICAL SHAMAN, AND MORE BESIDES

Dave, good to talk to you on your birthday. I was particularly interested by our brief discussion on the development of man since the ancient Greeks. How he moved from a state of thoughtfulness into the complexities of Roman life, which subsequently  collapsed with the barbarian invasions. Out of this, miraculously, Christianity flourished, became institutionalised, then, regrettably, set about stifling thought outside its own confines. It monopolized the right to it. The original message almost became secondary, and attempts have been made to revive it by various groups who have often put their own interpretation on it. Throughout history it (the message) has had to accommodate other vested interests, monarchies, aristocracies, merchants, politicians.                                                                                                              

Now, at this point, I am going to an article that I wrote some time ago and you will have to bear with me before I return to the subject of our discussion.           Forgive me if I start with a statement which you are unlikely to find challenging. I believe that one way man distinguishes himself from other animals is by trying to understand the world he lives in so that he can change it to suit himself. This has had a downside as well as an upside, but was always going to be easier if the day to day business of survival was sorted out first, yet the survival bit was facilitated by the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. Quite simply it was a case of chicken and egg.

It is apparent that once settled he needed to know how and when to plant things, the migratory patterns of the animals he hunted, and all sorts of other things that happened on a seasonal basis, and for this he needed a calendar; hence the creation of monuments or devices to establish the precise time of year. The study of the sun was an obvious starting point, although it is interesting to note here that there are a host of animals that do things on a seasonal basis without being able to count or measure, or create monuments. Apparently man needed to know exactly where he was in time and probably reckoned it gave him a better chance of survival. If he did it for some other reason then we still have some thinking to do!

However, this much is generally accepted by pre-historians. The reasons for studying the planets and the stars, naming them and attributing meaning to them is less apparent and displays more complex human needs. It was a case of giving meaning to the unknown, and it is the shifting over time of the line between the known and the unknown which affected human behaviour and cultural change.

Life was subject to random events which could turn organisation into chaos. Storms, floods and droughts needed to be understood in order to be controlled or provided for. It may have been inevitable that they were to be regarded as punishment for something, if indeed the notion of punishment existed at that time as it is a concept peculiar to man in his social state. If it did, then the notion of reward must have come with it. But who was punishing and who was rewarding? I can see how the idea of an invisible force, outside human control and superior to it, developed from here. This force, or forces were called God, and he, them, or it, would only be made redundant when the random events which created the chaos could be explained.

So, understanding and explaining were always paramount, and these processes were not just restricted to our scientific age. They have accelerated in our more recent history, but have been there since mans brain became big enough to cope with them. And the same brain has always had the capacity to embrace the idea of magic.

Magic included the miraculous. Germination, and by implication fertility and fecundity, were miraculous, and desirable. Because of their desirability in an agrarian society they were worthy of study, yet once explained they would cease to be magic. Mankind has for thousands of years been intent on transforming magic into the explicable. Yet certain things persistently remain beyond explanation. Inspired thinking and the creative force are just two, or are they the same thing? The creative force may be out there at the end of the universe, or it may be somewhere in our brains. I would suggest that in prehistory the shamans, and later the prophets, might have had some insight into the nature of it. We may have to revise our opinion of prophets as being rigid authoritarian figures predicting chaos and doom into figures more fluid, allowing themselves to drift in and out of reality, exploring the outer limits of their imaginations. I’m sure that the shaman of prehistory became the prophet of the Old Testament, although his social function may have shifted. The former may have functioned within the tribe to help make certain decisions, the latter to warn of impending doom, perhaps if his tribe failed to engage its collective mind.

Let us pretend that in our prehistoric tribe we have a dominant Shaman, whose accepted role is to illuminate the actions of his tribe. Within the tribe are a group who are perfecting their knowledge of geometry and another group who are studying the germination of seeds. There may, or will also be toolmakers, engineers (stone movers?), stoneworkers, herbalists. We may assume that gender was no barrier to activity although we cannot be sure. We cannot assume that the pattern of activity is the same as for a ‘modern’ stone-age tribe in New Guinea for instance, who may be in a state of regression.

This tribe is intent on progressing its knowledge and the Shaman has to stimulate that. As things move from the inexplicable (or magic?) to the explicable his attentions may shift. So as the seed germinators discover that seeds are best germinated at a certain phase of the moon, or when placed next to a lump of rock like quartz with a strong electro-magnetic field around it, then he moves on to the next problem. He doesn’t necessarily solve it himself, but he prepares the minds of those working on it, he nurtures the creative force. He also explores other boundaries, he knows that death is not simply explained in terms of being or non-being. It is the point when the spirit moves into another world. If he deals in the currency of other-worldliness then how can he believe in the finality of anything? He also advises or determines the way in which tribal life is related to the natural world. He believes that there is a powerful force generated by the actions of man in the face of nature, and that he has a sacred duty to respect that force. So that the moment man interferes with nature something mysterious happens; for as man moves, marks or models the stones, he adds his energy to them. The shaman knows that the stones contain energy, are the product of huge amounts of it, and they become the way man conveys his message. They have a permanence like nothing else.

Sometimes the Shaman will see fit  to leave natural features exactly as they are and set up his own works, using of course natural materials , alongside them. Divination, both in the practical and the religious sense, may feature here. The mountain, with a pile of shattered rocks on its summit is a frequent choice, and is so obviously the product of a massive amount of energy that it is deemed too sacred to interfere with. It may well attract the works of man in its proximity, be they dolmens, avenues of stones or menhirs shaped to mirror the mountain, but the mountain is respected, the subject of awe, for the power within it may be the power of destruction. Where works are carried out close to nature they are subjected to the discipline of the geometers, as if in contrast to the chaos of nature. Man probably discovered geometry when he set about determining the solar calendar and its application became a sacred rite in subsequent works. This tension between what was understood, what you were trying to understand, and the random and chaotic, must have demanded that you imposed your own kind of sophisticated order where you could.

I realise I have been using the idea of the dominant Shaman in a metaphorical sense, for he is not a singular character, but the spirit of enquiry and illumination. All these discoveries and developments took place over a long period of time and involved many different people although there must have been great leaps in the acquisition of knowledge. I believe that we have been wrong in describing early man as primitive and superstitious, as if man was just waiting for the arrival of science before he came to his senses.  Before science many people believed that we were awaiting the arrival of the Messiah. Apparently we await revelation, the revealing of truth. Mostly we realise that truth arrives by degrees, but it is also possible that revelation requires dispensing with old inhibitions imposed by rigid, accepted patterns of belief, be they religious or scientific. My ideal shaman knew this and instructed and inspired the members of his tribe accordingly. His perceived duty was not to impose social order, or to police the spiritual thoughts of his tribe, more to release them.

Two weeks later …….

I’ve come back to this as I realise it might be seen as a statement of religious belief; that God grew out of ignorance and will disappear when we have all the answers. It might also be construed that I have been indulging in some wishful thinking, by retreating into an imaginary tribal time when the world was populated by small cohesive groups without major human failings, like greed or bellicosity. I have been inclined for many years to think that our world would function better if divided into smaller units (ever the village romantic). I’ve also been inclined to think that a better understanding of the past would improve our chances of dealing with the future, but only in the sense that we might learn from our mistakes, not attempt to recreate a historical world.

Now, a month later (February 2010) I am thinking that if my metaphorical  Shaman was worthy of becoming myth how would I set about it? I have said that he is not a singular character, but the spirit of enquiry and illumination, and he has given me a clue how the idea of the Messiah might seize the human Imagination. It starts as an idea, as pure spirit, but by a process which might be magic, is made into substance by giving it form.                           

It might also be construed as my belief that we need messianic or shamanic figures to lead us out of our messes by promoting creative thought within our tribe. Actually I believe that those figures are potentially there, but that by and large they are shouting, or maybe just whispering into the void.  It may be argued that creativity is only part of being human and that other emotional and intellectual characteristics like the ability to love, co-operate, compromise, question, consider, examine, etc, are just as essential.

Most religions seem to assume that if we accept a fixed set of beliefs and adopt certain patterns of behaviour then all will be fine. How many talk about resourcefulness, inventivity, or the need to change and adapt? My belief is that we will not solve the major problems afflicting the human race by simply loving and believing in God but by using all our human powers (but not I hasten to add, the destructive ones), so I suppose that makes me a humanist rather than a Buddhist, Christian, Pagan, or anything else, although I have to admit that certain aspects of most religions (sculpture, art, architecture, mind altering techniques?) appeal to some of my human needs.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Sebastian Faulks, because it’s at least partly relevant to what I’ve been talking about:

“Like language, art struggles with what is common, to disturb the individual habit of perception and, by disturbing it, to enable men to see what has been lived and seen by others. By upsetting, therefore, it tries to soothe, because it hopes to free each person from the tyranny of solitude.”     

Hardy

HARDY, FIELD WORKERS AND PILGRIMS

Some four generations ago, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy created a work in which there was “a strange sympathy between Tess and her world” with ”no separation between what the characters feel and the setting in which they feel it”.

These words, from the critic A. Alvarez, are to me resonant of my modern experience of pilgrimage, in which my main preoccupation has been to link myself physically and spiritually with the landscapes through which I travel.  Hardy seems to believe that the female is better able to achieve this connection than the male.  Of the field workers of the 19^th century he says “A field man is a personality afield; a field woman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it.”

That we should respond to the difficulties or pleasures imposed by the landscape and climate whilst traveling out in the open is obvious but the suggestion is that there is potentially a deeper, more soulful connection available to us. Maybe Hardy felt the woman achieved this more easily because instead of setting herself against the land, she allowed herself to be absorbed into it; earth being a female element, not a male one.

Yet the business of allowing ourselves to be absorbed by our surroundings is not the only thing that qualifies us as pilgrims.  The man who takes, for example, magic mushrooms, may surrender himself to the moment, merge himself with his surroundings, without having any particular destination in mind.  While a specific sacred destination seems to be a prerequisite of pilgrimage it is arguable that many of the same goals may be achieved by simply “wandering with God”. So, what are, and what have been, the reasons for pilgrimage?

Pilgrimage, like the crusades, often had the purpose of asserting its version of Christianity in a region which had been or was under threat from another religion, being perhaps Catharism or later, Protestantism, which didn’t believe in it, or Islam, which did, but its own version.  Considerations of the afterlife were highly relevant of course, but I doubt that much was said about merging mind and body with landscape, although it doubtless happened.

Nowadays, we are unlikely to be looking to assert our religion or secure the afterlife, we are more likely to be hoping to better understand ourselves by setting ourselves this particular arduous task, this physical journey.  We may also be looking to conserve a tradition from the past, which will involve recognizing and enjoying, perhaps paying a kind of tribute to, the landscapes, art and architecture of the route.  It may be that the modern pilgrim doesn’t want to feel superior to the tourist yet is uncomfortable with the idea of seeing himself as one, and hopes to add something more to the idea of unity of person and place in the form of spiritual and symbolic components, so that his or her journey becomes a more complete work or story. The truly sacred nature of this journey may be achieved by this sense of completeness, or perhaps the sense that it fits well into the grander scheme of things, forming part of a satisfactory and illuminating pattern.  If this sense of completeness is to be achieved then the nature of the return becomes vitally important, for the final destination is home, not the point of pilgrimage.  Once home, the pilgrim may start to consider his next journey, hoping to add something to the first, or maybe improve upon it.  Hence the journey may become something like a work of art, perhaps with good fortune acquiring a sacred quality.

 The fascination of this for me is that I find I can always add another layer to what I have written, or express it in a slightly different way, in the same way that I can always add to my journeys.  I wonder if unifying person and place is a necessary first step in the process – must we first take to the road, walk until we become the road and then introduce (or expect to happen) prayer or meditation?  Or will the latter come before the former?  Then, what of our understanding of the history, traditions and symbolic elements? These surely involve some preparation and study before we embark.  The man-made objects, principally architecture and sculpture, much of which is closer to folk art than religious art, are to me a perennial source of interest having their own symbolic meanings, a relevant part of the belief system behind the pilgrimage, part of its history, part of its wealth. Finally, what of the human encounters, for many a vital part of the experience leading to a greater understanding and appreciation of it? These may be the most random, least predictable and most rewarding things of all.

           

Chris Masters

August 2008

Dream

Something remarkable happened to me the other night; remarkable because so often my dreams are painful expressions of things that afflict me; for instance the loss of confidence & self belief, & other insecurities which I need my waking hours to expel before facing another night which may or may not turn out to be another battle. These are quite likely to destroy my equilibrium for a few hours. Woe is me under these circumstances!

As often as not I can’t even remember what’s been going on in these dreams but I know I haven’t enjoyed it. I guess if I can’t remember  them  they can’t be that bad, whereas if I can remember I can then work on exorcising them.

 This night I entered another world, anchored by the presence of three familiar characters; a young version of Kate,(my daughter) Andy,(my wife), & a male friend I have known for over 60 years.

This world, as you would expect from a dream, was very much of my own invention which is to say it suited me rather than having disturbing elements in it. I was able to inhabit it for longer than the normal duration of a dream by gently compelling myself to stay within it, being aware that I didn’t want to leave it

My vision was a sort of idealised “somewhere” between town & country. I have to say that apart from my companions who were drifting in & out of my company, there weren’t many people about.

The buildings surrounding me were not so much for containing people as sculpted objects, the purpose of which was to express the beauty of their materials.

And what extraordinary objects they were! Formed of great slabs of glowing ceramics, sheets of darkened glass, slabs of terracotta, bronze & stainless steel, with shafts of curved metal projecting at purposeful angles, inviting exploration. This was not a vision of traditional forms, but a modernist or cubist one, abstract rather than real, certainly reminding me that surfaces don’t necessarily need decoration.

In the distance were buildings that were as ethereal as spiders webs, sketched ideas that gained substance as I moved towards them; line drawings that filled themselves in as I approached.

What was this about? I only wanted to share it with people I knew well, beauty was everything, but it wasn’t the crafted beauty which I set great store by, it was a modernist abstraction, infinitely appealing with the language of an architecture I’d just invented but was not particularly familiar to me

I felt that if I could have stayed within the dream I could have extended this language for I was in a creative place, & returning to reality meant returning to the world of my inhibitions. This world was my production but I was being reminded of things I knew but had forgotten. That there is a distinction between the real & the imagined, but it is up to us to make the connection, That the imagined becomes real by a process which at one point in my dream involved moving physically towards it yet might remain more beautiful by keeping it at a distance, just on the edge of vision. That beauty is akin to vitality & the perception of it is dependent on a state of mind, although somethings are inherently beautiful. That culturally we are disposed towards the appreciation of town & country combined although we (I?) prefer not to share it with too many other souls lest they destroy that appreciation.

There is very little in the imagination that cannot be made real. Reality progresses from vision through words & diagrams to substance. Yet it is not just substance but an amalgam of things. Finally & ultimately it will dissolve.

Goldsworthy, Waters of Leith

Land of poets

The Snowdonia massif.

Kate's mosaic

Here is one of Kate's mosaics.

Canigou- Catalan's Sacred Mountain

The Catalan Flag hangs in shreds from an iron cross on the summit of Mount Canigou in the Eastern Pyrenees. Next to it  I have wired a cockle shell, the symbol of the Pilgrimage for St. James. This seems as appropriate a place for the shell as it is for the Catalan flag, as it is for the Cross. These are all transitory symbols set on a mountain that will outlast them all, a mountain which was there long before the symbols had evolved, and which will be there long after, even though it is being eroded bit by bit.  Eventually my shell will disintegrate and find its way back to the Mediterranean sea, nine thousand feet below, and some thirty miles eastward.

The Canigou is Catalonia’s Holy Mountain. I suspect that this is at least partly because it has been seen as the gatherer of rain, distributing it to the valleys at its feet, supplying the orchards of apples, pears, cherries, peaches and nectarines, as well as the plots of vegetables. There are complicated systems of irrigation here with stone and concrete channels which collect the water from the streams and run for miles around the hillsides, feeding the fields and orchards through little sluice gates at intervals.

I have been here in May when the rivers are rushing with snow melt, and in September when the snow has gone but thunder rumbles deeply around the great ravines that run upwards for thousands of feet  towards a summit so often concealed by cloud. The Canigou is a benevolent giant generating water in what would otherwise be a dry landscape, and discharging alluvium into the valleys at its feet, the Tet and the Tech.

The French insist that the Tet valley formed one of the Ways of St. James. This, together with a notion that I would somehow be connecting with something older, more earthy, more primitive, seemed a good enough reason for me to finish a short journey on the summit of this mountain. I travelled from Montpellier ( a town on the prescribed Pilgrim Route from Arles ) at the bottom end of the Rhone Valley by bike, along the line of what my map described as the Roman road to Narbonne and which was now only a narrow track servicing the vineyards, a road that I felt must have at one time carried its fair share of pilgrims. At Beziers I left it for the Canal du Midi which I followed westward briefly before heading south again towards the hills known as the Fenouilledes. My motive here was to catch a glimpse of the Cathar castles of Peyrepertuse and Queribus, relics of a religion defined as heresy in the 13^th century and destroyed by the Albigensian crusades. The Cathars didn’t believe in Pilgrimage, considering it an earthly occupation, but I felt no need to apologise to their ghosts for including their castles in my journey. The manner of the destruction of the Cathars and their religion has given them an enduring place in the history books, attracting more sympathy and interest than if the militant Church of the time had left them alone.

After descending through the vertiginous Gorges of Galamus I spent the night at St. Paul de Fenouilledes, after which I crossed another range of hills before descending into the valley of the Tet. This valley hums with traffic and seemed unbearably busy after the peace of the previous two days.  I camped next at Vernet-les-Bains, seven thousand feet below the summit which was my destination; I had imagined that the mountain would reveal itself by degrees on my journey from Montpellier but this was not to be, for it remained persistently cloaked by cloud. I spent a day reconnoitering some of the paths that lead up the ravines to the summit and trying to assemble the strength and courage to do it. In the end I chose to take a track which started some way around the mountain to the east and which serviced the mountain refuge on a plateau two thousand feet below the top. If I could ride and push my bike to the refuge in one day I could ascend the mountain the following morning on foot and descend in the afternoon from the refuge by bike.

This, then, was what I did, and my cockle-shell was duly fixed to the cross, on a day when the clouds were all below me. I think that day climbing to the refuge was probably the hardest in my life with over six thousand feet of riding and pushing up a forest track which zig-zagged its way endlessly up a colossal ravine. I descended it five times faster than I climbed it, with my eyeballs leaping around in their sockets, and my modest amount of luggage (mostly extra clothing) crashing around in my panniers. It was certainly more exhilarating than going up and I was certainly fit for nothing when I crawled into my tent in Vernet-les-Bains that night. However, a good nights sleep was all that I needed to prepare myself for the easy ride down the Tet valley next day to Perpignan from which I was to take a train home.

On reflection I think my journey was too brief to qualify me as a pilgrim. I was something between mountaineer, cyclist, and spiritual tourist. Yet in the context of my other journeys (this was my fifth) over the last ten years I felt I had created another piece to fix to the structure of memories that are my Pilgrim experience.  Each piece that I fix to that structure adds another dimension, another layer, another piece of a jigsaw without boundaries. I carry no vision of a finished structure because this is an organic thing which will grow as long as the thing which is essential to it, my enthusiasm for the idea of pilgrimage, is sustained.