Royal Academy Schools, 1-2 October 2010

Researching a series of unexplained incidents at this historic building, artist Blue Firth uncovered a first-hand account of apparent poltergeist activity in the artists’ studios.

While patrolling the 18th century corridors one night in 2008, Red Collar guard Nathan Phillips experienced something that prevented him from finishing his shift: “When I got back to where the skeletons are kept, the doors all slammed shut — like boom, boom, boom one after another. I tried to make out what it could be and checked all the doors again. I got to the same point in the same sequence and the bangs happened all over again. I didn’t finish my patrol that night.”

To make sense of what happened to Nathan, Blue has collaborated with parapsychologist Dr David Luke and writer Mark Pilkington. As preparatory research they undertook investigative training sessions with the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP).

Bringing together their knowledge and experience of the paranormal and arts fields, the trio have devised an event that merges Blue’s art practice with David and Mark’s expertise in making sense of the unexplained. The end result is a unique participatory experiment in which the audience are both observers and the observed, the haunters and the haunted.

Participants will be asked to complete psychological and physiological assessments before and after entering the site of the haunting, which will be monitored for any unusual occurrences. The vigil will take place under carefully controlled conditions and in total darkness.

Combining authentic investigative procedures with subtle performative aspects, Vigil examines and subverts the roles of audience expectation, spectatorship and belief.

Spaces for both nights are extremely limited so we advise reserving your position soon.

Visit the Royal Academy web site to buy tickets.

Photo by Mark Pilkington

A discussion with Dale Pendell

[Question about who taught DP about the occult in Los Angeles.]

Dale Pendell: His name’s not really important. He kind of hid his traces, because he insisted on being without credentials. Anytime I would look for credentials, like, “Where did you get your Zen training, Carl?” “Why do you ask? Is that gonna make you believe something I say?” So he would never tell me. But he had a personal teacher. What he taught was the importance of a personal teacher. His personal teacher was a woman named Mary. And that’s as far back as I know the transmission. But I get a sense of high knowledge being passed on that way: through personal relationships, with some occult structure overt.

I don’t know, he was able to walk in and out of Zen temples like he belonged there. He was an artist, and sat with Suzuki, Roshi in San Francisco, and they palled around like old friends. When Trungpa came to town, they palled around like old friends—he was his driver for a while. Every place he went, he liberated people; he gave people permission. He constantly violated expected behaviour, and laughed a lot. I still consider him my true teacher. I would like to be able to give people permission the way he did.

So, I can’t speak for any occult tradition. I just know there are transmissions of higher knowledge.

[Question about what specific traditions or techniques of magical practice DP uses.]

Very eclectic. But I certainly look to general magical theory, magical dynamics and magical laws. So I would look to… I mean I read Crowley, and Lévi… I mean, it was harder to find stuff, back in the sixties. From the poetic tradition, like the charming song tradition of the Inuits, where charms are like spells. They had different kinds of songs; one group of songs you sing just for the joy of seeing the sun rise, or fresh snow on the ground or something. And then there’s the songs of derision that you sing to make fun of somebody. And they would share all these songs. But one class of songs they wouldn’t share at the “songfest”, and those were charming songs. Charming songs were meant to change, like change the weather, renew luck.

So I kind of combine those any way I can. I kind of feel my way into it, sensing, trying to feel or see, sense the presence someplace.

I have a favourite story. An anthropologist was talking to his Native American informant at the edge of a field, and he said, “So, I suppose you think that all of these rocks out there in the field are alive?” And his informant goes, “No… But some of them are!” The art is in the “some of them”, and figuring out which ones.

Working with charms, and remembering that if you use magic, you are vulnerable to it… It’s very delicate work. Like María Sabina said, relations with the mushrooms are muy delicado—very delicate.

[Mention of DP's characterization, in his talk, of tobacco as a "diplomat".]

Tobacco is good. It brings up certain questions. That is, we’re all kind of rational, educated. What difference could it really make to the world to leave a tobacco offering at the base of a plant? What difference could it make to say grace before a meal? How is that really going to change the world in any way? In fact, maybe you can just skip the whole meal, and just swallow a pill or something, and get on with what’s really important.

There is perhaps some step of faith here. That doing something beautiful, something proper, that seems to put the world in balance, is a worthwhile thing to do, and makes a change in the universe.

I have a poem on this subject. In poetry and literary criticism, they have something called the “pathetic fallacy”. Pathetic fallacy is when you say, “The sky was weeping.” Giving human emotions to inanimate things. I think they haven’t gone far enough. So I’m for what I call the cosmic fallacy. This is called ‘Last Specimen’, it’s about plant collecting, pressing [????] specimens.

In the bank of a gravely wash
A mile from the road in Saline Valley
I found the desert paintbrush.
Not a rare plant
Just one I didn’t have in my collection.
The brilliant scarlet-tipped bracks of the inflorescence
Were still enfolded.
Kneeling down, I gently pulled them open
To inspect the corolla
And then saw, still a child.
It’s not that anyone else would come by here
But that you live to blossom
Alone, here, beneath an empty sky
Does mean that somewhere a soldier won’t die
Or that on a dried planet somewhere in Cygnus
It will rain.
And I return with an empty press.

And all the people who have lived close to the earth for a long time seem to respect these rites and rituals. They feel a sense of gratitude. God, even Nietzsche said, “A sense of gratitude is seemly.” Our existence here rests on many lives who have gone before us, generations of people. And not only people; all sorts of beings that have lived, and suffered, and died, and micro-organisms creating even the air that we breathe, and the topsoil, and all of it. So every day of our lives is a gift of countless generations that have provided it, for our benefit. So a sense of gratitude is right, and it is good to give something back. It’s good to take a moment to place an offering, or a word or something. Ultimately I don’t think we can prove this. But I say, the other side can’t prove their way either. It comes down to a wager. And I put my wager on a green square, and to do these things, to find a way to move in beauty ourselves, does change the world. It’s the only way we can change the world.

So, that’s a long way of saying that that’s the ultimate basis of my magic. [laughs]

[A question about Zen, psychedelics, koans and healing.]

I’ll come back to that. I have one more thought on magic, another kind of magic that I dabble in. And that’s charms to change things. I call it demon work. Principles of working with demons, getting to know them. It all revolves around this business of diplomacy. So, give them a place to go. You can make a little shrine for your demons, and it’s good if you can name them. I have one called “She’ll Be Hurt” that’s stopped me from doing all kinds of things that had nothing to do with “she” or “her”[?]. Then I learned she had a big sister called “She’ll Be Angry”. [laughter]

In that way I invoke a being I call “The Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva”. The Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva sits with his middle finger up, and he looks like an ape. I made a clay model of him, he’s got big nails sticking out of his head, and I have this shrine with this incense for him. Anybody who has a worse inner critic than I have has either quit writing, committed suicide-or both! So when I get the voices saying, “You’re not good enough to do that”, I get to where I can recognize it, and go “Aha!” I go over to the Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva, put a stick of incense in, and get on about my business.

I even made a scourge at one point, very wicked-looking. Magic has to with changing reality, so you do physical manipulations. So I made a scourge, a cat o’ nine tails with these leather thongs and twisted, very wicked-looking pieces of wire on them, and wrote all kinds of stuff on it (in blood actually), like, “Bring it to the surface”; or “You’re doing it to yourself anyway”. And when I would get a critic attack, all these voices saying, “You’re kind of fucked up” or “You can’t do it”… “Aha!” I would go get the scourge. And go, “Right! I get it! Thank you!” [mimes hitting himself over the back]

I look on all those operations as magical operations. It’s a wonderful field to be creative in. All good art is magic. All the best art is magic. So you can use aesthetic criteria to help find your way.

[A question about precautions necessary in "unbinding magic".]

I’m not sure it’s a problem with unbinding. Unbinding is not really… You’re not asking for something for yourself. It’s like releasing a bird. I think the dangerous magic is when you’re trying to get something for yourself; that’s a binding magic. Or trying to hurt somebody else. Any of those things, the vibration, the colour of it is so different, you can feel it right away. The best unbinding magic is invisible, there’s nothing there that anything can catch on; you can draw teasel through it. That’s the goal, and we come as close to it as we can. We usually end up with something that things still catch on, cling to; but that’s the ideal.

[Questioner remarks that in unbinding there is sometimes resistance, that things seem to prefer to stay bound.]

[sighs] Yeah. [long pause] The ocean is salty because of Kwan Yin‘s tears, when she realized she could not really save any beings. That’s what I heard. Any being at all.

[A return to the question of koans and healing, advice on koan practice.]

Sure, I’ll be bad. Go right into koan practice. Why not accept several hundred obstructions right away? [laughs] They help you get unobstructed! Koans are quite wonderful, there’s a lot of misconceptions about koan practice. Like, some people think, they don’t really have answers, you just have to do something spontaneous, or they have strange ideas about the answers. But there’s hundreds of them, and many of them are quite specific. Some actually have particular presentations. Maybe you’ll come up with a variation or something, and your teacher will say, [uncommitted, slightly dismissive tone] “Yeah, that gets the point.” Then he’ll say, “But the traditional answer is so-and-so.” And you always go, “Ah yes, that hits it right on the head.”

They’re kind of like brain candy. Very seductive. They’re meant to absorb your whole power of thought and mind, attention. Doesn’t that sound like fun? [laughs]

Not all Zen schools use them. The Soto schools don’t really use them, but in Rinzai Zen and some of [????], there’s a transmission.

[Questioner asks about koans and tripping.]

Like, my intention for that trip is to solve a koan? I don’t know of any rules. If you’re working with a teacher, he gives you a koan. You go back to your cushion… “OK, OK, sound of one hand, what’s that?” You go back to the teacher, and you present your answer. And he’ll probably go, “Hmmm, back to the cushion. Sit with this some more.”

Some of the great teachers worked on the first koan for years. One was about to kill himself, he worked on it for seven years. All of his friends had already solved it, you know, they were all whipped off to be Buddhists someplace. He was about to jump off a balcony or something… when he got it. He went on to be the great Mumon.

It becomes so all-encompassing. It should be, good practice; to where it’s all you think about, all the time, it’s what you’re thinking about. That’s good, that’s the way it should be.

So, tripping at such a time… I don’t know. It wasn’t my way. Maybe some people have gotten answers that way. Salvia divinorum has the best shot, I think. But the best is just going back and focusing on it, on your cushion. But one never knows, and there’s no rules on this-so, whatever works. It’s probably wise to try the way that people have been doing it for a long time.

Laura Pendell: Or it’s like the story you told about Gary [Snyder]. He came up with the perfect answer…

DP: Yeah, he came up with the perfect answer, that’s what it usually seems… Marijuana seems to do that, too. You get “perfect answers”—but it’s not the point of the koan.

Go work on this some more. [sly laugh]

[Question about the use of psychoactives in Buddhist history.]

Tea. They made an early alliance. In fact, tea is even said to be Bodhidharma’s eyelids. He fell asleep, and he was so upset that he ripped his eyelids off so he wouldn’t fall asleep again. He threw them behind him and they grew into the first tea plants.

[Someone thanks DP for his books introducing them to the pleasures of tea.]

The interesting thing is that all the major religions have abandoned whatever use of entheogenic substances that they once had. Sometimes I’ll think about why… Going back and reading early accounts of psychedelic administration, even Oscar Janiger, who collected hundreds and hundreds of accounts, made a point of giving LSD to people for the first time without them knowing anything about it, without them knowing what to expect, because he was collecting information. Almost everybody felt positive about it. About a third of them had bad trips… I don’t know, it’s very time-consuming, it goes all over the place. So we find lots of traces of entheogenic substances at the origins of religion, and in tribal religions, shamanic religions. All of the cosmopolitan schools have abandoned them, except for the saddhus. Who else?

[A woman in the group talks about finding motivation, about having interest in psychology and writing and helping the world, but feeling lost and directionless. She starts crying halfway through, telling DP she feels she trusts him. She has to support her family but nothing seems to have sense, the world doesn't need her help.]

Maybe try some of this magic stuff? Leaving a little flower offering, or tobacco offering at four cardinal points, or by your door every day. It doesn’t take much, some of the old ones said, to push the world over into the right direction. It just needs a little help, from you. There’s nothing you have to write[?]. Just leave a little offering; something that makes the world a little more beautiful. If we can get out without making the world worse, we have succeeded. That’s all we need to do, is find a way not to make things worse. That’s good enough.

Add a little bit of beauty someplace. You will see. It is OK to be in this state; it’s a very good place. A very good place. It’s very open, you’re kind of stretching out this open moment. Spiritual teachers have a word for that, they call it acedia. It’s like the “dark night of the soul”, it’s this point of not recognizing your own way, your own worth, just where you are in the spiritual process. But it’s a very pregnant and rich point. So, stretching that out is… painful. But it’s very good. Something very good, something very good is going to happen to you. Lay out a nice offering; invite the good spirits in: “Here’s some flowers for you. Here’s some hazelnuts.” I don’t know.

[An American woman says, "You think the world doesn't need your help? I live in a country that needs a lot of help."]

[A question about the relationship of the psychoactive effects of the poppy to Zen practice.]

Wow. That’s a very esoteric question! I’ll have to think about it to make a connection; I’m sure there’s a way to do it… What I think of with the hallucinogenic effects of poppies is Greek healing, and the temple of Apuleius, where with a drink from the poppy, sick people would go in to have dreams-and the dream would reveal to them why they were sick.

If you approach it right-you know, you have to walk through the door the right way, you don’t want to offend the gods. Again, it’s a matter of ritual propriety. Confucius made a big deal of ritual propriety—what’s the Chinese word, li? I think so. It’s one of the foundations of his whole system, you can almost feel that it’s a carry-over from the older animistic traditions. Ritual propriety. Keeping everything clean with the spirits—that’s what you want to do. That’s the basic magical law.

María Sabina with the leaves, and Eve in Paradise Lost, that’s ritual propriety. With the Salvia leaves, it becomes almost palpable. If you have stems with some parts that are left over, you wouldn’t just throw them out anywhere, that would be shocking, you know? The great Japanese flower masters would dig graves, dig a little hole in a special place to put the old flowers in. You don’t just put them anywhere. And this matter of ritual propriety is much neglected by our culture. There’s no sense of presence… In the animistic world there are spirits that live in streams and trees and rocks and places, little nooks, this little nook has its spirit. People who’ve lived close to the earth for a long time all seem to have some sense of the presences around, and recognition that they do not want to offend that presence. It would be a desecration. Our culture kind of moved all that, had it taken out of the environment and boxed up in the Kirche, in the church, where it’s clear, that’s a sacred space and you wouldn’t think of throwing trash on the ground in the church. That’s pretty clear. We have it all boxed into this special place, but it’s in all of Earth’s places around us. This matter of presences is again one of the fundamental principles of all shamanic magic. You can kind of build the whole system up pretty much from that. Recognizing that there’s presences, you don’t want to offend them, you want to keep them in balance, and trying to find propriety.

If you don’t always know, you need to come up with some means of divination. Divination is another neglected art, it’s a kind of hazy area. It’s still a big part of our world, but we pretend that it’s… We flip a coin at sporting events-who goes first? That was to get the will of the gods. What do the gods have to say about this? Now we call it “chance”.

When you talk about using tobacco, how do you use it? Offering, or smoking?

You don’t have to smoke it. Tobacco offerings are very traditional; tobacco moved around the world very quickly after Columbus.

[A question about the tobacco industry and chemical additives.]

Well, you can’t look to me for purity. [laughter] I do grow tobacco, and it’s very good to grow one’s own magical plants. Kat [Harrison] made the point in her talk [on her fieldwork with the Mazatec Indians in Mexico] that with sacred medicines, any shaman wants to know who’s touched them, where they came from, their history. And making magical objects, the materials, and the history of the materials is all very important. You don’t want to get boorish on this, but the more you can refine that, the further you can trace that out, the more powerful the magic is gonna be, and it’ll probably be better art, also.

[Question about tobacco as an offering.]

Yeah, and you can use it as a purifier. Smoke some, burn some on charcoal and you can clean things. It’s very famously used as a cleaner. You can clean bad vibes off something with tobacco.

Something else I’ve found is good for cleaning bad vibes I learned from the Chinese, which is firecrackers. Wanna get the bad spirits out? That’ll work. Whole strings of them, let ‘em off all at once!

There’s a great wealth of lore, ways different peoples dealt with things for a long time. Much of it is neglected, but we can still find these very useful things.

And if magical thinking goes against your grain because you’re educated, and you don’t want to be superstitious, look at it as art, use aesthetic principles. Look at it as art and theatre, and you can do the same thing that way.

[Question about magical propriety and sacred space in dense urban environments.]

It is more challenging, yeah, but you can use all the same principles. I’m kind of “seat of the pants”, so I started hanging yarrow in the door. Something like that. In the sixties we all made these gods’ eyes. I still have one—shows how bad I am. I’m sure there are lots of people who do stuff like that. Over huge parts of the world people have all these charms and amulets as protection against the Evil Eye. So yeah, start with charms and amulets. I like yarrow, that’s good.

I don’t know what to do about sound. You’ll think of something. [laughs]

The main of faith, the ‘believer’ of every sort is necessarily a dependent man—such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself, he can be only a means, he has to be used, he needs someone who will use him. [...] Conviction is the backbone of the man of conviction. Not to see many things, not to be impartial in anything, to be party through and through, to view all values from a strict and necessary perspective—this alone is the condition under which such a man exists at all. But he is thereby the antithesis, the antagonist of the truthful man—of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

While I concur with the spirit of this attack on essentialism, there’s a particular aspect of Dvorsky’s post that is a transhumanist refrain that always makes me stop in my tracks, suddenly conscious of questions that don’t seem to be raised:

Fukuyama describes transhumanism as "a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints." He goes on to state his usual argument, which is that suffering and other negative aspects of humanity is necessary in order for us to retain our human "essence" and properly function as individuals in society. He believes that without aggression, for example, that people wouldn’t be able to fend for themselves, or that without jealousy there could be no love.

As I said, I’m no essentialist. And I’m not sure about Fukuyama’s specific examples of "positive negatives". But I baulk at the casual dismissal of suffering. I have to tread very carefully here—precisely because it’s other’s refusal to tread carefully that concerns me. I agree with neither Fukuyama nor Dvorsky, and their debate seems to me to be polarised into the inevitable abstractions of theoretical polemics. As I put one foot forward, I may be attacked by transhumanists; the next step may draw fire from "bioconservatives"; it requires focus to just use both feet and walk.

So, why caution at the dismissal of suffering? Isn’t this what we’re all after from cradle to grave? Am I a masochist? A sadist? Stupid?

I was talking last night in Cambridge to a friend whose depression has been greatly helped by Prozac. Hell, one of my ex-girlfriends was one of the UK’s earliest trial subjects for Prozac use—her condition was deemed severe enough to override the early concerns regarding side-effects. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly support both the right of these wonderful people to alleviate their suffering using chemical technology, and their act of doing so.

On the other hand, I’ve never chosen to take such drugs for depression, and I’m glad I haven’t. Frankly, while I’ve slipped into some pretty vile pits of torment, I don’t think these periods have been quite debilitating enough to warrant chemical intervention. But further, while pleasure, too, has moved my life on in astonishing ways, suffering has often been the furnace in which awareness and health have been forged in my life.

The crux here is that I think the term "suffering" should be complexified. There isn’t some universal pool of categorisable emotions and feelings that can be labelled "suffering", and emptied by smiling technophiles, or solemnly guarded by narrow-minded Luddites. There are forms of suffering that are inimical to life; forms that are to pleasure as dark is to light—defining counterbalances that give pleasure meaning and, indeed, make pleasure possible; and there are forms that shift between the two, now in danger of crushing vitality, now creating possibilities for its rebirth. Delineating these forms is, I believe, part of an ongoing debate in the evolution of sentience—a crucially important debate, but equally an open-ended, probably unresolvable one. I feel that termination of the debate, proclamation of absolutist victory by any party involved, can only lead to stagnation of life.

Dvorsky dismisses Fukuyama’s appeal to the "uses" of negative emotions and traits as "flowery mumbo-jumbo". Easy phrases such as this may well have bubbled up for you as you read the last paragraph. I’ve got no stats, I’m expressing my feelings, or my feeling-toned thoughts that have crystallised through experience. Luckily, I’m not hoping to convince any governments or institutions here; I can indulge in this ineffectual little corner of the blogosphere.

However, this Stats vs. Feelings opposition brings me to what I feel is a key underlying issue. The cartoonish polarisation (which unfortunately actually forms the backdrop for real debates on these issues) goes something like this: the Transhumanist Techno-Rationalists think our intellects are perfectly fine arbiters of what forms and directions our bodies, emotions, and other "lower" functions should take; the BioLuddite, Deep Ecology folk don’t trust humanity as far as they could through all six billion of them, and insist that we bow down before the superior wisdom of Nature.

I have to confess I have a bias towards the latter, given such a two-dimensional system of choices. But the system of choices that reality gives us has quite a few more dimensions. I do have some form of reverence for nature. How could you not, given the discoveries of science? As Alan Watts always patiently points out, the incredibly subtle operations of the body, from the complex, as yet ill-understood rhythms of the heart, to the digestion of food and wonderfully sophisticated structure of the brain, are all coordinated by some level of unconscious somatic intelligence that the conscious mind has no part in. The simple fact of our existence, and further, our ability to reflect upon it, is testament to the immense complexity, durability and adaptive intelligence of nature. After a couple of millennia of science, we’re only beginning to fully comprehend the complexity of natural systems, let alone comprehend the systems themselves.

It’s a mistake, though, to allow this concession, this necessary admission of nature’s long-term superiority, to bring our intellect to its knees in impotent awe. Our intelligence is nature’s latest development, and we would be treasonous in the extreme to castrate it. It seems silly to assume that this "rational mind" department, with its R & D timeline measured in hundreds of thousands of years at best, should really be given executive power over the whole company, which has amassed an immensely rich array of creations in its four billion year history. But which company ignores its R & D department? What is needed is communication, dialogue.

The crucial line of research, from this vantage point, seems to be the investigation of the continuities—and of the importance of these continuities—between non-organic and organic matter, and between non-sentient and sentient organisms. When we say "suffering", are we referring to something that is a tragic aberration, a "fall" concurrent with the flowering of such a delicate flower as sentience? Or is it the conscious successor to part of the processes of creation and destruction that have evolved in non-conscious life and lifeless matter to enable evolution itself? (I’ll leave the question of consciousness in inorganic nature for another time, though I should note that I think it’s worth asking.)

A while back I read an interesting article by an anonymous author, ‘Utopian Surgery: Early arguments against anaesthesia in surgery, dentistry and childbirth‘. The most significant of these arguments was the contention that the fact that we suffered pain obviously reflected God’s intentions, and to circumvent this distress was to go against God. The argument is easily demolished, and it’s hard to not chip in unless—whatever your "beliefs"—you’re prepared to forgo anaesthesia for the rest of your life. I’m not. But, replace "God" with "Nature/Evolution", and physical pain with emotional pain, and my contention that some emotional suffering may be necessary to emotional evolution seems to be in danger of a similar demolition. Or: it would if I was erecting an absolutist edifice, and not a provisional, pragmatic foundation.

Alongside dialogue, between the logic of the intellect and the maturity of nature, I would add choice as a necessary part of any sane future. Most transhumanists—certainly the democratic ones—would agree with the importance of choice. I would point out to them the significance of this. It’s an admission that you might not be right, and as such should feed back into your beliefs, and help you weed out any fundamentalisms. Many people gain deep insight from intensely painful practices such as ritual scarification—and they may well see no contradiction in getting a general anaesthetic when they have major surgery. Equally, the right to use anti-depressants to combat truly debilitating conditions must be weighed against the necessity of leaving the neural gates open to allow ourselves to fall through emotionally purgative holes. Such experiences, certainly repugnant to the upstart intellect, seem to have evolved to strip away dead and dying feelings in a way that unintegrated chemical intrusions can’t hope to emulate.

It seems quite short-sighted to view pain and suffering to be as monolithic as Christian beliefs are monotheistic, and to bind the two together in history, the inevitable collapse of the latter taken as a sign of the need for the abolition of the former. If your only experiences of suffering are inseparable from those slavish monotheistic experiences of passivity, subservience and conservatism, all I can say is that your experiences are impoverished.

This article explores the relationships between language and magick, and uses concepts derived from neuro-linguistic programming to bring into focus the core elements of magickal training.

Introduction: What is Language, and What isn’t?

Some dualisms are actually useful, and considering them leads us deep into magick. One such complementary dyad is that of biogram and logogram. The biogram is seen as the operation of the entire genetic potential, the whole genome, of the individual or, on a wider scale, the gene-pool of the whole human race. This includes flesh, desires, atavistic levels; in short, everything that Austin Osman Spare might have implied by the definition of Zos as ‘the body considered as a whole’. It appears that the biogram contains the needs for food, shelter, sex, companionship and some form of ecstasis.

On the other hand, the logogram contains the whole gamut of symbolic systems that humans use—language in all its forms, from the abstractions of mathematics through spoken and written word, semaphore, the structured visual and audial imagery of painting, TV, music, to symbolic postures and hand gestures and everything in between. A magician can be viewed as someone who seeks to strengthen, liberate, feed, indulge and enjoy the biogrammatic forces through transforming his or her portion of the logogram, although it might be pointed out that this definition is broad enough to take in anyone who succeeds in generating sane (functional) behaviour out of the logogrammatic mess of mass culture.

The distinction between biogram and logogram gets blurred when we consider our appetite for ecstasis, or what is usually called the ‘drive to transcendence’. This whole issue is dominated and confused by religious/political exploitations of our fears of death and social ostracism. This exploitation takes the form of repressive dogmas built deep into the logogram in the course of the socialization process, along with their related reward/punishment patterns. The function of these elements is the achievement of social conformity via co-option of the ‘transcendence drives’. This pollution of the weirdest aspect of the biogram has the effect that many magicians deny the existence of any ‘drive to transcendence’. This is not surprising, considering that ‘transcendence’ usually (and wrongly) implies escape from the world of the senses—indeed, escape from biogrammatic realities into the cloud-cuckoo lands of religion or historical determinism.

This is basically the position of Freudians, who identify transcendence with mere escapism, regression to the oceanic consciousness of the womb. While this is valid as a critique of religion and body-denying mysticism, it has to be borne in mind that the outcome for the Freudian process is the return of the individual to the ‘ordinary misery of life’. The more sophisticated views of the postmodern psychonaut assert that there is a whole spectrum of eigenstates available to us. In this view, the socially-sanctioned formula of ‘ordinary misery’ is merely one rather sad example of institutionalized disappointment and hedonic dysfunction. Let’s face it: either we are here to experience ecstasy in as many manifestations as we can handle, or we’re wasting our time.

To look at civilization so far, it’s easy to get the impression that the logogram has won a decisive victory over the biogram. The contents of the logogram, under the influence of the slave-religions, have been severely anti-hedonistic and anti-bioaesthetic, crippling the ecstatic capacities of all but a few strong individuals.

There is no easy solution to this mix-up, and I believe there is a good reason for that: human consciousness is, by its nature, incomplete, provisional. Our atavistic prehistory in the stream of organic evolution provides us with the biogrammatic constants of hunger, sex, the search for shelter, and the more primitive forms of reproductive bonding. As soon as we start to construct more complex social forms, we need language. It may even be true to say that the evolution of language and the evolution of society go hand in hand. In any case, as soon as we start consciously defining and negotiating our relationships with each other and the world, we transform ourselves. Therefore, language is the prime medium of transformation; the logogram is the history of our past transformations, and a set of levers which we must use to achieve the next ones. Awareness of the inevitable link between language and magick is recapitulated in numerous myth cycles—Hermes was the Messenger as well as god of magick; Odhinn gained the runes, bringing the core of the mysteries into focus through a sophisticated system of semiotics.

Structures of Magick

Certain themes are common to all effective systems of magick. These core elements have also been recognized in one of magick’s postmodern descendants—Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP. NLP has been described as ‘an attitude and methodology which leaves behind it a trail of techniques’. It is the techniques that NLP is best known for; the ’10 Minute Phobia Cure’, and the Pacing and Leading techniques that are taught to salespeople are (in)famous, and tend to give the impression that all NLP is is a set of techniques for doing a few tricks with the mind. This is not the case: NLP is essentially about finding out how people who are exceptionally good at something actually do it, including the parts that they may not have conscious access too. In other words, the practitioner finds a precise role-model for the skill he or she wants.

To illustrate this, imagine you want to become better at, say, archery. The most obvious route would be to find a truly excellent archer, the best you can find, and get him to teach you. Now, your master archer will only be able to transmit to you what he knows he does when he shoots an arrow. Unless he is also an exceptionally sophisticated teacher, this will consist only of the conscious part of his skill. Under his tuition, you will no doubt progress to a much higher level of skill, but it is unlikely that you will achieve his own level unless you also absorb the unconscious strategies that hone his technique to a level of brilliance. The elicitation of these strategies comprises the core NLP technique of modelling.

Some of these strategies may appear initially to have nothing to do with the skill of archery; for instance, you may find that you have imitated his stance, his breathing, his sighting… and still you miss something. By talking to him, however, you may find that he performs a particular visualization, or hears a particular voice in his head just before he releases the arrow. At an even more internal level, you may discover that he has a particular belief or set of beliefs about his archery skill. You may even find that he has beliefs about life in general, powerful generalizations that mark the difference between you and him, and which facilitate his excellence. In any case, the model is complete when you are able not only to achieve his level of excellence, but able to communicate to others the internal processes that can take a third party to a new level of proficiency.

What is it that is being studied here? In the most general sense, it is the internal language of the person being modelled. The phrase ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’ reflects discoveries of how the brain actually represents information—in other words, the internal language of consciousness. Magicians have been ‘programming’ in this sense throughout the history of magick, and many of the concepts and structures of magick have been rediscovered by NLP modellers. Some of these are:-

Using Willed Imagination

Magick is often seen as a linking of imagination, will and desire towards a single aim. Much of basic magick consists of the controlled daydreams of visualization and audialization (and to a lesser extent the use of imagined kinaesthesia and smell). Anybody who has tried this a few times will realise that it works, if the focus is strong enough. Much NLP work also relies heavily on imagined situations, although usually for effects on the self. (NLP practitioners will seldom admit (at least in public) that they are trying to affect consensus reality!) The point is, your brain cannot tell the difference between the ‘real’ situation and the visualized/audialized one, and responds accordingly.

Try this exercise: remember an emotionally-loaded situation that is past and done, and check you reactions to it. Better still, evoke one of your obsessions, a concept you can get really emotional about—for instance: scroungers, poverty, Country and Western music, or whatever really rattles your cage. Get really worked up about it. Now relax and look at what you have done: you have taken some key images, sounds and words, and created a set of feelings which are indistinguishable from the feelings you would have got if you were standing in front of a real sample of your obsession. In fact, even when you are in a ‘real’ situation, you are often dealing with it through the lens of previous remembered experience. In other words, you aren’t there at all. Experiment with evoking the whole range of emotions—start off with a basic 6 or 8—lust, tenderness, anger… proceed to more complex ones, like gratitude or jealousy… experiment with different modes of each one. Remember to banish! This is—or should be—absolutely central to basic magickal training. If you cannot achieve a resourceful/useful emotional state at will, you are always vulnerable to enemies and manipulators. That is one of the differences between a magician and a non-magician.

The ability to change your state of consciousness via imagination takes us on to the next point:-

Correspondences and Anchoring

Correspondences are often used by magicians to attain repeatable states of consciousness. Correspondences work by conditioned reflex linking the desired state to a symbol at a pre-conscious level. For instance, a magician may associate personal dynamism and assertiveness to Mars, via repeated work with the colour red, iron, blood, and the smell of leather. Every time these symbols are used deliberately, the Martial state is evoked. In NLP this type of process is known as Anchoring, and it appears virtually everywhere—consider the power of a perfume or other unusual aroma to bring back a precise memory from years before. Consider also the ways in which we associate a particular task with a particular emotion; how do you feel when it’s time to get out of bed in the morning on a work day? Or again, on a day when you’re about to go on holiday? At some stage in the past, you had anchored a particular state to an imagined situation; whatever went through your mind, whatever picture or voice was in your head, had had that emotion anchored to it. Knowing that, you know that you can change any state, if you want to enough.

Will and Congruence

One of the central themes in magick is Will. This is probably best defined as ‘unity of desire and purpose’. This is the unity of purpose that brings about the reification of your most inspiring dream. Most people, most of the time, hardly ever achieve this condition, and simply wander from one passing impulse to another. Failed attempts to break out of the cyclical world of desire-gratification-frustration and achieve one’s dream of life often feed back to the person an increased sense of impotence, resulting in further entrenchment in hopeless cyclicity.

The condition of one-pointedness is known in NLP as ‘congruence’. A person in a congruent state knows what he or she wants, and is already in the process of achieving it, by that very fact. She can walk into a room and command attention by the slightest of gestures. The kind of congruence required to influence others can, to some extent, be developed by rigorous attention to one’s own body language and voice tonality whilst in the process of speaking one’s desire. This will lead to some inner congruence. However, the royal road to congruence at every level is to pay attention to signals from the ‘unconscious’ that manifest as body sensations, inner voices and images.

Try the following: get into a relaxed posture, and ask your ‘unconscious’ if it’s listening: you will probably get a sensation of some kind; this is a congruence signal. Now repeat to yourself a desire-sentence about which you have some doubt or fear. You will probably experience a different sensation, which is an incongruence signal. Experiment with different formulations of the desire-sentence, until you feel quite a different sensation. When you are confident that this is a congruence signal, you will have formulated a congruent desire. If you persist with such techniques, it becomes rather like dowsing. Some form of congruence testing is a powerful tool for magick, because you have at your disposal the entire committee of selves whenever you want to clarify your will.

Multiple selves, Goddesses & Gods

Chaos magicians have been working with the notion of multiple selves for some time. So have NLP practitioners, as the following quote from Frogs into Princes by Bandler and Grinder shows:-

We’re all schizophrenic… Evolutionarily, the next step, which we’re all engaged in, is multiple personality. You’re all multiple personalities. There are only 2 differences between you and an officially diagnosed multiple personality: 1) the fact that you don’t have amnesia for how you are behaving in one context; you can remember it in another context, 2) you can choose how to respond contextually. Whenever you don’t have a choice about how you respond in context, you are a robot. So you have two choices. You can be a multiple personality or a robot. Choose well.

We can view a personality as a pattern of social responses. It consists of language, of external and internal signals—body language, voice tonality and language patterns that project it to other people, and internal dialogue and internal imagery that supports it and keeps it in place internally. It has an agenda, concerning social power transactions via the repetition of learned roles (or, in the case of more advanced personas, adaptation). One feature of personalities is that they attempt to achieve (or believe they have achieved) some consistency of behaviour. They are in a sense functional clusters of wordviruses or memes which have acquired self-consciousness, and in this respect they are like deities.

Chaos magicians invoke god/dess-like entities from various sources, including the archetypal/stereotypical humanoid deities of pagan pantheons, characters out of films and comics. The god/dess form Baphomet as used by chaos magicians is a kind of reinvented gnostic entity, culled from various sources, which has come to represent magick, and the universal life-field, the planetary biogram. When we invoke any of these entities, we are seeking to bring into our nervous systems a perfect (or at least improved) role-model for one of our personas. Or indeed to assemble a ‘new’ personality for some new function. These selves are then available so that we can access and act from whatever self is the most effective in every situation we find ourselves in. The use of samples is a kind of parallel in music to this modelling of personality traits we desire. Flexibility is one of the cornerstones of power.

Systems, Levels & Hierarchies

Magickal systems almost invariably involve some sort of symbolic psychocosm. These maps can be useful for doing practical magick—generally in proportion to how much the magician immerses herself in the set of beliefs that the system implies and depends upon. The usual meta-belief in Chaos Magick is that belief is a tool, rather than an end in itself , and a particular psychocosm is viewed in the light of its usefulness. Psychocosms originate from mystery schools (‘Qabalah’ means something like ‘oral tradition’) or from commentaries on older texts (the I Ching, reconstructed Runic systems), or from scientific considerations, like the 8 Circuit model of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

Some such maps can be viewed as purely magical or ‘spiritual’ in purpose. Such psychocosms have teachings associated with them which are only comprehensible if the map itself has been internalized. Further, some, like the Qabalistic Tree of Life, have an inbuilt up/down quality, a hierarchy, explicit or otherwise. This kind of hierarchy is seldom helpful in practical magick. For disentangling levels in the selves, the neurolinguist Robert Dilts has created a ‘Unified Field of Neurological Levels’. This is purely functional, stripped of any ‘spiritual’ message. Each level contains all the most general features of the level below it. In other words, the patterns in one level imply the patterns in the next level down. This means that change at any level will affect the levels below it, but not necessarily the levels above it (although this can happen). It is not the case that higher levels are more important than lower; rather, the model reflects the way in which willed change works: it is more effective to make a change at a higher level, and that is precisely what makes it a higher level. Dilts’ Neurological Levels are:-

• SPIRITUAL: Purpose. This is anything which is at a higher level of power or priority than:-
• IDENTITY: all the things we tell ourselves about who we are; we are often not conscious of the self-referential loops that inhabit this level;
• BELIEFS: whatever ideas we think are true. This includes our criteria, which are implicit in the way we make decisions, whether we are conscious of them or not.
• CAPABILITIES: these are our skills—not just manual or recognized intellectual ones, but the abilities that enable us to get through our everyday lives, socialize, make decisions, engineer our emotions and so on.
• BEHAVIOUR: what we actually do in the world. Our usage of time.
• ENVIRONMENT: the final level which we change through action (including magick).

Conclusions

Magick is inextricably intertwined with language, and language is just about everything. We are immersed in it for better or for worse, and so we need to understand it, take a grasp of our inner linguistic processes, so that we can become just what we want, rather than another robot whose blueprint was drawn up by someone else. Change is resisted by the nervous system, which prefers to repeat comfortable and familiar actions which have become ineffective rather than adopt new and more powerful strategies.

Magicians are generally aware that, in order to get results and fulfil your potential, you have to do things you don’t initially like—you have to break out of your ‘comfort zone’, in order to change. Through its modelling of successful change, NLP has accumulated (and is still accumulating) some of the smoothest techniques for changing beliefs and identities. This in itself makes it worth the magician’s while to investigate.

Recommended reading

NLP

• Richard Bandler & John Grinder—Frogs into Princes. Fast-moving seminar transcripts from the original masters.
• Joseph O’Connor & John Seymour—Introducing NLP (Thorsons). Good general introduction to NLP, including Robert Dilts’s Unified Field.

Magick

• David Lee—Chaotopia! (Attractor)
• Peter J. Carroll—Liber Null (Samuel Weiser)
• Phil Hine—Prime Chaos (Chaos International, BM Sorcery, London WC1N 3XX)

The 8-Circuit Model

• Robert Anton Wilson—Prometheus Rising

Shamanism is the subject of intense debate in many arenas at the moment, and here I wish to add my own idiosyncratic views.

First off, we have to remind ourselves of the origins of the word ‘shaman’. It derives from saman, used by the Tungus people of Siberia, which means ‘one who is excited, moved, raised.’ Some think it derives in turn from an archaic Indian word meaning ‘to heat oneself’ or ‘practice austerities’; others think it comes from a Tungus verb meaning ‘to know’ (Walsh 1990: 8). It was adopted—and made into an ‘ism’—by anthropologists and ethnologists to refer to healers in various cultures who seemed to practice their art in similar ways. Mircea Éliade famously defined shamanism as ‘techniques of ecstasy’, highlighting its practical emphasis on entering altered states as a basic modus operandi. For a rule-of-thumb definition of shamanism, I prefer Walsh’s slightly broader attempt:

Shamanism can be defined as a family of traditions whose practitioners focus on voluntarily entering altered states of consciousness in which they experience themselves or their spirit(s), traveling to other realms at will, and interacting with other entities in order to serve the community.

ibid.: 11

This is a good baseline, but as anyone who has studied the matter knows, there are many other elements to some of the traditions in this "family" that, while their occurrence may not be 100% ubiquitous and uniform, are widespread enough to warrant interest. I would say that the main such elements are the three-levelled cosmology, centred on an axis mundi; a focus on nature spirits (plant or animal) as guides or helpers; ritual incorporation of zoomorphic aspects into the shaman’s identity (‘shapeshifting’, whether via costume or transformation of ‘soul-image’ during soul flight); initiation(s) via a breakdown / restructuring process; and so on.

There are too many cross-cultural parallels to document and categorize here, and this is precisely the heart of the debate around shamanism in many disciplines today: Similarity (comparison) vs. Difference (definition).

The Difference viewpoint often stems from a healthy awareness and celebration of human cultural diversity; respect for the idiosyncrasies of individual cultures is seen to be eroded by washing them away in a tide of Similarity. To me, the Difference/Similarity debate (which I’ve polarized hideously here for the purposes of argument) is comparable to the old "The glass is half empty" / "The glass is half full" illustration of the difference between pessimism and optimism. The reality of the glass’ situation is that both views are ‘true’, and they complement each other. So do Difference and Similarity, when seen as two perspectives on the same situation.

The !Kung and Kundalini

For instance, I am very struck by the similarities between descriptions given by the African !Kung San people of their entry into trance states, and the experience sought by Indian tantrikas practising Kundalini yoga. Tantrikas say that the Kundalini Sakti, a feminine ‘serpentine’ life-force lying coiled and dormant at the base of the spine, rises up the spine when aroused, eventually uniting with Siva at the crown chakra (Mookerjee &amp Khanna 1977: 21). The experience is usually one of an "explosion of psychic heat" (ibid.: 193). The !Kung San hold that n/um (usually translated as ‘spiritual energy’ or ‘potency’) is stored in the pit of the stomach or base of the spine. The process of prolonged rhythmic dancing and singing, during their healing rituals, ‘boils’ the n/um, causing it to ascend up the body. The peak of the trance—full visionary consciousness, associated with soul-travel—is attained when the boiling n/um reaches the skull, inducing a state known as !kia (Gyrus 1998).

It would take truly awesome powers of difference-based thought to ignore these parallels! Yet the very similarities between these experiences, mediated via the traditions of entirely different cultures, can be used to highlight the idiosyncrasies of each. For example, the !Kung !kia experience is brought about in a way that is communal and physically frenetic, and !kia itself is directly associated with active travel into visionary realms. Kundalini yoga is often a solo effort, practised by few in society. It does not normally involve much physical movement (except perhaps in sexual yogas), and the peak of the experience is seen to be one of blinding light or perceptual union with the environment. Traditional yoga frowns on the active participation in visionary realms. It is mysticism, not magic. These differences are of interest to the ‘human sciences’, looking at varied cultural responses to similar phenomena in human experience. An analysis of the differences between Kundalini yoga and !Kung trance practices will shed revealing light on the respective cultures they occur in (e.g. yogic non-attachment to, or avoidance of active visionary journeys may be related to the values of India’s socio-religious structures, in contrast to those of the !Kung).

Difference and Similarity are related and complementary; each draws meaning from the other.

First-hand research

The similarities seem to be of more interest to those in the West practically engaged with the ranges of human consciousness—magicians, occultists, psychonauts, whatever you like to call such folk. The manifest parallels between different cultures’ spiritual traditions are of interest to people who are attempting to recover a working relationship with these processes, within a culture which has lost all traditions dealing with such matters. Parallels may be used to try to uncover starting points, some ‘baseline maps’ of possibilities for human interaction with the more esoteric aspects of the body and environment. They may be also used to shed light on spontaneously occurring, often very unsettling experiences that cannot be usefully framed in Western paradigms.

The latter use of cross-cultural comparisons is precisely what has helped me, and many others in our culture, gain perspective on shattering personal experiences. Mine was a very disturbing experience with psychoactive chemicals, where I felt an ‘essential force’ rise up my body and threaten to burst out the top of my skull into a swirling vortex I saw in the sky. I felt like a was dying. Subsequently I learned—much to my relief!—that there are other ‘types’ of dying that are not comprehended by our literal-minded, ecstasy-free culture.

Participatory interest in shamanism is, of course, responsible for much of the term’s abuse. It also holds the key to a more sophisticated and—in the deepest sense of the word—scientific understanding of shamanism.

The abuses of the term in this area a largely to do with our own culture’s lack of ecstatic religious traditions, and with our domination by consumerism. The first leads to a fragile or non-existent ‘ecstatic cultural identity’, hence a tendency to vampirize and distort other cultures. As the magician Phil Hine said in a recent interview, "I think we have to be very careful when we appropriate chunks of living magical traditions, otherwise it’s Western imperialism all over again. The West has take their land, their culture, their dignity, and now we’re coming back for their spiritual beliefs." (Gyrus 1998) The second factor here—consumerism—leads to distortions in popular perceptions of shamanism. The less marketable aspects of shamanism (e.g. torturous initiation rituals, genuine sorcery, a deep concern with death and dissolution) are naturally edged out of popular accounts and workshops sold to middle-class self-discoverers.

What were you on when you wrote that?

As far as the academic community is concerned, there is of course the strong suspicion of ‘less than sober’ modes of experience impinging on research. There has been a perpetual crisis on the fringes of academia since the 1960s around this issue, and it will simply have to come to terms with the full implications of altered states of consciousness (and thus consciousness itself) if it is to have any hope of remaining relevant to genuine human knowledge.

Recently, in British Archaeology, archaeologist Paul Bahn made an oblique attack on the MA course in rock art at the University of Southampton, which is at the forefront of ‘shamanic’ research in this area. He sees such research—and specifically the idea that some rock art motifs may result from visions in altered states—as a "bandwagon . . . largely born of the drug age and the New Age phenomenon…" (Bahn 1998).

Bahn seems to think that those who take on board the shamanic hypothesis are excluding all other interpretative possibilities. In my view, they are merely redressing the balance. Not every study of rock art has to deal with every possibility; people are, by and large, astute enough to blend singular perspectives into the wider picture. And when one hugely important area of interpretation is lacking in the field, there is space for some specific focus on it, to fully drag it into the interpretative spectrum.

Incidentally, the independent researchers I know with extensive experience of psychedelic chemicals have been the first to point out holes in and exceptions to the theory of ‘entoptic’ geometric imagery influencing abstract glyphs in rock art. Actual experience of altered states, far from inducing a blinkered approach to theories about them, often leads to the most sophisticated approach (it’s called knowing what you’re talking about!).

The fact is that Bahn is perceiving more ‘shamanism obsessed’ research around him than there actually is (though he’d have a field-day with this article!). His accusations of projection and obsession merely reveal his own obsession with denouncing a new area of research. It is plain from his comment quoted above where the roots of his obsession lay: in the same soil that nourishes tabloid anti-drug hysteria, and the Thatcherite-Reaganite view that "it all went wrong in the sixties".

The Invisible College

He is right to be cynical about the ‘New Age’, but for the wrong reasons. In the eyes of someone like Bahn, the most intelligent, erudite and responsible modern student of psychedelic shamanism, totally unconcerned with the ‘New Age’, would fall into the same category as the flakiest, vaguest, fad-driven hippy. Naturally, people with little experience of Western subcultures end up not seeing past the images of drug culture, paganism and occultism that break through into the mainstream media. The Bahns of this world pose no threat at all to the ‘unseen’ (i.e. unmediated) explorers in this area—they will carry on regardless of popular perceptions. Indeed, their cultural ‘invisibility’ is in a way the core of their strength, as their research remains uncontaminated by mass-mediation, consumerism, and the vested interests of professional research. But the more conservative elements of academia do stand in the way of fruitful cross-fertilization between the cutting edge of academic research into shamanism / altered states and participatory research into these areas. In other words, they block the development of an integrated approach to the exploration of first-hand spirituality, past and present.

Of course, it is only academia that can lose. As I said before, those of us who are personally (and not necessarily professionally) committed to rediscovering ‘hands-on’ religion will carry on regardless. And the barriers that stop academics from reaping the benefits of ‘knowing what you’re talking about’ are not there to stop occultists, pagans and users of psychedelics from drawing on academic research for a more balanced, integrated approach.

The Vortex

The Strid gorge, West Yorkshire

Near Bolton Abbey in West Yorkshire is a section of the River Wharfe called the Strid, where the current narrows down between rocks to form a foaming torrent. Folklore collected in late nineteenth century tells of a certain shadowy beast, known as a ‘water kelpie’, which may appear here (Bogg 1904a: 189).

This water fiend generally presented itself to the belated traveller in the shape of an old shaggy-haired pony near to some well-known crossing place on the bank of a river. But woe to the traveller who, to escape the discomfort of getting a wetting, unsuspiciously mounted the supposed steed! It instantly sprang with a wild shriek of laughter into the deepest whirlpool, without giving its human victim any chance of dismounting.

Bogg 1904b: 348

Cup-and-ring carvings on the Panorama Stone, Ilkley Moor

When I first read this passage, its ‘shamanic’ resonances immediately leaped out at me. I was well aware of the reasons why. Firstly, my experience of nearly being sucked into a vortex in the sky—which I had subsequently gained perspective on through researching shamanic experiences—had led to a deep awareness of the association of vortex-like images with entry into otherworlds. The whirlpool is a good example of a naturally occurring vortex, and my research into shamanism had made me aware that shamans often use bodies of water as ‘entrances’ (see Halifax 1979: 61 for a !Kung example).

(Incidentally, I had come to see the possibility that cup-and-ring motifs may be associated with this phenomenon about nine months before I learnt that respectable academics were also considering this—see Bradley 1997: 54.)

Secondly, many years ago I had a dream in which I saw a brown horse pierced by a spear and fall to the ground. Then I was astride a winged white horse, flying up across the sea into the sky. Six months later I read Mircea Éliade’s Shamanism for the first time, and was amazed to learn of a Siberian shamanic rites in which a horse is slain so that the shaman may enter the otherworld and use the horse’s departed soul as a steed in that realm.

More recently, I had been sent an article by Angelo Fossati dealing with Iron Age petroglyphs in Valcamonica, Italy (Fossati 1994). He discusses a depiction of a ‘labyrinth’, incorporating three human figures and a bird (below), relates examples in early European mythology of birds acting as guides for those entering the otherworld, and then details how the horse superseded the bird as the main guide of this type in European myth.

These elements—the vortex-entrance, the horse as a ride/guide to the realms beyond it—resonated strongly for me with this little folktale of West Yorkshire. We may also note the liminal location of the water kelpie’s appearance.

Does this mean I see it as a ‘genuine’ linear descendent of classical shamanic practices in the area? About as much as I take my various dreams and experiences as evidence for me being a shaman! I am interested here in what is usually known as the ‘psychology’ of myth. Psychologically speaking, I see the nature of this Yorkshire water kelpie as emanating from the same regions of human consciousness that are the focus of shamanic exploration. If nothing resembling the classical definition of ‘shamanism’ ever existed in Wharfedale (which I find hard to assert as an absolute statement), the origin of the water kelpie would be ascribed to local ‘imagination’. Imagination was, in this case, probably put in the service of cautioning people, especially children, about the very physical dangers of this part of the Wharfe. But it is precisely this region—the human imagination—that is consciously entered, and explored in a spatially manifest form (‘the otherworld’) by the shaman. And the imagination / otherworld is ultimately non-local in nature.

Who’s in control?

We can see a failure to understand the common underlying source of mythical and cultural artefacts in the rock art and shamanism controversy. Much of the debate centres around whether or not this or that motif was directly inspired by geometric hallucinations. But even if a certain motif was just ‘imagined’, and associated with things more mundane than altered states, it would still, by definition, owe its creation to the human imagination. Problems arise when we try to pinpoint the exact way in which a motif emerged from this pregnant realm—was it hauled out, or did it fall out?

Here we reach the key distinction between ‘shamanic’ and ‘non-shamanic’ motifs, in both art and myth: the former are voluntarily encountered and actively related to. The latter ‘bubble up’ into consciousness of their own accord, but frequently still resemble shamanic motifs in form, if not in the way humans relate to them. The water kelpie is an entity that is, according to the tale, ‘misinterpreted’ as a real animal, and seems to possess a slightly demonic, malevolent nature. To me, this demonstrates a manifestation of a common shamanic phenomenon that

1. is initially taken to be ‘real’ because it is not encountered voluntarily, with awareness, and
2. seems to be beyond control and malevolent because, again, it is not approached with conscious intention.

Again, it matters little to the ‘psychological’ view whether anyone ever "actually" encountered a water kelpie, voluntarily or otherwise, or whether the beast is a simple ‘nursery bogie’ used to warn children of the river’s physical dangers. The form of the tale, even if it never ventured outside the human brain (which seems unlikely), still reveals the way in which shamanism can reflect the mind’s methods of organizing imaginative / mythical reality.

The voluntary nature of shamanic activity is stressed to distinguish it from mere mental breakdown. And indeed, modern magic also stresses that ‘intention is the key’. But, as any shrewd anthropologist or practising magician knows, human brushes with the otherworld are a little more complex. It appears to me, from my research into traditional shamanism, that intention and control are often factors that only come to the fore during and after shamanic training, or formalized rituals. A shaman’s initiation is frequently terrifyingly out of control. The otherworld initially bursts into the human world, not vice versa. The experience is only directed away from the anchorless processes of schizophrenia by cultural convention and recognition of shamanic potentiality, ripe for training.

And I find it hard to believe that all shamans reach a point of total ‘control’ over their universe. They may stress their personal power as part of their method, or to induce faith in the people they heal, but I like to bear in mind the words of Huichol shaman Don José Matsúwa:

The shaman’s path is unending. I am an old, old man and still a nunutsi [baby] standing before the mystery of the world.

Schultes & Hofmann 1992: 138

Modern magicians are also coming to recognise the limits of control over the world:

Magick is defined as: causing change to occur in conformity with will, expanding your achievable reality, the pursuit of power, and so on. All these definitions presuppose control as the central theme in magick. This is all fine and good, but it illustrates that magick cannot address issues outside of the sphere of control. These are issues that are usually chunked up into mysticism . . . This is a mistake, because half of our quality of experience is dependent on our ability to let go, stop worrying, stop controlling and enjoy. . . . Therefore, magick can be seen as the pursuit of power, via the dynamic tension between ecstasy and control.

Lee 1997: 13-15

I strongly suspect that most shamans would concur with such a view, if we get behind their professional bravado, and the cultural differences in our ways of mediating power, ecstasy and control.

We can see the control/ecstasy polarity in our comparison between !Kung trances and Kundalini yoga. The first is seen as ‘shamanic/magical’, the second as ‘mystical’. This is a useful distinction on one level; but does it mean that !Kung medicine men never experience the free-flow ecstasy of the Indian Tantrika? I feel it merely means that !Kung social structure, incorporating fully communal, actively shamanic ceremonies, allows the experience of ‘uncontrolled’ ecstasy to be subtly blended into the very fabric of their shamanic experiences. It is not compartmentalized and placed on a pedestal, as in much ‘mysticism’. As Lee says, "Control is the basis of magickal structures, defining one’s will in a given situation, but without ecstasy it doesn’t go. Without a tank full of gnosis, the magickal vehicle will not run." (ibid.: 14)

So, the issue of control in shamanism is not as clear-cut as academic accounts imply. In contemporary society, we know from the testimony of many individuals (and I know from personal experience) that involuntary experiences of the otherworld do not necessarily lead to mental illness, as definitions of shamanism often presume. Whatever ontological validity you ascribe to reports of ‘abduction by aliens’, they are clearly as real to many of the people who experience them as a traditional shaman’s journeys are to him or her. And again, they derive from the same regions of consciousness.

Patrick Harpur (1994) has made convincing comparisons between tribal puberty initiations, spontaneous shamanic initiation in the otherworld, and modern accounts of ‘UFO abductions’. These frequently share a similar structure:

• isolation from community/’reality’;
• the infliction of pain and possibly bodily mutilation;
• the transmission of esoteric knowledge to the initiate, shaman or ‘abductee’;
• and return to a world that is never quite the same again!

‘Abductees’ often have no knowledge of shamanism, and no history of ‘mental illness’. Yet the parallels are astounding.

I once interviewed a woman (Gyrus 1995) who described her experience of smoking the potent hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (used by many indigenous shamans in various organic forms). She was "grabbed" out of her initial experiences on the trip by an unseen force, and "landed in this dimension, and I wasn’t free, I wasn’t able to control where I went." Conveyed into the middle of a "grid-like structure", she was then reassured by an unmanifest "male entity". Told that she would find the following events frightening, but also that it would all be good for her, she proceeded to have each limb, one by one, ripped off and replaced. While each limb was off, "all this stuff ran out… I felt all my troubles, my aches and pains, my paranoias, come out." Then she "felt this mad feeling again, going up through my little toe, and it crawled all the way up my leg, and up through my body, and it felt like when it hit my heart, there was a massive explosion . . . I’ve just never felt so amazing in my life. It felt like a complete cleansing process." Needless to say, she felt healthier, happier, and more psychically potent than ever for months to come! I asked her later if she had read anything about shamanism before this experience, and she hadn’t; it was only afterwards that she encountered anthropological literature on the subject, which helped her understand her trip. Evidently there’s something unprecedented and very interesting going on here, something touching deep levels of human consciousness.

The inter-disciplinary parallels I’ve drawn here are obviously just the tip of the iceberg. For those committed to the rigorous slicing-up of life for the purposes of a professional career in gaining and dispensing knowledge, the weight of these parallels are a cumbersome burden; hence they are rarely even picked up. Those interested in all aspects of human experience need to be careful when confronted with such parallels, as they can lead into an interminable maze of intellectual associations. The way out of this maze is to discover the paradoxically idiosyncratic and universal nature of direct spiritual experience. Through this we can see, first-hand (scientifically), just how Difference and Similarity gain there meaning from each other.

We always need to remember what ‘shamanism’ really is. It is a modern Western conceptual construct, developed out of comparative anthropology. In our discussions, we shouldn’t forget that we define it, and are therefore at liberty to redefine it to suit the purposes of whatever form of research we are undertaking. Surviving indigenous ‘shamanic’ traditions will continue interacting with spirits in their own ways, whatever arguments transpire in academia about how a certain Siberian word may apply to them; modern magicians (and unsuspecting non-magicians) will do likewise.

Look again at Walsh’s definition of shamanism. In that form, it could easily apply to newly emerging traditions in Western society (with possible complexities around the definition of ‘serving the community’—we have no unified ‘community’, so this definition will, for us, always be subject to mutation and debate). Also, note that Éliade’s definition of shamanism can lead to the misleading idea that most young people in Britain are involved in this tradition every Friday night!

Very few modern magicians define themselves as ‘shamans’, simply because they are acutely aware of the historical and socio-cultural background to the term. However, they know that there is some inner congruence between their own activities and those of shamans throughout the ages, as there is between shamanic motifs and an amazing variety of human mythical constructs.

As a rough rule of thumb, I see the following distinctions in terminology:

shaman

A specific term that can only be validly applied to individuals within indigenous traditions.

shamanism

A Western construct used to reflect the astounding parallels between such traditions across the globe, and presumably throughout history.

shamanic

An adjective that may be used to draw attention to elements of myth, folklore, art, and hypothesized or actual spiritual activity that can be associated with motifs found in shamanism.

Emphasis on diversity must not become a new monolithic creed in our awareness of ourselves. I feel it must be balanced against the somewhat unfashionable idea of a unity underlying human consciousness. The ‘bathwater’ in this idea is its rigidity, its lack of feel for multiplicity; the ‘baby’ is our common human axis mundi. Let’s not throw out our own centre.

References

• Bahn, P., 1998. ‘Stumbling in the footsteps of St Thomas’, British Archaeology no. 31, p. 18.
• Bogg, E., 1904a, Higher Wharfedale, Petty & Sons.
• — 1904b, Lower Wharfedale, James Miles.
• Bradley, R., 1997, Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe, Routledge.
• Éliade, M., 1989, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Arkana.
• Fossati, A., 1994, ‘L’acqua, le armi el gli uccelli nell’arte rupestre camuna dell’età del Ferro’, Notizie Archeologiche Bergomensi no. 2, pp. 203-216
• Gyrus, 1995, ‘Amy’s DMT Trip’
• — 1998, ‘The San & the Eland’, Towards 2012: part 4, The Unlimited Dream Company.
• — 1998, ‘An Interview with Phil Hine’, Towards 2012: part 4, The Unlimited Dream Company.
• Halifax, J., 1979, Shamanic Voices: the Shaman as Seer, Poet and Healer, Penguin.
• Harpur, P., 1994, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, Viking.
• Lee, D., 1997, Chaotopia! Magick & Ecstasy in the PandaemonAeon, Attractor.
• Mookerjee, A. & Khanna, M., 1977. The Tantric Way, Thames and Hudson.
• Schultes, R.E. & Hofmann, A., 1992, Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers, Healing Arts Press.
• Walsh, R.N., 1990. The Spirit of Shamanism, Mandala.