Photo by Caroline Forbes

An Interview with Patrick Harpur

by Gyrus

Gyrus: The threefold division of ‘body, soul & spirit’, as opposed to the dualistic mind/body model so common in our culture, seems central to your work. Could you sketch it briefly, and discuss how you feel “soul” has come to be distorted, misunderstood, or lost?

Patrick: You’ve started with the hardest possible question! I’ve just jotted down 14 ways in which the word ‘soul’ can be used, and there are many more. It’s impossible to define. But this flaw is also its strength. Like ‘God’, it’s a portmanteau word, ‘empty’ in itself, yet taking on meaning in different contexts and in relation to other things.

Soul in relation to body likes to personify itself as Jung’s anima, for instance, or as the personal daimon whom Plato describes in his myth of the geezer called Er who returns from the dead at the end of The Republic. It’s different from soul in relation to spirit, which is where I prefer to use the word as the Neoplatonists used it. For them, soul was a whole realm intermediate between the spiritual or intelligible world (nous) and our own familiar sensory, material world. It was Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World, wherein dwell the daimons who link us, as Socrates remarked, to the gods.

However, this all-pervading collective realm was paradoxical: it could also manifest individually, as individual souls—in other words, as us. Since the chief faculty of soul is not reason but imagination, it likes to imagine itself in many different ways, cutting its cloth to suit the times. Thus it re-imagines itself now as Imagination itself—a powerful autonomous realm beloved of the Romantics whence all the myths come—now as Jung’s collective unconscious. It supplies the root metaphor for such modern re-inventions as the earth-spirit Gaia and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field.

But, in another sense, soul and spirit can be thought of as symbols of the two main perspectives through which we view the world—the two perspectives which create the world we see. We experience them as a tension within ourselves between the spiritual longing for Oneness, unity, purity, light, transcendence etc. and the imaginative need to recognise Manyness, multiplicity, labyrinthine entanglement, darkness, immanence etc. It’s because, historically—ever since the Enlightenment—Western culture has emphasised the preeminence of ‘masculine’ upward-striving Apollonian reason and science that I have tried to emphasise the neglected ‘soul’ perspective which is dark, moon-struck, downward-spiralling and Hermetic or Dionysian—the Affirmative way of the artist, as the medieval mystics might have put it, instead of their own Negative way, which disdains and seeks to overcome the images and myths which soul, willy-nilly, besieges us with and which we find so hard to free ourselves from in spiritual disciplines. The great ascents of the spirit into rareified mountain realms where the One dwells in blinding light can be read as a disastrous neglect, even repression, of the Nekiya—the underworld journey of the soul whose course is tortuous and mazy, moving towards darkness and death. That’s why, as far as any sort of gnosis goes, I prefer the soul’s way, death and resurrection, the painful initiatory dismembering of the shaman, to the rather unsexed and anodyne rebirth system of ‘spiritual’ paths.

I prefer, as Jung says, wholeness to perfection. That’s the short and incoherent answer to your question.

Gyrus: I was quite surprised when I learned that James Hillman had travelled quite widely, in Asia and Africa—his work is so consciously rooted in, and confined to, the Western tradition. You’re steeped in the same tradition, from Greek antiquity, through the Neoplatonists, to the Romantics and depth psychology; but you also freely draw inferences from anthropology, from animist traditional cultures. Have your own experiences while travelling led to this influence?

Patrick: Actually I’ve barely travelled at all—my daimon has always kept me tied to my desk, insisting that I travel metaphorically through the realm of imagination rather than literally… So, no—my influences are all from books. But I did hitch-hike round Africa with a mate in my gap year, when I was seventeen—when everyone else was travelling to India—and it did leave a deep impression on me. I constantly wondered what was going on in the minds of the Biafran refugees, or the Cameroonian villagers or the Masai or the Bushmen or the Ethiopians and so on.

I’m still trying to find the perfect work of anthropology, as it were—the book which gets inside the mind of wholly different culture from my own; which imaginatively empathises with its tribe rather than applying ‘scientific’ principles. I mean, how can you trust an anthropologist who can’t study witchcraft properly because he doesn’t believe in its possibility? I want anthropology to be like the works of Carlos Casteneda or that essay of Benjamin Whorf’s on the language of the Navajo or Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.

Gyrus: How does the perception of deep problems in the “comparative” approach to religion and myth, exemplified by J.G. Frazer and Mircea Eliade, impact your thinking? What remaining value do you see in wide cross-cultural surveys of things like folklore and shamanism, the alleged dangers and past mistakes of this approach notwithstanding?

Patrick: That’s very pertinent and difficult to answer. I laugh at the idea of this approach being ‘dangerous’—it’s often what academics often call ideas which contradict their own. Who’s in danger? What’s more dangerous is the modern presupposition that all cultures are isolated and opaque to each other, and so studies are confined to details and minutiae, without any attempt to draw wider inferences about how different cultures can be compared, and whether or not they share a common humanity.

But if you believe that humanity is informed by a common imagination whose autonomous products, the myths, are, as Ted Hughes says, ‘as alike as the lines on the palm of the hand’, you see that no myth is truly alien to us, no matter how outlandish it appears at first sight. And if no myth is alien, no culture is. And if the contents of the myths seem strange, then Lévi-Strauss’s structural approach has been very useful in showing how the mythopoeic imagination obeys certain archetypal rules—rules of symmetry and inversion, for example—which illuminate myths by showing how one story, which looks wholly different from its neighbour, is in fact a transformed version of that neighbouring tale. This is how I hit upon the notion that the tall tales of modern science concerning black holes and dark matter and the abyss of space etc. are in fact only literalised versions of those Gnostic myths which were suppressed by orthodox Christianity 1500-odd years ago.

So, while I sometimes despair of ever understanding a single thing about another culture, I also rejoice in how much of that culture is in fact available to me through our common imaginative substrate. Incidentally, it was my elaboration of what I call ‘daimonic reality’—a version of Jung’s ‘psychic reality’—which proved the most useful tool in understanding that relationship with the world which ‘tribal’ peoples seem universally to have, and which we Westerners used to have: a reality which lies between the literal and metaphorical, which has one foot in the Otherworld, which obeys Blake’s ‘double vision’ (something shared by all artists), which is participatory rather than objective, and so on. I’d call myself an animist if that weren’t already a rather insulting term for one who has a clear vision of how everything that is, is ensouled and participates in that great World-Soul whose images constitute the flagstones of reality which underlie this poor phenomenal world of ours. And this is how ‘tribal’ people see the world: they’re natural Neoplatonists.

And of course Eliade et al. may be wrong in certain details; but the impulse is, surely, invigorating and engaging in a way that most mythography and anthropology isn’t—we suffer loss of meaning, even a loss of soul as benighted primitives say, when we lack an overarching world-view, a sense of a bigger picture from which no culture is excluded, don’t we? (Frazer was, by the way, very different from Eliade—he literalised one ‘solar hero’ myth and sought to explain most other myths by recourse to it. In this he was more like a Darwinist than a comparative mythographer).

While I appreciate the agonising of post-colonial, post-imperial, post-modern critics, I just can’t interest myself in it. It’s a fault, I know. But my deepest impulses are religious, I think. I’m a Christian, for instance; but I don’t like other Christians much. That’s why I was so happy to find my own people among the Christian Neoplatonists (who are also pagan!) such as the alchemists, the Renaissance magi, the Romantic poets. A religion or religious perspective, at once Christian and pagan, such as they held, seems just what’s needed in our times of Christian and Scientistic fundamentalism. I’d like to propagandise it more; but unfortunately it can’t of its nature be subjected to the tools of propaganda because it’s subtle, humorous, tricky etc, and has to be just seen, like a joke or a dream, to be grasped. It’s the opposite of fundamentalism because it sees the root metaphors or myths behind every belief, including itself!

Gyrus: Is there not a hint, at least, of the unifying ‘spiritual’ urge in looking for a “common humanity”—with current academia, perhaps ironically, serving ‘soul’ in its desire to retain distinctions, to emphasize particular characteristics of specific cultures, to champion multiplicity?

Patrick: Yes. And yes.

Gyrus: In your work you make very lucid, revealing comparisons between tribal initiatory structures and spontaneous modern experiences such as UFO abductions. Could you discuss these associations and what fascinates you about them?

Patrick: Yeah, the Attack of the Little Grey Men. Wasn’t that interesting folklore? With all the requisite memorates and fabulates, as those annoying folklorists with their quasi-scientific jargon call them…

Like anyone fascinated by UFOlore, I racked my brains to come up with some sort of reason why 80% of all Americans (it seemed at the time) were being snatched into circular uniformly-lit ‘spaceships’ and subjected to bestial probings by those truly frightening little greys with their now-iconic all-black eyes (the cover of Whitley Streiber’s book [Communion] still gives me the willies).

One of the theories I liked was that they were the demonic spirits of the millions of aborted foetuses getting their revenge! But it just seemed to me that what these abductions most resembled was the painful initiation of shamans by daimons, and, indeed, the imitative initiation of pubescent boys who are abducted at dead of night by masked elders posing as daimons, and subjected to scarring and circumcision etc. before being given secret knowledge. I was also struck by a remark of Jung’s—that the unconscious shows to us the face that we show to it. And I wondered if the ‘greys’ were probing us in a heartless empirical way in some parody of the way we investigate Nature.

Anyway, there is no ‘explanation’ for the widespread abduction epidemic—it is not a problem to be solved but rather a mystery to be entered—but I gave it my best shot vis-a-vis finding anthropological and Jungian parallels. While I liked the late John Mack, the Harvard Professor who researched abductions, I didn’t like the way his latest book seemed to ‘work’ with abductees, hypnotising them etc., until the ‘greys’ became sort of relatively benign harbingers of, yes, you guessed it, the imminent ecological crisis—thus effectively repressing the idea that unless we find news ways of initiating ourselves into the Otherworld, we run the risk of being forcibly initiated, against our will, by daimons who have become apparently demonic by virture of our neglect of them.

Gyrus: What is your fantasy for more conscious initiatory rituals in our society—or do you think society is now too unwieldy to manage like this, and true initiations will now continue to be emergent phenomena?

Patrick: I wouldn’t be surprised if the need for initiation has become urgent. It seems to be, after all, a universal requisite—there’s no society which doesn’t or which didn’t at one time attach the highest importance to initiation. So, now that we’ve abandoned formal rites, we must expect to pay the price: a catastrophic severance of relations with the Otherworld, for example, and a lack of certainty about identity and adulthood among youth.

Luckily youth has its own means of self-initiation—drugs, piercings, raves, Mediterranean ‘holidays’ etc.—but these can all of course be merely destructive if they are not performed in a sacred context, the ritual pain succeeded by revelations of the tribal secrets and myths. I think children probably long for initiation if reality TV is any guide: whenever they’re subjected to real hardship in a meaningful context—Brat Camp etc.!—they respond gratefully.

I can’t think what religion is doing, adopting secular liberal caring values where everything must be comfortable and all suffering is medicalised. The whole point of religion is not to provide a cure for suffering but, as Simone Weil says, a supernatural use for it. Only suffering can provide the deep energy required for self-transformation. (Luckily, once again, there’s often enough suffering to go round in the course of everyday life—illness, bereavment, unhappiness in love, whatever—but it’s usually treated when it could instead be pressed into the service of initiation.)

But I’m beginning to rant now. It’s just that i’m furious at the deprivation of meaning, enchantment and transformation that young people suffer at the hands of our culture.

Gyrus: What were your most significant initiations into your relationship to daimonic reality?

Patrick: Well, you know, I was brought up believing in Spiritualism because my grandmother was a first-class medium and my mother a believer, who, wherever she lived, always managed to dig up a local medium / healer to talk to the dead or cure us kids of our childish malaises.

Meanwhile I was very aware of my Dad’s psychic powers, which he played down, even denied, having made of himself a hard-headed business man. But he saw the fairies twice as a young man in his native Ireland—all the more surprising because he was Anglo-Irish, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, who was not supposed to see or believe in the Sidhe.

So I grew up with the supernatural and, instead of forgetting or rubbishing it all once I was exposed to education, I always tried to fit it in—ultimately this meant writing my own book. I was lucky at Cambridge to be supervised by the great Shakespeare and Yeats scholar, Tom Henn, who was another Anglo-Irishman. He, too, believed in the supernatural—he experienced Panic while fishing a stream in Galway, and heard the banshee keening on a train to Birmingham (his brother died at that moment)—and he showed me rare books from the Order of the Golden Dawn, and generally encouraged me to use my beliefs, as Yeats had, to make sense of the world.

However, my real initiation didn’t come until I immersed myself in alchemy for my book, Mercurius; or, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. I thought I could crack alchemy in three months, but, three years later, I lifted my half-crazed, tear-stained face up off the nth Latin manuscript in the British Library and realised I’d never ‘crack’ it. For every book about alchemy perforce becomes a book of alchemy, and I had felt the hand of Mercurius move my hand and what I wrote didn’t come from me—I felt the centre of my volition shift and I was no longer myself. This, I suppose, is the central prerequisite of initiation: the awful uprooting as the Muse, or personal daimon, or self, ruthlessly seizes you and usurps the ego. From then on, I had a new topsy-turvy and Hermetic perspective on things, out of which I wrote Daimonic Reality and The Philosophers’ Secret Fire.

Gyrus: To apply Jung to his own lineage, what do you see as the Shadow side of the tradition of alchemy and Neoplatonism that you subscribe to? How do you relate to it?

Patrick: Your question is a difficult one. It may be an incoherent one. I don’t know that I can answer it.

I want to say that alchemy and Hermetico-neoplatonism (if such a thing exists) is itself the turbulent mercurial underground stream which shadows the orderly canals of religion and reason, welling up in times of transition and crisis to form the flood of culture we have called the Renaissance or Romanticism. That’s to say, in itself, the ‘perennial philosophy’ I favour includes its own shadow, like the Nigredo of the alchemists. That’s part of its great attraction: it is concerned with wholeness and with realising the totality of the psyche; it holds the great dividing forces within psychic life—forces I’ve called ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ (tho’, pace Nietszche, Apollonian and Dionysian would do)—holds them in tension so that nothing is repressed and no shadow forms.

I think Jung said that Christ redeemed mankind but left out Nature, which groaneth and travaileth. Nature is therefore Christianity’s shadow. It was part of the alchemists’ (unconscious) purpose to complete the work of redemption by raising up Nature. But in a sense this is no more than poetry does—there’s something redemptive about all great poetry, isn’t there? Poetry, like alchemy, doesn’t merely copy Nature (as Plato feared), but (as Plotinus says) completes the work of the Creator by returning to the original archai or archetypes which the Demiurge looked into in order to make the world.

The whole point of a daimonic philosophy (to put it another way) is that it doesn’t subscribe to the brilliant Apollonic lighting effects of monotheism and, later, rationalism which are themselves intrinsically shadow-forming—soul is always neglected and forced into the darkness underground. Rather it operates in lunatic twilight, between the light and the dark, where it is half light and half shadow, and so the problem of ‘the shadow’ is not so much resolved as dissolved altogether…

Sorry, gone off the point a bit. Or have I?

Gyrus: I get the idea of this hidden tradition “containing its own shadow”. But surely there’s a shadow that’s missed by everything that can be called a “tradition”. With alchemy and Neoplatonism, I wonder if social concerns, engagement with communal politics and so on, the whole quotidian world of people and their mundane necessities—isn’t this neglected by most exponents of the tradition? Maybe Blake manages to transcend even that… But the modern occult / hermetic “scene” can be woefully insular. And I look at the arc of James Hillman’s work, and it seems his merging of the concepts of Anima Mundi with things like urban architecture and environmental concerns came quite late in his career, like the “real world” out there was the last bastion. Of course he had his Neoplatonic take on it—that we repress beauty, and our environment suffers from this…

Patrick: Yes, I take your point about there always having to be a shadow of some sort—in the case of the Neoplatonic tradition, the quotidian world etc. I don’t know, but I always thought that that was something those guys took in their stride. When you read Porphyry’s life of Plotinus, you don’t get the sense that he was in any way sealed off from the world or sitting, Hindu-like and silent, in a sacred grove, or living in an academic ivory tower etc. Rather the reverse—like most mytics worth their salt, he seems to have been embedded in life and as pragmatic as St Teresa, who achieved union with the Godhead only to burst out of the convent and found many more, her letters full of practicality and worldly advice.

I dare say periods of retreat were necessary for the Hermetic lads, during stages of their advancement—as it is for us all. But I think they attended to God’s immanence in the world, and hence to the world, just as much as to His transcendent aspect. They had both perspectives, and held that contradiction in tension by means of Blakean ‘double vision’.

On the other hand, I’m only guessing. But I’m probably, as so often, right.

by Gyrus

In this culture, in this age, ego death can be slow and painful.

The Out of Order Order, Liber 111-111 (=000)

Experience

Glastonbury Festival, June 1993. I had finished my final degree exams, and was standing on the edge of a cliff. Behind me lay the rocky certainty of passage through the educational system; ahead lay the uncharted depths of the ocean commonly known as the Real World. At university I had been initiated into illicit drug use, and had fallen foul of a nervous breakdown precipitated by a broken relationship, and the subtle slip into drug abuse that sometimes follows initial ecstatic experiences. Here, among the hallowed hills of Somerset, the residues of this breakdown were to culminate in my facing Death.

The first days were quite uneventful, measured on the scale of the festival’s notoriously hectic hedonism — doughnuts, dope, blazing sunshine and glowing campfires. I ate little, slept little, and danced abundantly. I felt curiously disturbed by the appearance of a raving acid casualty, a girl who bounced around the stage area in the aftermath of The Orb’s appearance, burbling out an incomprehensible gush of verbal torrents that obviously served to help her precariously hang on to some reality among the shifting states she seemed lost in. “Trippy! Trippy! Trippy!” she would exclaim, obviously elated, making a small leap with each word, before degenerating into a disturbing paranoid rant. She eventually vanished into the darkness, and I bumped into a friend and temporarily forgot the incident.

Sunday was the final blow-out. Constant consumption of dope in the Jazz Field, and then preparation for the final night’s festivities — amphetamines, a pill which I hoped contained at least some MDMA, and a pure grass & hash joint. As I dabbed the speed in my tent, a companion poked his head around the zip flap and made a jokey comment about speed being deadly — I laughed it off, having happily ingested far greater quantities at other times, with only good effects.

I dropped the ecstasy before Porno for Pyros, and tried my best to thrash around in the sunset, surrounded as I was by drunken stoned people looking on dumbly at Perry Farrell’s antics. They finished, and I passed the joint around my friends in the dim twilight. Spiritualized took to the stage, which at once erupted into a blaze of searing white light and sculptured white noise. I felt instantly uncomfortable, but my love for the music and my conviction that I WAS going to enjoy myself kept me there for several tracks. Being outside, my glowing sunburn exposed to the chilly onset of night, didn’t help; neither did the fact that it’s impossible to dance to the mono-drone of Spiritualized, so I was unable to release any of the energy that I felt surging up inside me. Most significantly, I was quickly aware of very uncomfortable blocks in the energy flow around certain areas of my body. My left arm gradually passed from electrical tingling to numbness. My heart was beating rapidly, and its seemingly irregular pounding echoed around my body. I felt painful knots of muscles in my upper left back, and vainly tried to massage them out. I sensed that my entire left half, defined in an alarmingly precise way, was either tingling uncomfortably or numb. I feared a heart attack.

On top of this, I realised that I was standing in the same area as the acid girl had been in the night before. I fancied that her disequilibrium and general freaked-outness was seeping into me and not finding its way out.

I remember it vividly. The track being played was ‘Medication’ (a synchronistic irony which added to that of the band’s name, in relation to what was about to happen). The intensely bewildering white lighting, strobes and search-lights, began to seem disturbing, vaguely menacing. I crouched on the floor, partly to avoid the light and dull the sound, and partly to ‘steady’ myself. Rather than look at someone’s backside, I closed my eyes, but found that I could still perceive the forest of legs around me. And mingling with the muffled sound of the band (which was also carried through vibrations in the earth) was a sinister babble of whispering, all the conversations in the field floating around below head-level. Looking up, and opening my eyes, I saw an incredible thing in the sky, which I actually enjoyed watching for a moment, such was its spectacle. The band’s light show, reflected from the night’s clouds and shaped by my altered perceptions, smoothly coalesced into a vast, swirling vortex of light above me, rotating madly like a whirlpool into infinity. I decided to stand up… and after my body had straightened out to full height, I, my consciousness, felt as if I was continuing to rise. I felt as if the point of perception that is essentially me was rising up my spine and threatening to escape out the back of the crown of my skull, towards the vortex in the sky. My thought processes rocketed, and I felt absolutely positive that I was going to die. NOW. Or rather, I had the option — I could fight it off if I wanted to live strongly enough. My responses to this became a rapid oscillation between positive and negative, “Yes!” and “No!”, flitting insanely back and forth like a strobe. I eventually hung on to the positive long enough to decide to walk away.

I asked my friends to take me to the medical centre, which they managed to do with admirable efficiency under the circumstances. I was ferried across the site in an ambulance, and was examined at the medical centre… there I was told that my heart was fine and I was in no danger at all. I ranted for a bit about how E should be legalized so it could have guaranteed purity, and how they (the docs) should give me something to calm my metabolism down; but I was finally shown to a stone barn that served as a medical ‘chill-out’ zone. I found it very difficult to chill out in a brightly lit room full of fellow freak-outs, some crying uncontrollably, one occasionally pointing at me with a quivering hand and an expression of wide-eyed horror. I eventually wandered back to my tent with my friends, and watched the sunrise with a sense of gratitude I had never before experienced.

The months that followed were peppered with other, less intense, death-fear panics; usually, though not always, occurring after smoking cannabis. I would catch glimpses of that feeling I experienced at Glastonbury, of staring into the void of Death, contemplating with clarity and fear the black emptiness that would result from my experience of Life simply ceasing to exist. I was once accidentally given a coffee full of dope, and panicked severely on taking the last sip and discovering the huge flakes of slate at the bottom. Seeking shelter at a friend’s house, I found myself sat behind a television, listening with growing fear to the programme that was on, a hospital drama — the blip-blip of a heart monitor levelling out to a high-pitched tone amidst the sound of panicking doctors. A paranoid, synchronistic mind-media feedback loop often accompanied the death-fear syndrome.

I only began to feel release from the recurring death-fear after a particularly intense dream experience, several months after Glastonbury. As I drifted off to sleep, I heard hypnagogic chants and voices, and slipped imperceptibly into a dream set in the same room as I was sleeping in. All my teeth fell out. I began to feel my blood flow clogging up. The friend who was sleeping in the same bed as me called an ambulance (it was the same friend who had guided me to the medical centre at Glastonbury), and hugged me Goodbye. A crowd had gathered outside when the ambulance arrived, and they cheered me incongruously as I clambered in, apparently praising my degree results. At the hospital, I walked into a tatty, yellowish room lined with mirrors, full of decaying medical equipment and bustling nursing staff. My perceptions were distorted, giving everything the grimy, too-real appearance common on rough acid come-downs. Am I dying or tripping? Or both? If I’m tripping, how can I tell these doctors, who seem to be in a different world, to get me some thorazine? I looked at myself in one of the mirrors, and the instant that I saw my reflection, stark horror in my eyes and blood running from my toothless mouth, time slowed down and made all movements syrupy. I began to fall down to the floor, infinitely slowly, always staring fixedly at my reflection. I quickly remembered a tip a friend had given me for coping with Bad Trips — to place the palms flat on the front and back of the head, and to imagine a beam of blue light linking them. I did this, and everything grew instantly brighter… and brighter… and brighter… and brighter, until it reached a peak intensity, and all I could see was searing white light. I had finally died.

And then I woke up.

Maps & Models

After this dream, I began to intensively research areas that may shed light on my experiences — psychology, religion, shamanism, magick, dreamwork, meditation techniques. I slowly realised that my spontaneous experiences, uninformed at the time by anything save the barest inklings of these various bodies of thought, appeared to resonate with human mythologies and experiences that reached back into the prehistory of our species.

It may be tempting for many people to pass my experiences off as mere aberrations brought about by the careless use of chemical compounds. I cannot (perhaps of necessity). Extensive experience of altered states of consciousness, drug-induced and otherwise, has taught me that such monumentous experiences as these cannot, and should not, be sheltered from analysis and deeper understanding by the cosy blanket of reductionism. I believe my drug use enhanced and intensified my experience of processes that were already present in my situation. Although I ran the danger of mental and/or physiological damage, perhaps such an experience was necessary for certain ways of thinking, certain perceptions, to burst through the rigid layers of my social conditioning. And despite the fact that I acknowledge the stupidity in my abuse of chemicals, I believe that this stupidity stemmed largely from the society and culture that I was raised in — where potentially beneficial substances are criminalized indiscriminately, leading to misinformation and ignorance about their benefits and dangers. The same obsessional behaviour that taboos against sexuality lead to may also manifest in drug use when these substances are banned, and thus closed off from informed debate. For myself, it took an experience like this to shock me into self-discipline with regard to drug use, and to open me up to an intensive, experiential awareness of my own mortality — an awareness that can paralyse one into passive fear, or goad one into a more vital appreciation of the living of Life.

I never have one model. I always have at least seven models for anything.

Robert Anton Wilson

What I intend to do here is to summarise my research and intuitions about this experience, and its possible implications for myself and others in this culture. I’m trying to write what I would have liked to have read two years ago. I will make specific references to my own experiences to clarify the relevance of certain analogies, but I will leave much of the comparison work up to the reader. There is no overall ‘structure’ intended, although there are many resonances between separate sections. However, underlying all the different perspectives and traditions through which this raw data of experience may be filtered, there are several basic assumptions. These are the assumptions I hold now, after my research, and are, like all assumptions, expedient.

• The experiences I have described are not, in their essence, idiosyncratic aberrations; nor are they necessarily universal.
• My delusion that I was about to die was due to ‘crossed connections’ in my mental circuits. An impending dissolution (death) of a set of mental patterns (ego) was misperceived as the impending death of myself as a biological organism.1
• The processes involved in my experiences are intimately connected to ‘initiatory’ processes — both those natural to an organism’s socio-biologic evolution and those rituals found in tribal societies and esoteric mystery schools.

Throughout, I shall refer to the core process that I feel underlies my experiences as IF (Initiatory Fear), for reasons that I hope will become clear.

Shamanism

The most ancient models for IF processes lie in shamanism, which Mircea Éliade has defined precisely as techniques of ecstasy.2 Shamanism is not a religion — the set of techniques that define it exist within many mythological and religious traditions. However, investigations into surviving tribal cultures (in which shamanic practices have survived in their least diluted forms since their origins in human pre-history) have revealed some key, almost universal, mythological motifs in shamanic practices.

Of prime importance here is the initiatory ritual of death and resurrection. A shaman enters his vocation in one of several ways, usually through inheritance or through a spontaneous ‘call’. This often takes the form of an initiatory sickness, which may be an illness, an accidental brush with death (e.g. being struck by lightning) or a general breakdown.

The shamanic cosmos consists of three worlds: this world, the earthly realm; the underworld, populated by ancestral spirits and demons; and the upper world, where gods and celestial beings dwell. This cosmos is usually represented by the symbol of the World Tree; the underworld in its roots, the celestial realms in its branches, and this world where the trunk meets the ground. During hir initiatory sickness, the shaman’s soul travels down into the underworld, and is torn apart by spirits. The mutilated pieces of the shaman’s body are then brought back together, usually in a large cauldron, or in a blacksmith’s furnace. Often an extra organ or magical stone is included in the body as it is re-forged. This is followed by an ascent into the celestial realms, where the shaman meets the tribes’ gods. SHe then returns to this world, healed (often hir body has been lying prone, unconscious, in a tent or hut for several days while hir soul voyaged to the underworld). It is the fact that the shaman has healed hirself, through hir ecstatic journeys to the other worlds, that grants hir the power to heal others (one of the many social functions of the shaman). In healing others, the shaman induces in hirself an ecstatic trance, through drumming, dancing or hallucinogenic plants, which enables hir to journey again to the underworld, to battle with the spirits that have caused the illness, and to recover the client’s lost soul. The shaman also uses hir powers for divination, finding lost objects (or people), and for conducting the souls of the recently deceased to their place in the underworld.

From the reports gathered, it seems that the shaman’s perception of hir soul-body being ripped apart by spirits has a very literal character — many accounts convey an extremely gruesome event. Often, the shaman is decapitated so that sHe may witness hir own dismemberment. Here, while the physical body lies in a tent on the earthly plane, the shaman experiences hir mental and spiritual reconfiguration in a drastically physical way. If the death and resurrection motif of shamanic initiation is seen as a hypernormal ego deconstruction/reconstruction process, the misperception of ego-death as biological death in my own IF experiences can be seen to have strong historical precedents. Of course, my own experiences are more diffuse and distorted — they lack the ritualized focus and mythological structure of true shamanic initiation.

A final analogy is from a less traditional source of shamanic experience. In True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna describes his journey with his brother, Dennis, and several others to the Amazon basin, where they conduct an experiment in consciousness expansion using indigenous psychoactive mushrooms. 24 hours after their key experiment, during the night, Dennis went on a wild ramble in the surrounding jungle; or at least he believed that he did — nobody saw him go or return. Whatever the reality-status of the experience, he had wandered into the jungle and found an especially tall tree.

On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point of his ascent, something that he called “the vortex” opened ahead of him — a swirling, enormous doorway into time. He could see the Cyclopean megaliths of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and marble-faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt. And yet further into the turbulent mass of the vortex he saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man — titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering abysses, touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon-consuming time, rushed down upon him. He fainted, and time — who can say how much time — passed by him.

Again, the parallels are vague and diffuse, but nevertheless there. This account seems to indicate some of the experiences that the “vortex” phenomena may yield when the ego can be released from its painfully desperate attempts to maintain its mastery.

Esoteric Yoga

The most curious aspect of the peak of my Glastonbury death-panic was the sensation of my consciousness threatening to rise above my physical body, out of the top of my skull. There is an obvious connection here with the onset of a near-death experience, but the fact that I do not believe I was actually near physical death, only ego-death, causes me to look for other models (despite the fact that near-death experiences may parallel certain aspects of ego-death).

There is a striking similarity between the anatomical location of my consciousness’ near-escape route and the processes described in the ancient Indian esoteric practice of Kundalini Yoga. This is based around the theory of the chakra system in the human body. Briefly, there are seven separate chakras, or energy centres, each relating to different manifestations of energy in the human organism. They are located in the base of the spine, the genital area, the solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the ‘third eye’ (between the eyebrows) and in the crown of the skull. Each is related, due to its location, to different forces in human life, e.g. the base of the spine is associated with basic survival instincts, and the ‘third eye’ is associated with psychic perceptions. In addition, there is (in certain traditions, and in the correspondences of Leary & Wilson’s Eight-Circuit Brain model) an eighth chakra, located above the head, which is associated with out-of-body experiences. The Kundalini power is envisaged as a snake of energy, or life-force, that lies coiled in the base chakra. If it is activated, through yogic practices, it will surge up through the successive chakras. However, if there is a ‘block’ in any of the chakras above it, the Kundalini snake will rebound downwards, and manifest as a powerfully distorted force in the energy centre immediately below. But if all the chakras are functioning smoothly in their processing of energy, the snake will be experienced as a glowing fiery power that surges up through the spine and out of the top of the skull. Certain energy blockages probably caused the knotted muscles in my back, but the Kundalini seems to have burst through all the chakras to an extent, only to be prevented from free release by terrified ego-mechanisms.

Also, Antero Alli has made an interesting observation with regard to Kundalini experiences:

The activation of Kundalini does not always occur from practising Kundalini Yoga, etc. … It has been known to erupt spontaneously in those people on the verge of major spiritual breakthroughs, regardless of their ideas of how enlightened they are.

However, as my own experience showed, lack of preparation in this process may cause considerable panic, and false, potentially destructive perceptions.

The Dark Night of the Soul / Chapel Perilous

The sixteenth century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, wrote his treatise The Dark Night of the Soul in the years following his escape from prison at Toledo. In it, he describes the Dark Night as a “passive purgation”, a necessary period of spiritual dryness and despair through which every soul must pass on it journey towards God. In his introduction to the treatise, Rev. Benedict Zimmerman describes this process as the wilting collapse that follows the finite’s brush with the infinite: “There is one other reason why the soul should pass through the trials of the Dark Night. Its ultimate destiny is union with God. Now the soul is finite, and God is infinite. The disproportion between the two is so enormous (being, in fact, infinite in itself) that the mere comparison must have a crushing effect upon the finite being. … When the finite comes into contact with the infinite it realises its utter nothingness; it is humbled to the ground. The contrast causes it the most intense pain.” Stripped of the Christian theology, I find this to be a nice model to look at the vortex/void experience with. An experiential perception of the void (which is by definition infinite) shatters the puny ego with its incomprehensible vastness, and the ego vainly struggles and claws to hold on to itself — tearing at and cramping the natural psycho-biological flow of energy in the process.

Following in St. John’s footsteps, Robert Anton Wilson renamed this joyless phase of individual evolution ‘Chapel Perilous’. Antero Alli elucidates this idea in great depth in his Angel Tech. He feels that the cause of a soul’s entry into Chapel Perilous is a tremendous SHOCK. The soul, unable to deal with this, migrates from the body, leaving the individual in a barren, literally ‘soulless’ state.

This conception is strongly shamanic. An article I read on the Internet, long since lost in cyberspace, tied up the shamanic idea of soul-loss with modern psychotherapeutic methods of re-experiencing trauma. The combined theory suggests that when someone experiences a traumatic shock to their system, part of the psyche or soul is ‘frozen’ or ‘trapped’ at that precise intersection point in the space-time continuum. The modern model of recovery from this is that the individual has to vividly ‘relive’ that moment in time, and to fully feel the pain and shock that was repressed the first time around — thus ‘thawing out’ the trapped part of the psyche. The shamanic model sees this process as the recovery of the soul; the shaman travels into the underworld (which underpins the space-time continuum) and, after struggling with the evil spirits that kidnapped the soul from its owner in the first place (‘trapping’ it), brings the soul back to hir client, and restores it in its proper place.

Alli explains the process thus:

…[shock] often produces a sense of Limbo, floating feelings and an overall disconnectedness.3 Depending on how traumatic the shock is, we’ll enter into anything from ‘spaciness’ to the Permanent Vocation of Psychosis. Shock temporarily disconnects the soul from the body and sends it to CHAPEL PERILOUS to learn the lesson of the sermon. This process of returning to ourselves … will be referred to as INITIATION.

The initiatory nature of the Dark Night is now explicit. Alli sees the actual initiation in the rebirth aspect of the process. The death aspect occurs when the soul flees the body, and the individual is ‘reborn’ when the soul is recovered.

Initiation is a creative response to the shock of the unknown. Since SHOCK disconnects us, how do we reconnect and where do we begin? One creative way to respond to shock is by reconnecting ourselves to new habits and routines which increase our intelligence and make us happy. During the phase of our disconnection, we are perhaps most vulnerable to impressions and suggestions from ourselves and others. It is during this time that new directions may be initiated and crystallized when the ‘gap of our death’ eventually closes down again and we stabilize. … If we are naive to this effect and don’t reconnect ourselves creatively, we lapse back even deeper into our previous habits… like them or not. (Alli)

The Chaos Paradigm

A key influence on the conception of initiatory processes in this article has been ‘The Cycles of Chaos: Deconstructing Initiation’ by Kalkinath & Vishvanath. The impetus behind Chaos Magic,4 to strip dogma and glamour away to reveal the bare bones of magickal structures (and then to use glamours as tools) has been applied here to recognise that ‘initiation’ is not necessarily a cut-and-dried event that occurs once and instantly reveals great secrets, or ushers one on to an authentic ‘path’.

Initiation is described here as a “threshold of change”, and Kalkinath & Vishvanath make clear three important points about what I have termed IF processes:

• Initiations are processes. They may take many different forms, and vary in scope and impact. Here, the process of initiation is divided into three cycles — (a) peaks (initiatory crises), which can take the form of intense over-load experiences, crushing breakdowns or accidents/illnesses; (b) troughs, in other words Dark Nights of the Soul, dryness of spirit and an oppressive sense of emptiness; and (c) plateaux, where “nothing much seems to be going on”.
• Initiatory processes are fractal. Here, they are described in terms of Macroscopic and Microscopic initiations. That is, Big Ones and Little Ones; different scales of process which share a basic similarity in structure, and which often contain elements, motifs or archetypes that resonate across space and time.
• The key to dealing with initiatory cycles is recognition. Through examining your own experiences, you can become consciously aware of the particular process you are moving through. Kalkinath & Vishvanath’s method for dealing consciously with IF processes is the A PIE formula: Assess — stop and realise you are at a turning point, examine possibilities open to you, use option lists, divinatory techniques, “be vulnerable to the forces of change.”; Plan — decide what you need to do, gather resources necessary for its implementation; Implement — do it! Follow things through, do not give in to inertia; Evaluate — assimilate your experiences into your Self, real-ize the lessons you have learnt.

In line with a major practical technique in the Chaos tradition, the inevitable fear associated with these processes is not seen as something to be avoided and suppressed. Rather, full awareness is maintained; the fear is fully experienced, and transformed into wonder or excitation. “Transform fear into fuel” — a redirection of energy flow.5

Psychedelic Research

Ego-Death

In the mid 1960s, ex-Harvard professor Timothy Leary collaborated with colleagues Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner on a re-vision of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, renamed The Psychedelic Experience. Their central thesis in this new interpretation is highly relevant to the general ideas presented here in relation to IF processes. The Book was traditionally seen as a guide-book for the dead, to be read to the dying or recently deceased in order to guide them through the successive realms, or bardos, of the Tibetan Buddhist model of the afterlife — and to enable them to successfully find a nice new body to be reincarnated in. With the guidance of Tibetan Buddhist Lamas, Leary revealed that this was merely the exoteric reading of the Book. Its hidden, esoteric meaning was that it was designed to guide people through the death/rebirth initiation rites of Tibetan mystery schools.

So, with the intention of providing Americans with a safe guide to turning on, he and his friends re-wrote the Book in modern psychedelic parlance. In a journey directly analogous to that supposedly taken by the departed soul between the end of one life and the beginning of the next, the tripper is guided through the death of hir old ego (resulting in the classic ‘merging with the Clear Light’), and, on the come-down, advised regarding creative choice of new ego patterns, more flexible ‘game routines’.

Speaking of the difficulties often encountered by those new to intense psychedelic experiences, the book confirms my own intuition regarding the misperception of ego-death:

…another impasse is the imposition of physical symptom games onto the biological flow. The new somatic sensations may be interpreted as symptoms. If it is new, it must be bad. Any organ of the body may be selected as the focus of the ‘illness’. … All physical symptoms are created by the mind. Bodily sickness is a sign that the ego is fighting to maintain or regain its hold over the outpouring of feeling, over a dissolution of emotional boundaries.6

Perinatal Matrices

As we venture [on LSD] beyond the biographical events of early childhood, we enter into a realm of experience associated with the trauma of biological birth. Entering this new territory, we start experiencing emotions and physical sensations of great intensity, often surpassing anything we might consider humanly possible. Here we encounter emotions at two polar extremes, a strange intertwining of birth and death, as if these two aspects of the human experience were somehow one. Along with a sense of life-threatening confinement comes a determined struggle to free oneself and survive.7

Stanislav Grof is a pioneer in the application of the psychedelic experience to clinical psychiatry, and in the mapping of the human psyche. His principal contribution to human psychology seems to be his research into how our experiences in the womb, and during the birth process, affect our life experiences as adults.

During many LSD sessions, involving both himself and patients, he noticed that most people eventually spontaneously re-lived their pre-birth experiences — even back to being a sperm struggling towards its goal, at the same time as being the egg waiting for the triumphant sperm. Their fusing would be experienced as a titanic explosion of creative energy, followed by the mysterious differentiation of cells that forms the foetus. Many experiences of foetal life and birth related by patients in psychedelic therapy were later confirmed objectively by medical records, parents and adults present at the birth. Without prior knowledge, people established through LSD sessions very specific details about their mother’s lives while pregnant and various events or complications surrounding their birth.

Grof discovered profound connections between the physical experiences of the womb and of birth, and later manifestations of aberrant behaviour and psychology, as well as intense spiritual experiences. He called the complex emotional constellations that threaded through the key experiences of an individual’s life COEX systems (for “systems of COndensed EXperience”). An individual will usually have several COEX systems in their unconscious mind, each one dominated by a major theme, e.g. humiliation, claustrophobia, or rejection (there are also positive COEX systems, however). As a result of his research, covering both LSD experiences and physical birth processes, he concluded that a major, possibly fundamental, part of each COEX system is a corresponding stage in foetal development and birth. He called the residues of these experiences Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs).8 He hypothesizes that many traumatic or ecstatic life experiences involve a re-invocation of BPMs whose dominant themes resonate with the specific experience. More radically, he suggests that certain compulsive or obsessive traits (e.g. the repetitive seeking-out of humiliating experiences) are governed by BPMs — we search, consciously or not, for situations that re-invoke certain birth processes, which consequently augment the corresponding COEX system. He feels it is necessary to fully re-experience, and integrate, such BPMs in order to resolve the conflict patterns they have engendered.

He divides the BPMs into four successive stages, each one representing a specific constellation of motifs (represented on LSD by vivid hallucinations and emotions), each one a basis for an ongoing COEX system. I shall briefly describe his definitions of these stages, and add comments regarding their relevance to this essay as appropriate.

• BPM I — The Amniotic Universe: Often associated with the passive, oceanic ecstasy of classical mysticism; every need being instantly fulfilled, floating in a warm, comfortable aquatic environment. However, recollections of various toxins in the mother’s body (alcohol, cigarettes, spicy foods, ‘toxic’ emotions like anger or bitterness) can manifest as feelings of suffocation, agonizing physical pains, muscular spasms, the felt presence of insidious evil entities or alien intrusions.
• BPM II — Cosmic Engulfment & No Exit: Finds its basis in the onset of the birth process, the realisation that the bliss of the Amniotic Universe is about to end, but without any idea of what will follow. The uterine cervix is still closed, but contractions have begun, and various hormonal and chemical changes are taking place. “The contractions, closed cervix, and the unfavorable chemical changes combine to create a painful and life-threatening environment from which the fetus can sense no possibility of escape. It is no wonder the death and birth are so closely related in this matrix.” Grof relates the common occurrence of paranoid ideas during the reliving of this matrix (radiation, evil forces, secret organizations, extraterrestrial influences) to the chemical changes of the onset of contractions, which may be perceived by the unborn child as disease or intoxication. He also relates the pessimism of the existentialists to this process, noting that Sartre called one of his most famous theatrical statements of crushing anxiety No Exit.
  There are two specific quotes here that may shed light on the key experiential themes of this essay:

  As these threatening experiences continue and deepen, the person may have a vision of a gigantic whirlpool and feel in the middle of it, being drawn relentlessly to its center.9

  Experiences of BPM II are best characterized by the triad: fear of death, fear of never coming back, and fear of going crazy. I have already discussed the predominance of the theme of death; this often includes the sense that one’s own life is seriously threatened. Once this feeling is present, the mind is capable of fabricating any number of stories that provide a rational ‘explanation’ of why this is happening — an impending heart attack or stroke, an ‘overdose’ when a psychedelic drug is involved, or many others. The cellular memory of birth can emerge into present consciousness with such a force that the person believes beyond any doubt that real biological death is possible and actually imminent.10

  And, echoing Kalkinath & Vishnvanath’s advice about ‘relaxing into the fear’, Grof states: “Paradoxically, the fastest way out of this situation is to fully accept the hopelessness of the predicament, which really means conscious acceptance of the original feelings of the fetus.”

• BPM III — The Death-Rebirth Struggle: A continuance of the above process, although now there is a little ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, as the very apt cliché goes. “In the previous matrix, the cervix was closed; now it is open, allowing the fetus to move through the birth canal. Although the fight for survival continues, there is now a sense of hope, a belief that there will be an end to the struggle.” Reliving this process involves a titanic experience of pressure (due to the vast pressure of the pelvic opening on the child’s head and body), and the intense physical proximity between the child and the mother often results in an oscillating identification between the child and the mother. This frequently involves intense sexual arousal, due to the involvement of the genital area. Grof believes this to be a stage of violently merging contradictions, where death is intertwined with sexuality, pleasure with pain, aggression with love — he terms this experience “Dionysian” or “volcanic” ecstasy, as opposed to the passive bliss of BPM I.
• BPM IV — The Death-Rebirth Experience: A traumatic yet triumphant culmination of previous sufferings and struggles, resulting in an experience of total ego annihilation. Their is an intense purgation that bursts through the pits of despair and violence of BPMs II & III. There follows a sense of deep relaxation, serenity and quiet excitement. Grof warns that an incomplete re-experiencing of this stage, due to complications in BPM III, may result in a hyperactive mania; the cosmic insights and feelings of triumph at this stage can manifest in people wildly proclaiming their revelations to others and making grandiose plans to change the world.

Although Grof occasionally runs dangerously close to a reductionist position (intense emotional experiences in adult life are nothing but the re-emergence of perinatal matrices), the primal nature of the birth process does indicate that experiences of it may be of great importance in assessing and understanding many archetypal human experiences of death-rebirth.

Individuation, Culture, and Awareness of Mortality

In surveying the neo-Jungian literature dealing with the different stages of human life, and the transitional phases/crises between them, I was struck by the fact that the crisis provoked by an encroaching awareness of self-mortality is placed categorically in the mid-life crisis transition. In his wide-ranging study, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Daniel J. Levinson acknowledges that the concept of death does play a role in all the various transitional phases:

Some preoccupation with death — fearing it, being drawn to it, seeking to transcend it — is not uncommon in all transitions, since the process of termination-initiation evokes the imagery of death and rebirth.

However, Levinson says that “…the experience of one’s mortality is at the core of the mid-life crisis.” Why? In this standard model of the human life-structure, the biological and social imperatives come first: the crisis of the early adult transition (approx. 17-22) is focused around entering the adult world, with the primary aims of getting married, raising a family, and getting a job (and social status) to facilitate this. When these duties are accomplished, and the person in question is rendered redundant in terms of their biological service to the species; then sHe will begin to realise the horrible fact of mortality.

Although I have not found any statement backing this up, Levinson’s assertions about the awareness of death in the mid-life crisis seem to contain an implicit commentary on Jung’s conception of how cultural evolution is carried out:

Man has two aims. The first is the natural aim, the begetting of children and the business of protecting the brood; to this belongs the acquisition of money and social position. When this aim has been reached a new phase begins: the cultural aim.11

A young person has not yet acquired a past, therefore has no present either. He does not create culture, he merely exists. It is the privilege and task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture.12

It isn’t too wild an assumption to see a connection here between awareness of mortality and participation in the evolution of culture. Lust for some form of immortality (fired by awareness of death) has often been cited as the drive responsible for culture in the first place. Jolande Jacobi has elucidated Jung’s philosophy further with a quote from Schopenhauer:

Life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together.13

I don’t think that Jung’s and Schopenhauer’s views here stem from some youth-hating bigotry. This model of the individual’s relation to culture was probably quite valid for their respective eras. However, as most people reading this must know, it is no longer just over-40s who create all the culture that surrounds us and permeates our existence. Since World War II, the progressive emergence of specific youth sub-cultures has created zones of autonomy in which young people can manifest their own cultural environments: beatnik, hippy, punk, mod, goth, industrial, rave, cyberpunk… These radiate outwards into mainstream culture, where they are usually assimilated and emasculated; but the continuing existence of thriving sub-cultures keeps the young one step ahead of the mainstream. Jung and Schopenhauer would have had to radically remodel their ideas if they had been zapped into the future and taken to a rave festival in the backwoods of rural England.

The DIY ethic of all the most radical elements of today’s youth cultures is a conscious rejection of the model of cultural evolution that seems to have existed from the beginning of settled civilisations until about fifty years ago.

A Stab in the Dark Night

What follows is just one model in which to place IF processes in relation to human evolution in general. I’ve only found this one so far — I’d be interested to hear of others. I’ve taken the step of making quite a wild generalization, extending from my own personal experiences out into cultural evolution theory for two reasons: (i) The fact that most people I know have experienced some form of breakdown (at least) or confrontation with Death (at most) in their early twenties. Several cases have borne vivid similarities; and (ii) it’s a possibility, so I’ll throw it out there for it to be ripped apart and analysed by others, and to pass or fail the test of time.

It seems that in the context of my own (and many other peoples’) experiences, the awareness-of-death crisis, that traditionally hits you when your brood have flown from their nest, has been shoved backwards down the ladder of life to become the focus of the early adult transition crisis. It is true that many of the ‘confrontations with Death’ I spoke of above involved assorted hallucinogens, or pseudo-hallucinogenic cocktails of other substances. Firstly, beware of reductionism, of ‘explaining away’. Secondly, it may well be that in certain sections of the population the awareness of mortality is being shoved backwards because of the widespread use of psychedelics. The intimate connections that have been traced between the explosion of psychedelic usage in the sixties and the parallel emergence of youth culture seems to confirm that these compounds have played a great part in the toppling of the Jungian model of culture.14 Of course, psychedelics make you aware of more than just your own death — but this seems to be a glaringly powerful factor in the hypothesis that is emerging here.

Jacobi acknowledges that there have always been those freak individuals who end up looking at the wrong side of Schopenhauer’s embroidery in the first half of their life cycle. He describes these as “the introverted, the seekers, the quiet and reflective ones.” He sees this as a tragedy — they supposedly spend the first half of their life moaning about how screwed up the world is, and then mourn the missed opportunities of youth in their old age. This seems to be a completely illogical way of looking at things. To go back to Schopenhauer’s analogy — surely the woMan who looks naively at the ‘right’ side in youth, then sees the thread structures in middle age and starts trying to add hir own contribution, surely sHe will be pretty frustrated that sHe has realized the pattern can be re-made — after hir youthful energy has passed hir by. Surely we should look at the ‘wrong’ side as soon as possible, try to improve it, or re-thread it, as best we can. Then we can relax as we approach old age, enjoy the fruits of our labours, and watch the new generation with pride as they valiantly add their own improvements to life’s embroidery.

It seems that youth culture in the late 20th century holds at its core this very idea, of looking at the wiring under the board and re-engineering, long before one is ‘supposed’ to. Perhaps we have been forced to do this, such is the blatancy of the toxic mess our ancestors have made of our culture and the planet we inhabit. And, on surveying the writings of Arthur Koestler, it can be seen that this lowering of the age of cultural participants has possible evolutionary implications.

Paedomorphosis, or Juvenilization, is an evolutionary strategy much lauded by Koestler.15 Although it has gained credence from the work of biologists such as Garstang, Hardy, de Beer, Koltsov, Takhtajan and Julian Huxley, it is not an established argument in the study of biological evolution. But, as we shall see, it is of undeniable importance in cultural evolution.

In general, paedomorphosis is seen as an evolutionary strategy for the escape from the dead-ends of over-specialization:

It indicates that at certain critical stages evolution can retrace its steps, as it were, along the path which lead to the dead end and make a fresh start in a new, more promising direction. The crucial event in this process is the appearance at the foetal, larval or juvenile stage of some useful evolutionary novelty which is carried over into the adult stage of the organism’s progeny.

An example given by Koestler of this process in biology is that of the sea cucumber. This creature ordinarily sits on the sea bed like an inert sausage. However, its larvae float about in the ocean, like a plant’s seeds in the wind. These larvae show features, like a ciliary band (a forerunner of the nervous system), that make them closer to fish than the adult cucumber. It is hypothesised that some of these larvae, subjected to stronger selective pressures than the adults as they drifted in the oceanic currents, gradually became more fish-like, and eventually some reached sexual maturity while still in the larval state — “…thus giving rise to a new type of animal which never settled on the bottom at all, and altogether eliminated the senile, sedentary cucumber stage from its life history.”16 Paedomorphosis “involves a retreat from specialized adult forms to earlier, less committed and more plastic stages in the development of organisms — followed by a sudden advance in a new direction … In biological evolution the escape is brought about by a retreat from the adult to a juvenile stage as the starting point for a new line; in mental evolution by a temporary regression to more primitive modes of ideation, followed by the creative leap forward.” Thus, biological juvenilization finds its parallel in cultural evolution.

Now, perhaps, the ‘archaic revival’ proposed by Terence McKenna, and the term ‘modern primitive’ popularized by the Re/Search body art manual, can be seen in an evolutionary context. The prime characteristics of rave culture — the use of psychedelics, the utilisation of percussive music for altering consciousness, its neo-tribal structure, the rise in nomadic lifestyles, the popularity of body-piercing and tattooing — may be seen as a cultural return to a more primitive model. From this point, having regressed back beyond the cultural and social blind alleys of recent human history, a “creative leap forward” may be made to escape WoMan’s over-specialization.

Hopefully, out of this quaggy mire of pop science, the reader will have already dredged up my main argument, relating to IF processes. It is probable that our culture has reached a dead end. The intense selective pressures that today’s young face, adrift during their larval phase in overloaded media landscapes and societal breakdowns,17 may be dramatically collapsing the awareness-of-death crisis back to the point at which the security of the parental/educational nest is left behind — and often even further. The breakdown-restructuring process that this awareness necessitates, when experienced in the “more plastic” stages of adolescence/early adulthood, will enable some to restructure themselves, and eventually their culture, into more viable, less destructive phenomena.

Koestler also talks about the process of regeneration in relation to paedomorphosis. Apparently, in animals that are able to regenerate lost limbs or organs, like amphibians, the “magic [of regeneration] is performed according to the undoing-redoing formula; the tissue cells near the amputation stump de-differentiate and regress to a quasi-embryonic state, then re-differentiate and re-specialize to form the regenerated structure.” Koestler’s examples progress up the evolutionary tree to rats, whose brain tissues can similarly de-specialize then re-specialize if their optical cortex is removed.

Lastly, in our own species, the ability to regenerate body structures is reduced to a minimum, but compensated by man’s unique power to re-mould his patterns of thought and behaviour — to meet critical challenges by creative responses. And thus we have come full circle through biological evolution back to the various manifestations of human creativity, based on the undoing-redoing pattern, which runs as a leit-motif from paedomorphosis to the revolutionary turning points in science and art; to the mental regeneration at which the regressive techniques in psychotherapy are aimed; and finally to the archetypes of death-and-resurrection, withdrawal and return which recur in all mythologies.

And we have come full circle, back to the shamanic initiatory theme.

It is fascinating to note the connection between a culture’s provision of initiation rites for its young (shamanic or otherwise) and the level of crime and mental illness in that culture. Jungians never tire of pointing out our lack of culturally sanctioned rites of passage, and its connection to retarded personal development. But what do WE have to be initiated INTO? In tribal societies, a youth undergoes severe ordeals as part of hir initiation into adulthood, and “During the heightened suggestibility of this state, he is instructed in tribal lore, myth, secrets, traditions and the arcane wisdom of the ancestors.”18 What if the culture doesn’t work anymore? What if the majority of the ‘elders’ are as ignorant of the (toxic) culture they live in as they are of the (toxic) air they breathe? They are then in no position to initiate anyone into anything. But the initiatory process will not just fade away — “…although our culture no longer provides rites of initiation, there persists in all of us . . . an archetypal need to be initiated.“19

What I am proposing here is that we may be seeing the emergence in certain individuals of spontaneous initiation, into the culture that the individual chooses to help create.20 Please read the previous sentence again and think about it. The forces of cultural evolution may be thrusting vastly traumatic, and potentially highly creative, mental breakdowns upon young people; unprompted and unasked-for initiatory crises that lack a rigid formula for the re-structuring phase… and hence burst open the vertiginous possibility of a radically new vision of human culture and society.21

Appendix

What follows is a compilation of extracts from letters received from an individual who has had a similar set of experiences to the myself. His account is interesting in that he seems to have facilitated a return to the death-panic state, and actually ‘went through’. It should be borne in mind that these words were never intended, originally, for publication. My grateful thanks to (you know who you are) for allowing this account to be published, and for helping me put my own experiences into perspective.

I had the same type of experience (the opening up of the universe and a type of vortex pulling me up) about 9 years ago. I had been smoking hash and drinking most of the night. I suddenly began seeing (I was in a pub) that my life could stay exactly like it was, and that I would be like the other people in the pub, just sitting around wasting their lives. I left the pub, and as I began walking down the road, my mental universe seemed to give way. The ‘vortex’ type effect came and I knew I had the choice to live or die. My heart began beating so loud and fast that it dominated my consciousness. Something inside me knew it was going to pack out. I also knew that I had to go forward (upward) and die, but oh, oh, oh, what fear and panic. I didn’t want to make the choice, and so I collapsed on the floor (luckily no one was about or I would have felt a right turkey).

After this experience I was no longer capable of living the life I had been living, but also couldn’t go forward and work out where I was going next — I had a great sense that I had failed the experience and should have died. After a lot of anguish and lack of direction, I was eventually born onto the Magickal Path, i.e. I read a few Crowley books and felt these may lead to an understanding of the experience. I began practising various magickal and yogic methods, which served as a good discipline. I had slight rumbles of the life/death/panic experience, but nothing so heavy as the first one for about 7 years or so.

Then, late in ’92, I again had the experience, the whole bloody “I’m going to die” panic. I managed to control it this time, but on my birthday I was again there. I really knew I was going to die. I was sobbing and shaking. My heart was again going crazy, time seemed to have slowed down, so each moment was an eternity, every thought seemed to have infinite significance. My girlfriend eventually called a doctor, and I was told it was a ‘panic attack’. I had these ‘panic attacks’ (although not as intense) for quite a few months after this. Every time I went through them it was always a choice of life or death, Death a forward decision and Life a backward decision. And I always came away from them with a sense of failure. On the early morning of 6.7.93, I had another. This time I used all of my discipline (from yoga/magick work) and rode the panic. I rode it all the way up. I lost all consciousness of my body and material surroundings. I came to the point where I knew I would die or not. I knew to back out would somehow lead to failure. I knew I had to die. It was the end of my life. It was a type of block that separated life from death. I then pushed forward and surrendered to death. All I can say after this is that I later started ‘coming down’, knowing I was ‘reborn’ (horrible Xtian-type word) and that I had completed my life/self.

Since that day I have been able to ride the ‘vortex of light’ without the Pan-ic, and had been riding it the night before I got your letter. I think the experience is linked to the Greeks’ Pan concepts, Pan being the all-begetter, all-destroyer; death, all and not. Thus the Pan-ic felt when the life/death choice comes. This is just one map I have since found that seems to describe this experience. Another is that the vortex equals Kundalini, and the ‘death leap’ equals the reaching of Nirvana. They all seem to fit the experience, using different symbolism. As I was saying, I now seem to be able to ride the vortex without the same Pan-ic. I can do this by mixing yoga and hashish, although I now find that the ‘Great Leap’ is impossible for me, as it seems to be a one-off experience — you can only die twice!

I found it very interesting to read in your letter how after your Glastonbury experience you occasionally felt the vortex opening up again. I too had (and still have occasionally) the same feeling. It’s as if the near-death experience cuts you free of gravity, and at any moment you can be sucked up into infinity. Incidentally, I was reading a ‘Women’s Own’ type magazine a few weeks ago, and came across an article about the increasing occurrence of ‘panic attacks’ amongst the population recently. It seems from the article that doctors aren’t really sure why this is, or what can be done about it. Reading this, I came to the theory that they (the ‘panic attacks’) could be some kind of evolutionary mutation, brought on perhaps by the increase in information and a growing awareness of there being no one basic reality. Thus the person’s sense of security is weakened, opening up the ‘fear-vortex’.

Footnotes

1. If I drop dead of a cardiac arrest tomorrow, I don’t believe it would invalidate my ideas here. The fact that I am writing this now proves that my fear of imminent death at Glastonbury was unfounded. Also, several medical check-ups since then have shown that my heart is perfectly healthy. This is one of the reasons I have interpreted my experience as a transference of a mind-based process onto the physical aspect of my organism. [back to text]
2. The word ‘ecstasy’ is not used here in the standard narrow definition of ‘rapturous joy’. Its roots lay in the Greek word ekstasis, literally ‘to stand outside oneself’. Overwhelming joy may be experienced, but shamanic ecstasy, soul-travel, is not confined to one emotion, or even standard conceptions of emotion. [back to text]
3. Both myself and my correspondent (see Appendix, above) experienced this sense of weightlessness. I felt it as a very worrying sense of insubstantiality, of not being ‘grounded’ in any way. [back to text]
4. For more information on Chaos Magic, see Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll, and Prime Chaos and Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine. [back to text]
5. John C. Lilly has expressed this view in an interview in Mavericks of the Mind. Asked what he thought the purpose of fear is, he replied, “From Orthonoia to Metanoia through Paranoia. Orthonoia is the way most people think; they’re creating simulations that everyone accepts. Metanoia is where you leave all that and you’re experiencing higher intelligence. But the first time you do this, you’re scared shitless. On my first acid trip in the [flotation] tank, I panicked. Suddenly I saw the memorandum from the National Institute of Mental Health: ‘Never Take Acid Alone.’ That’s all I could think of. Luckily, I was scared shitless, had no idea what was going to happen, and boy, that was rocket fuel if ever there was one! I went further out in the universe than I’ve ever been since. So the Paranoia is rocket fuel to get you into Metanoia.” Incidentally, Lilly’s concept of metaprogramming in his books The Human Biocomputer and Centre of the Cyclone precisely anticipated the basic principles of Chaos Magic (as exemplified in Pete Carroll and Phil Hine’s work), which came along about 10 years later. [back to text]
6. A note here on the fears that are abound about ‘the end of the world’. To put it glibly… equate, if you will, the individual ego with the collective consciousness, and individual biological organism with the biosphere. Is it not possible that, just as impending ego-death may be experienced in the distorted form of the terror-inspiring feeling that Death is approaching, humanity’s fears of an ‘apocalypse’ may be just a (potentially dangerous) mass misperception of an impending release from our petty collective ego? [back to text]
7. The Holotropic Mind, p.28 [back to text]
8. Perinatal means near or around childbirth. [back to text]
9. The Holotropic Mind, p.48. In correspondence, Margaret Andreas commented on my ‘vortex’ experience, “Surrender to the Void. The Void is the Womb from which we will be reborn.” [back to text]
10. The Holotropic Mind, p.51 [back to text]
11. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, par. 114 [back to text]
12. ‘Women in Europe’ in Civilization in Transition, p. 132 [back to text]
13. Essays from the Parerga and Parelipomena, p. 102 [back to text]
14. See Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens. [back to text]
15. And Timothy Leary. At a Nova Convention in the late 70s, Leary, with his customary jovial hyperbole, described paedomorphosis as “the hottest issue in evolution, the number one tactic that the DNA code has always used.” Leary’s application of the idea of paedomorphosis to sixties youth culture has greatly influenced my ideas. [back to text]
16. Koestler also puts forward the tentative hypothesis that the ‘missing link’ between ape and man may be the ape embryo. He quotes numerous examples showing that the ape embryo resembles the human form more strongly than does the adult ape – for instance, lack of body hair, lighter skin, less protrusive eyebrow ridges, larger cranium, and numerous other structural similarities. In a highly speculative mode, it is fascinating to take on board the idea that the foetal form of an organism prefigures, to some extent, its next stage in evolution. The re-connection with foetal life in Grof’s psychedelic therapy may be seen as personal, micro-scale paedomorphosis – as may shamanic initiation. Also, it is interesting to look at the human embryo with this concept in mind. Here we have an even larger cranium, in relation to total body mass, possibly indicating greater mental capacities in our future evolution. Finally, compare the human embryo form to popular representations of advanced extraterrestrials (developed from supposed contactee eyewitness reports) – their bodily forms possess an uncanny embryonic or foetal quality. [back to text]
17. See also notes in Appendix, above. [back to text]
18. On Jung by Anthony Stevens, p. 128 [back to text]
19. On Jung by Anthony Stevens, p. 130. Perhaps modern WoMan’s endemic fear and denial of death (and hir consequent susceptibility to manipulation by cynical priests and advertisers) stems from this very lack of initiation rites. A living relationship with the death and resurrection archetype that lies at the heart of all initiations would probably go some way towards enabling individuals to deal better with the prospect of biological death. The acceptance of death as a natural stage of life in tribal and shamanic cultures seems to confirm this. [back to text]
20. Alternatively: “Our initiation is more OUT OF the society than INTO it.” (Margaret Andreas) [back to text]
21. Margaret Andreas notes that the real meaning of the word ‘radical’ is ‘from the root’, which places it closely in relation to paedomorphosis, regression to womb life, and to the thematic core of the death-rebirth motif. [back to text]

Bibliography

• Gneurosis #2, published by The Out of Order Order
• Mavericks of the Mind, edited by David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen Novick
• Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, by Mircea Eliade
• The Death & Resurrection Show, by Rogan Taylor
• True Hallucinations, by Terence McKenna
• Angel Tech, by Antero Alli
• SSOTBME, by Ramsey Dukes
• Thundersqueak, by Liz Angerford & Ambrose Lea
• The Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross
• ‘The Cycles of Chaos: Deconstructing Initiation’ by Kalkinath & Vishvanath, in Chaos International no. 16
• Character Analysis, by Wilhelm Reich
• The Psychedelic Experience, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert
• Flashbacks, by Timothy Leary
• The Holotropic Mind, by Stansislav Grof
• On Jung, by Anthony Stevens
• The Way of Individuation, by Jolande Jacobi
• Civilization in Transition (CW, Vol. 10), by Carl G. Jung
• Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW, Vol. 7), by Jung
• The Seasons of a Man’s Life, by Daniel J. Levinson
• The Psychology of Death, by Robert Kastenbaum & Ruth Aisenberg
• Janus: A Summing Up, by Arthur Koestler

I’d pondered my admiration for controversy-monger Jim Goad‘s recently-resurrected post-a-day discipline. Not too deeply, just one of those dangerously fleeting tingles in your brain that whisper, "That sounds like a good idea." I thought, "Hey, it’s the 1st September soon, maybe I could post every day in September?" All sorts of ideas. Writing something for each blog category, rotating through them one by one… Dredging my swampy memories when the present is all-too-parched… Fleshing out some of those mad scribbles in my notebooks…

So I crashed about two hours ago, but got totally absorbed and fired by Eleanor Coppola’s fantastic book on the quasi-legendary Philippine shoot of Apocalypse Now. A thought spilled onto a page in my notebook, and I caught myself. "Do it! Do it now! Join us!" chanted the gnomish hordes who shovel the musings of the vain ceaselessly into the furnaces of the blogosphere… And here I am. It’s not technically 1st September anymore, but you don’t care about that. And I might not post every single day in September—but it’s possible I might not take a dump every day either. Same difference.

So, (draws deep breath, teeters on the edge before leaping) here goes…

Yesterday, Sofia lost her first tooth. . . . She kept calling me, asking me questions: "Does the tooth fairy have blond hair?" "Does she have a crown?" "Why do fairies have crowns?" "Maybe because a kid might think it’s his parents leaving the present."

Finally she went to sleep and I went out to the Chinese grocery store to see what I could find in the way of a surprise.

I’ve not got kids, and I never really had any issue with these little parental myths as a kid—believing them, then realising the truth. But I’ve always been a little dubious about the ethics of lying to kids—the whole Santa Claus thing seems too much like that Christianity codswallop.

But Eleanor Coppola’s vivid little portrait struck me sideways. Isn’t it just like initiation? I’ve never been part of a magickal group, but reading about the process of hoodwinking followed by revelation has always seemed to have its own inalienable logic, a logic that I can map onto my own spontaneous experiences, one that teaches you about life in a way that clear, upfront honesty can’t. The potential for abuse is there, and is surely part of the logic, too. Initiation without risk seems nonsensical.

Without real social initiations, what more intimate, important and powerful initiation is left besides these little parental conjurations? I’m not trying to set anything in stone, least of all any kind of parental structure—but as long as adults are raising kids, these things will probably persist.

There’s the usual gulf between ideal and reality to bear in mind, but surely deceptions like the tooth fairy and Santa implant a real sense of mystery… and pave the way for dis-illusionment. Whether the latter manifests in its mundane sense of disappointment and betrayal, or the more interesting sense of "pulling back the veils"—whether you get the demystification of The Wizard of Oz or the revelation of The Holy Mountain—or really, how healthy the mixture of the two is—depends, I imagine, on the love and creativity of the parents.

I went home and wrapped the package and put it under her pillow. Then I went out to the set to see how Francis was doing. When I came home, Sofia was really excited about the tooth fairy’s visit. She showed me each thing, looking over it carefully. She said, "You know, Mom, I think she was a Filipina fairy with short black hair."

In my last article, I wrote of the Native American spiritual path of the Sacred Warrior. To Native Americans, the path of the Sacred Clown is ALSO considered a spiritual calling, essential to the smooth functioning of the tribe:

In the days before the invaders came. . .we had clowns. Not clowns like you see now, with round red noses and baggy costumes. Our clowns wore all kinds of stuff. Anythin’ they felt like, they wore. And they didn’t just come out once in a while to act silly and make people laugh, our clowns were with us all the time, as important to the village as the chief, or the shaman, or the dancers, or the poets.1

Most every tribe had their Clowns. The Oglala and Lakota called them Heyoka ("crazy"), the Arapaho called them Ha Hawkan ("holy idiot"), and both peoples considered them religious specialists. The Salish people honor the memory of a Clown who (not so long ago) challenged a missionary. The missionary was enticing people to come to his church by handing out little mirrors to them while urging them to cover their bodies with white folks’ clothes. It is told with a smile that the Clown (a woman!) walked into the church one Sunday wearing nothing but a hat and old shoes! Read the book to find out what happened!2

The Hopis protected their Sacred Clowns by incorporating them into their Katchina ("Cloud spirit") ceremonies where the Clowns make a hilarious entrance from a roof, descending a rope ladder into the plaza where the Katchinas are dancing. "Look down there!" they exclaim, "Everything is bountiful and beautiful!" Their descent is very precarious, usually head-first, and causes much laughter as they tumble over each other and fall the last few feet. They do not see the Katchinas until they bump into them, and then they say "This is MINE!" or "This many are MINE!" They act silly, childish, greedy, selfish, and lewd. As they pretend to become aware of their surroundings, they mock tourists, anthropologists, neighboring Indians, even themselves! They beg for food. Their guessing games and balancing acts please the crowds. The dancing Clowns sometimes pretend they are invisible, heightening the joke.3

The survival of these ritual clowns gives us a clue as to how important a Clown was to the community-spirit of each Native American tribe. Nothing was sacred to a Sacred Clown. She was a social critic of the highest order. Her funny mimicry and joking exposed hypocrisy and arrogance. Her portrayals of ridiculous behavior showed the people (in a very humorous way) their own foolishness and blind-spots. "A clown was like a newspaper, or a magazine, or one of those people who write an article to tell you if a book or a movie is worth botherin’ with. They made comment on everythin’, every day, all the time. If a clown thought that what the tribal council was gettin’ ready to do was foolish, why the clown would just show up at the council and imitate every move every one of the leaders made. Only the clown would imitate it in such a way every little wart on that person would show, every hole in their idea would suddenly look real big."4

With the arrival of the "invaders", this sacred office got to be a most dangerous one—maybe more dangerous than that of the Warrior. Perhaps this is why most of the Sacred Clowns disappeared from sight! As the Cree Medicine Woman says in the story, Flight of the Seventh Moon, "No wonder we never got along. . .my people and your people. They were all the time getting peeved at each other and much hatred grew between us. It was unavoidable, because my people had great pride and humor. Yours had the jitters and wanted to shoot those who were laughing at them. Yet I still find you white people very amusing. I have to laugh at you because you never let yourself go. Every word to you is a completeness or else a long way off. You like to bludgeon the meaning of something to fit your own stupidity. It would serve you well to quit being so brittle."5

The Sacred Clown of the Salish people mentioned earlier made a trip to Hudson Bay, Victoria, to clown about the way her people were trading seal and otter skins for rum. The white company-men soon had enough of her, and when she was later found shot in the head, all her people figured that a white man did it. The Indians themselves strictly forbade doing any kind of violence to a Sacred Clown.

These Clowns were dangerous to tyrants and exploiters because they were so disorganized and so completely honest. They could see with the eyes of a child, and because of this, could spot a phony a mile away. They were sometimes called "destroyer of heroes." The white invaders hated them, of course, so it was either be killed or find a way to hide. Those who were killed are remembered with much respect by their people. Those who survived did so by learning to be Tricksters, to change their form, to become invisible if necessary.

A negative religious figure (such as the Sacred Clown) seems odd to most non-tribal people. Most Native Americans, however, LOVE the humor of it and tell stories about a mythic Trickster whose pranks and mishaps teach the tribe moral lessons. The Trickster takes many forms, but the favorites seem to be animals who are exceptionally curious, resourceful and adaptable—SURVIVORS, such as spider, raven, rabbit, owl, bat, coyote and crow. The stories are full of funny situations with the Trickster being mischievous, being in turn made a fool of, and even getting involved in obscene affairs. "Mostly, Trickster likes pullin’ antics and tellin’ dirty jokes."6 Perhaps it is this appreciation for the Trickster that has given the Native American the ability to survive against all odds. The Trickster makes a lot of mistakes, and usually has a hard time learning from them. However, She keeps on keepin’ on. She doesn’t drown Herself in despair, doesn’t kill Herself in frustration. She survives.

Trickster shows us how we trick OURSELVES. Her rampant curiosity backfires, but, then, something NEW is discovered (though usually not what She expected)! This is where creativity comes from—experiment, do something different, maybe even something forbidden, and voila! A breakthrough occurs! Ha! Ha! We are released! The world is created anew! Do something backwards, break your own traditions, the barrier breaks; destroy the world as you know it, let the new in.

Sacred Clowns function as the eyes of the Trickster in this world: mirrors in which we see our folly as well as our resilience. As the Salish clown said to the people who were seduced into the missionary’s church by the pretty, shiny mirrors he handed out, "There are better mirrors—the mirrors in the eyes of the people you love."7 We’re reflections of each other. When we begin to take ourselves too seriously, there is the Clown to give us a laugh! When we become too heavy with self-importance, there is the Clown to knock some of that load away and lighten us up! The power of the Clown is the power of life itself. Acknowledge the pain, then let it go. Don’t carry it around with you. Focus on the joy, the mystery, the happiness, the cosmic joke. When Clowns delight in eating and in sexual horseplay, they are showing this love of life.

It’s a little more difficult to spot a young clown than it is to spot a young warrior. Those who describe a child as being "too sensitive" need to be aware that the little one may be a Sacred Clown in the making. The child may be shy, or she may be a temperamental show-off, sometimes both in different situations. In any case, a young clown is an explorer in the world of emotions. She tests the limits of her feelings as surely as a young warrior tests the limits of her will. She can amuse herself for hours playing pretend games, exercising her fantastic imagination. She will often mimic animals in her play. Just as often, she will have an ear for music and a talent for drama. Physically, she will have an excellent sense of balance.

The initiation for a Sacred Clown happens as she realizes that even people who love each other can be cruel to each other, or that Life itself can be cruel. Her own intense reaction to a personal experience of abandonment, betrayal of trust, or shattered romance may result in extreme depression, emotional imbalance, a nervous breakdown, or (in extreme cases) a suicide attempt. A Heyoka remembers her initiation thus, "I didn’t care about my life or what happened to me. I didn’t realize it, but there is big medicine in that abandon."8 If she can somehow find her emotional equilibrium, somehow go THROUGH the pain and come out on the other side, learn to dance on the knife edge of her own Soul, the experience becomes a gateway THROUGH the illusions of life and into the truth of life.

What is truth? This question propels the Clown into the sacred dimension. The Truth the Clown intuits is the interconnectedness of all life. She KNOWS (although she cannot prove) that no part is more important than any other part—no matter how big or how small—and that the tiniest change in one part produces a profound change in the Whole. She SEES (although she cannot explain) that imbalance or blockage of the Life Force is the result of a person or group believing themselves to be more important than another. And she can’t help puncturing that over-blown self-importance with her sharp humor!

A Clown becomes Sacred by opening herself. Like a child, she is vulnerable, fluid, and open to the Life Force. Unlike a child, however, she has learned to shield herself and move safely through an insane world by using masks, disguises, tricks and transformations. In a sane world, she might risk a bit more exposure.

Native Americans say that Sacred Clowns are great lovers of children, healing them and protecting them. In addition, one of their powers is to bring fertility to barren people and situations. If the Sacred Warrior personifies the Sun, the Sacred Clown personifies the Void—that great black openness of space, the great Womb from which we all are born. In the Hopi Katchina ceremony, it is said that long ago the Sun was given the responsibility to people the earth, but that "it failed to lift itself,"9 preferring instead to follow its own personal ambitions and desires without regard to the tribe. For this reason, the responsibility to carry out the plan of Life was shifted to the Clowns. In the Hopi ceremony, the Clowns do not appear until after noon, until "the sun reaches its zenith and is on its down slope."10 "First here was the Sun, who was young once and is now a grandparent of many powers. But the Sun will one day go into the Void. That’s the power of the Heyoka—the Void."11

The power of the Void is the power of wombness in us all, the power of true creativity. The power of being open is sometimes regarded as a weakness, but the Sacred Clown gives us this paradox: The weakest can be the most powerful. The dumbest can be the most wise. "In a clown’s craziness, she can be obscene or test any of the existing structures and ideas to see if they are true and real—and she gets away with it. She herself is weak, but her very weakness is her power."12

In modern times, Clowns sometimes emerge into the public eye as comediennes, actors in guerilla theatre, critics, ritualists/artists/musicians who break the boundaries of "good taste" and aesthetics. But usually, they keep to the guise of normal, everyday people who know how to get other people to laugh at themselves.

If you decide to travel on this Path with a Heart, you’ll be travelling backwards! Remember, though, to look behind you (or in front of you) once in a while. It just could be that another Sacred Clown is clowning YOU up! And that could be worth a good belly laugh for sure!

Footnotes

1. Granny, from Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron, 1981, Press Gang Publishers, 603 Powell Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6 A1 H2, pg. 109 [back to text]
2. ibid., pg. 108-114 [back to text]
3. Talayesva, Don C., Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, Leo W. Simmons, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press [back to text]
4. Granny, from Daughters of Copper Woman, pg. 109 [back to text]
5. Agnes Whistling Elk, from Flight of the Seventh Moon, pg. 74 [back to text]
6. Philbert, Powwow Highway (Video Movie), 1982, Hand-Made Films [back to text]
7. Clown, Daughters of Copper Woman, pg. 112 [back to text]
8. Agnes Whistling Elk, Medicine Woman, pg. 117 [back to text]
9. The Hopi Ritual Clown: Life As It Should Not Be by Hieb Louis Albert, 1972, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI, pg. 146 [back to text]
10. ibid. [back to text]
11. Ruby Plenty Chiefs, Flight of the Seventh Moon by Lynn V. Andrews, 1984, Harper & Row, NY, pg. 185 [back to text]
12. Zoila Guiterez, Jaguar Woman by Lynn V. Andrews, 1985, Harper & Row, NY, pg. 121 [back to text]

The Path of the Sacred Warrior heals the Spirit. The Path of the Sacred Clown heals the Soul. And the Path of the Shaman heals the Body. The Body? Haven’t most of us been conditioned to believe that the Body is somehow inferior to the Spirit, to the Soul?

America’s Elders—the Native Americans—have always taught that the Body, our personal connection of substance and spirit, is sacred. An ancient song of the Salish Women’s Society runs:

Who cannot love her Self cannot love anybody.
Who is ashamed of her body is ashamed of all life.
Who finds dirt and filth in her body is lost.
Who cannot respect the gifts given even before birth
Can never respect anything fully.1

A Shaman’s Path begins with her own Body and involves the generation, control, storage, channeling, exchange, and release of energy. Principles recently "discovered" by modern scientists have been known to Shamans since ancient times, for example: Entrainment ("If two rhythms are nearly the same and their sources are in close proximity, they will always lock up, fall into synchrony.")2; E=mc² (the interchangability of energy and matter); and Wave/Particle Theory (Energy can travel in either waves or particles). A Shaman perceives her Body as a luminous cluster, a sacred act, a whirling act of power and beauty. Exploring her Body, she becomes a specialist in vibration, harmony, and balance. Curious to bridge other dimensions, her awareness reaches out like a lightning rod. When that awareness is illuminated, her own Body grounds the energy and releases it into the Earth so that it does no harm.

Some scientific principles have not yet caught up with shamanistic knowledge, for instances, the principle of Gravity. A modern-day Shaman puts it this way, "The earth is calling to you. It has something for you. This great creature upon which we live wishes to give you its energy to empower your life." Westerners shun this gift. They call it GRAVITY and think it’s a force that wants to pull us down to the center of the earth. Instead, be like a tree, sinking roots down into the earth’s magnetism. Reach out with your branches and leaves for light and air from above!"3

The image of a tree is a great model for Shamans. A Tree is a very efficient energy-being. It uses every bit of energy and wastes none. The wood of a tree is a conductor of energy from both below and above; and as such, is often used by the Shaman to conduct her awareness upon journeys of discovery. A drum, made from hide stretched over wood, becomes "the shaman’s steed." Gourds, rattles, and other rhythmic devices can also be used as energy conductors. The Shaman tunes into the rhythm and rides it to other worlds! Then the rhythm brings the Shaman back to this, her beloved Earth. "Like a living tree, the shaman is rooted deep within the earth, reaching and growing into spirit."4

Shamans heal themselves (and serve as a healing catalyst for others) in three main ways:

1. Removing blockages in the energy flow;
2. Balancing and centering; and
3. Attunement and harmony.

Shamans are described as having keen intelligence, a perfectly supple body, and an energy that appears unbounded. Their memory and self-control are above average; and their bright eyes reveal a shy cunning. Often, their inner power advances with their age; and they display great strength, flexibility, and stamina throughout their elder years. As Old Ones (a term used with utmost respect by Native Americans), they can perform amazing acts of balance and agility. Often, they are splendid artists (especially abstract/mystical art), musicians, dancers, poets, singers, craftswomen who use their art to bring the spirit to earth. All these qualities proceed from years, even lifetimes, of suffering, sacrifice, and impeccable effort.

As shamans, the women in many tribes perform in all ways that male shamans are known to. They perform healings, hunting ceremonies, vision quests and the guidance for them, acts of psychokinesis, teleportation, weather direction, and more. In the various tribes according to each one’s custom, the shaman also creates certain artifacts—clothing, baskets, ornaments, objects to be worn in pouches or under skirts or sewed into belts. She officiates at burials, births, child naming and welcoming into this world, menstrual and pregnancy rituals and rites, psychic communication, manipulation of animals, metamorphoses or transformations. She does much of this through dancing and chanting, and a large part of the method, symbols, significances, and effects of her shamanic efforts are recorded in the stories she tells, the songs she sings, and the knowledge she possesses. Much of this knowledge she transmits to others in ways that will be of use to them, and much of it she keeps to herself, teaches in formal settings to her apprentices, or shares with other shamans.5

Acquiring shamanic power involves a kind of death/rebirth experience. It involves letting go of the self, eliminating habits that make up the personality, dispensing with the "self-dialogue," getting out of the way and letting the universe do the talking. When the Shaman traditionally dies to herself, she is born into the larger community of the Tribe of the Cosmos as a representative of Earth. "Essentially, a woman’s spiritual way is dependent on the kind of power she possesses, the kind of Spirit to whom she is attached, and the tribe to which she belongs. She is required to follow the lead of the Spirits and to carry out the tasks assigned her. Native American stories point to a serious event that results in the death of the protagonist, her visit to the Spirit realm from which she finally returns, transformed and powerful. After such events, she no longer belongs to her tribe or her family, but to the Spirit teacher who instructed her. This makes her seem ‘strange’ to many of her folk."6

Seeking the Body’s wisdom, a Shaman continually centers herself in her womb, her belly, or her solar plexus, NOT in her head. The lower center brings her to a better foundation from which to move. It also anchors her runaway thought processes and brings her to an attunement with the Body of the Earth. In order to use her own energy efficiently, the Shaman must become flexible, fluid. To do this, she must confront the blockages of fear stored in the Body. Her task is to melt the blocks of fear with the energy that she generates; indeed, the word "Shaman" literally means "to heat oneself."7 As the rigid form is consumed, the flowing form is released; this is the meaning of transformation. It is a return to the liberating simplicity akin to the primal nature of wild animals, young children, and our earliest Earth-ancestresses. Freedom comes from letting go and learning to trust in one’s Body to find its own vibration, balance and harmony.

I find myself happier and happier as I get older. I am simply freer of conditions. This entails making voluntary sacrifices. Sacrifice comes from the words ‘to make sacred.’ My shamanic life is a whole life of making sacred, seeing everything as sacred… Even garbage is sacred.8

The initiation of a Shaman is no easy affair. However, as one budding Shaman was told, "The most beautiful jewel is tempered in the hottest fire and dipped in the coldest water."9

Power is strength and the ability to see yourself through your own eyes and not the eyes of another. If a person has power, as women do, and she doesn’t use it, power will sit within her and have no place to focus. It is then that power becomes twisted and evil. It can turn against the person who has called it. If a person backs away from her power (for example), she will develop back problems and all sorts of physical ailments.10

A person may be a potential Shaman if conditions such as these exist in her life: Her birth is peculiar, special in some way. Perhaps it is difficult, even traumatic. As a child, she experiences some element in her life that sets her apart from other children. She may simply be left to herself, or there may be disabilities and restrictive situations. She feels somehow different than the norm. Sometimes there are long illnesses, fevers, seizures, even brushes with death. Because of this isolation, or simply because she is gifted, she comes in touch with a subtle world that is foreign to most of her peers, and her psychic talents flourish. Importantly, she also misses out on vital portions of the acculturation process, leaving her to feel that she doesn’t quite fit in.

At a certain point, the psychic energy peaks almost unbearably. If met with hostility or abuse (as usually happens in a world that lacks understanding), the potential Shaman may turn the energy in on herself, or outwards, becoming hostile and abusive to others. Some conditions such as Multiple Personalities, Mental Retardation, Dyslexia, Sexual Disorientation, Hallucinations, Hebephrenia, Schizophrenia, and Delusions can be the result of this "twisting" of the psychic flow. Sociopathic or psychopathic behavior, addictions, behaving in a such manner that one is literally "crossed-off" by society—all these can become the path that leads to the shamanic initiatory crisis.

This is not to say that an initiate cannot receive help. If she is sincere in her desire for healing, she will find the proper catalysts and midwives for birthing the Shaman in herself. In the ancient tribal ways, she could find an experienced Shaman in her own community to explain what was happening to her, and ease her way a bit. This older, wiser one would give her exercises that would train her to control the degree and timing of "opening the flower of her awareness."11 These might include instructions in meditation, lucid dreaming, self-hypnosis and visualization, recognizing energy fields, practices with sound and color, ritual-making, sand-painting, crafts of various kinds, trance-dancing, etc. She would also be taught how to protect herself from unwanted psychic and physical intrusions. Techniques such as purifying, blessing, boundary-making, shield-making, and acquiring guardian allies would be part of such instruction. Grounding techniques would be stressed as the initiate worked with plant, animal, and rock medicine.

In modern times, however, the help may come from strange directions, indeed. For example, the contemporary Plains Indian Shaman, Tayja Wiger, was born into an extremely hostile, abusive urban environment with no exposure to tribal ways. Society called her blind, crippled, retarded, insane and delinquent. She was institutionalized in reform schools and mental institutions. All this time, she prayed for healing. The psychiatrists didn’t understand her Shamanic tradition (which she often expressed subconsciously), but they did help her to find the time, space and resources that she needed for her to be able to heal herself. Her intense focus on self-healing propelled her through the dark tunnel of fear and anger to a place where she could let go, in love, trusting the Universe. Now, she is sighted, physically sound, intelligent, sane and working as a Shaman; "healer, ordained minister, counselor and laughing friend of the Light."12 Her story is an inspiration to us all!

Tribal people believe that becoming a Shaman is a matter of destiny; and that if a destined person resists becoming a Shaman, she will become more and more immeshed in her own problems. The story of Sky Woman, a Shaman of the Ojibway Tribe, illustrates how a womon who courageously responded to a crisis embraced her own shamanic destiny. Born into a family that was disturbed by violent parental disagreements, Sky Woman fled from this chaotic situation at 9 years of age and wandered in the northern woods for a long time until a search party found her. Among her rescuers was an old woman who loved her and took care of her, and became her adopted grandmother.

They lived together happily for many years until one day, the Grandmother got very sick. Sky Woman was afraid. While she took care of her Grandmother and watched over her, Sky Woman fell asleep and had a dream. She dreamed someone gave her a rattle and other things Shamans use when they heal, and said to her, "Try this on your grandmother. She might get better." When she awoke, Sky Woman made a little rattle and started to do the things the dream showed her. When she finished, the old womon seemed brighter. Sky woman kept on with her work until her grandmother was up and around. Then, other people heard about her and came to her for help. She became a travelling healer.13

Following her inner guidance, Sky Woman later remembered that in her youthful wanderings, she had been guided and instructed by her Guardian Spirits for her life’s work. Her loving compassion for her Grandmother was what catalyzed her own transformation. Her Spirits guided her but SHE CHOSE OF HER OWN FREE WILL to follow them.

Modern-day Shamans have learned from the mistakes that Shamans of the past have made. Keeping what works, they’ve thrown the rest away. They have let go of arrogance and embraced simplicity. They are not afraid to frolic and have fun. They have made a commitment to serve the life-force; they draw strength and unity from that commitment.

It has been said that the first Shaman was Grandmother Fire. She is the true ancestress of all Shamans. It also has been said that the first Shaman invented sex. The Shaman is self-erotic, in love with her own Body and with the Body of Earth. She heats herself, burning off the dross, centering herself in her own luminosity. She radiates well-being and self-confidence. Her leadership emerges out of a passion for life and is sustained by balance. The Shaman’s heat is a centerfire around which a community naturally gathers. Her heat is engendering; and her own gender can hold and transcend the tension of opposites, giving her the ability to operate with success in whatever world she finds herself. Just by being, a Shaman gives comfort by proving that change is possible.

Healers state that it is love that heals, yet it is so difficult for many to release the fear and anger that lodge in the subconscious mind in order to be able to ACCEPT that love. Now it is time for all of us to cleanse our lives, then turn ourselves inside out for all to share.14

Love is a word for transformation. And there are many beings worthy of our love. It does not have to be a man you seek. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you are saying, ‘I transform you.’ But since you alone can transform no one, what you are really saying is, ‘I transform myself and my vision.’ I am always living in the lodge of love and I share it with you.15

Footnotes

1. Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron, 1981, Press Gang Publishers, Vancouver, BC, p. 62. [back to text]
2. Planet Drum by Mickey Hart and Frederic Lieberman, 1991, HarperCollins Publishers, NY, p. 17. [back to text]
3. Movements of Magic by Bob Klein, 1984, Newcastle Publishing, CA, pg. 8. [back to text]
4. In the Shadow of the Shaman by Amber Wolfe, 1989, Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, MN, p. xiii. [back to text]
5. The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn Allen, 1986, Beacon Press, Boston, MS, p. 207-8. [back to text]
6. Ibid., p. 257. [back to text]
7. Shamanic Voices by Joan Halifax, 1979, E.P. Dutton, N.Y., p.3. [back to text]
8. Ruth Inge-Heinze, in Shapeshifters: Shamanic Women in Contemporary Society, 1987, Viking Penguin Inc., N.Y., p. 62. [back to text]
9. Leilah Tiesh in Shapeshifters, p. 36. [back to text]
10. Agnes Whistling Elk in Flight of the Seventh Moon by Lynn V. Andrews, 1984, Harper & Row, San Francisco, p. 130-131. [back to text]
11. Channeled from my Spirit Teacher, "Butterfly Woman". [back to text]
12. Birth of a Modern Shaman by Cynthia Bend and Tayja Wiger, 1987, Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, MN, p. 8. [back to text]
13. The Shaman: Patterns of Siberian and Ojibway Healing by John A. Grim, 1983, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, p. 121-125. [back to text]
14. Bend and Wiger, p. 6. [back to text]
15. Agnes Whistling Elk, in Flight of the Seventh Moon, p. 156. [back to text]

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.

by Gyrus

In an age where anti-flesh puritanism seems to be waning, and yet still persists in subtle manifestations, more and more extreme stimuli—both physical and conceptual—may be necessary to re-establish our relationship with our bodies. The vicious and relentless suppression of bodily awareness that is our inheritance from Pauline Christianity will not just fade away if we ask nicely. It seems that the growing popularity in the West of body modification practices, and physical forms of S/M sexuality, is indicative of the what may be necessary to reclaim our flesh and provoke ourselves into a deeper body-consciousness. And, as we shall see, our cultural myths, the imagery and conceptions that our artists generate, may also have become equally extreme in their treatment of the flesh, of necessity.

What is most relevant to us here is the phenomenon that stands as the most violent litmus test of attitudes towards the body—physical illness. I say ‘physical’ to distinguish from mental illness, and straight away we’re plunged into the arbitrary, and only sometimes useful division of existence that is embedded deep within our psyches and our language. We’re talking Cartesian dualism, of course… body = matter, mind = spirit… they’re utterly divorced, and God knows how they interact. To me, this is less a scientific observation than a philosophical rationalization of the core myth of Christianity. That is, the belief that we have been expelled from the spiritual paradise of Eden into this lumpen world of mortality, matter and disease. This world, and thus our bodies, in which our souls are supposedly encaged, is our punishment for the transgression of Adam & Eve. However, as Science gradually replaced Christianity as the West’s guiding mythology, there was a growing impatience with the whole idea of ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ ("Where is it? How can we measure it?" cried the anxious minds in the laboratory). So the concept was dropped altogether as an embarrassing ghost that evaded quantification—and we arrive at materialist reductionism. All mental phenomena are seen as illusory by-products of the chemical and electrical activity of the brain. The world, and our bodies, move from being seen as corrupt to being seen as essentially meaningless. Disease is seen as just a mechanical fault, to be repaired and patched up. Patients are usually allowed to believe that their thoughts and emotions are real, but any connections and correlations made between the mental and the physical are seen as dangerous superstitions.

To set the debate rolling, let’s look at Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, perhaps the most concise, lucid and passionate statement denying a non-physical basis for physical illness. Briefly, her main argument runs along these lines…

In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was a relatively widespread terminal disease that was seen in popular folklore, and through the eyes of artists, as indicative of a certain emotional temperament. The Romantics romanticized TB, seeing it as a sign of a passionate and sensitive nature. Then science discovered the physical basis for the disease, and consequently found a cure. The mythologizing of TB rapidly faded away, to be completely superseded in our century by another disease ripe for fantasy-projections: cancer. And, as a guaranteed medical cure remains elusive, cancer remains a condition muddied by unnecessary metaphorical thinking.

Sontag’s book is very persuasive, but tends to be very glib with regard to non-orthodox medical practice. Her persuasiveness largely stems from how she plays with the belittling connotations of ‘folklore’ and the authoritative tone of ‘scientific truth’. Also, she attempts to claim that ‘illness as metaphor’ is a dominant cultural myth of the modern era, when materialist science—’illness as mechanical breakdown’—undoubtedly holds this honour.

Neglecting to mention the vested interests that drug companies have in patients being treated solely via medicine, she states that "such preposterous and dangerous views", such as the idea that illness is a manifestation of unexpressed desires or impulses, "manage to put the onus of the disease on the patient and not only weaken the patient’s ability to understand the range of plausible medical treatment, but also, implicitly, direct the patient away from such treatment."1 This is a common distortion. The idea that a psychological view of certain diseases automatically places the blame for the condition on the patient is overly simplistic. In her criticism of Wilhelm Reich ("who did more than anyone to disseminate the psychological theory of cancer"—Sontag), for instance, she entirely neglects his extensive sociological analyses. While Reich placed the blame for cancer on unexpressed emotions, he usually placed the blame for this repression on repressive social systems. Of course, when thought about deeply, this reasoning leads to a classic ‘chicken and egg’ loop—which came first, consciousness or culture? To avoid metaphysical ‘first cause’ speculations, it is obvious that the most practical model for causality here is to accept the loop; to see causality as a dynamic interplay of external and internal factors.2

Essentially, then, Sontag is reiterating the doctrine of Cartesian dualism, or Christianity in disguise: that mind is separate from body; that the body is no more part of our identity than a car is; that disease, though painful, is merely a mechanical breakdown or invasion. And, like a car, the body should be repaired from a purely physical standpoint—any reference to emotional states or character traits is romantic mythologizing at best, dangerous delusion at worst.

While posing as a radical out to scythe down the perilous weeds of mythology, she perpetuates yet another form of the mind/body split that has drastically alienated us from the world we are part of.

The films of David Cronenberg are, if nothing else, resolutely body-conscious. Although the average reaction to this consciousness is one of hysterical revulsion, and although many critics claim that Cronenberg demonstrates a puritanical disgust with the flesh, it is my view that his films can be seen as a bloody and painful—but natural—conceptual birth process. The birth, back into awareness, of our relationship with our bodies. Just as scarification or piercing may be necessary to re-invoke body-awareness on an individual scale, the visceral pain of Cronenberg’s imagery may be a good example of what is necessary to kick-start the cultural meme-pool’s body-awareness.

Cronenberg has stressed his fascination with Cartesian dualism in statements too numerous to mention. He envisions the ultimate comment on this unfathomable ‘split’ (and the basis of all horror) as being the process of physical death. "Why should a healthy mind die, just because the body is not healthy? … There seems to be something wrong with that. It’s very easy to see why many philosophers detach the mind from the body … But I don’t believe that."3 It is this anguish of contradiction that lies at the heart of the painful mystery in his films. Cronenberg sees an apparent split—but his intuitions deny that such a thing exists.

Martin Scorcese once said that Cronenberg doesn’t understand what his films are about.4 Cronenberg himself has admitted that he makes a film to find out why he wants to make it. It is my argument that, from film to film, his central line of questioning has revolved around the mysteries of the mind/body/disease axis; and that in recent years, he may well have started to brush against some answers.

The Brood (1979) was Cronenberg’s first film with ‘name’ actors—starring Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar. Reed plays Dr Hal Raglan, a maverick therapist who has set up a retreat to practice the controversial technique he has developed, known as Psychoplasmics. It is here, at The Soma Institute, that the film begins.

We are immediately plunged into a dark auditorium, where Raglan is giving a demonstration with a male patient. Psychoplasmics appears to be a rough parody or charicature of many of the alternative body-therapies of the seventies. Here, the patient is taunted and humiliated by Raglan, who plays the role of the dominant father, persuading him that he would have been better off as a girl—his weakness would then be more ‘acceptable’.5 The patient resists this suggestion fiercely, and as his anger wells up, Raglan encourages him. "Show me your anger!" he shouts, and the patient removes his top to reveal his torso—which has developed strange scarlet boils. With a mixture of defiance and frustration, the patient cries, "This is me, daddy!"

In line with the real-life therapies it apes, Psychoplasmics proposes that bodily dysfunctions give physical form to emotional dysfunctions—a hypothesis amplified here under the cinematic lens into a quite immediate process. This concept is neatly expressed in the title of Raglan’s book, The Shape of Rage.6 And this, in turn can be seen as a reflection of Cronenberg’s greatest contribution to cinematic expression, its visual grammar. In exploring and revealing hidden anxieties and abstracted conflicts, he has utilized the "gloop" (his word) of prosthetic special effects to give visual form to these mental phenomena. The basic model for nearly all Cronenberg’s films is to turn a violently alienated individual inside-out, to externalize their internal dynamics for the audience’s inspection—in the same way that illness, in the psychosomatic model, brings repressed conflicts to the attention of the individual.

Videodrome (1982) is probably Cronenberg’s most complex and provocative film, in both form and content. It deals with a vast constellation of issues that infest the late twentieth century: mass media landscapes, censorship, the effect of technology on humanity, loss of stable identity, violent sexuality, mind control… All these themes are woven together in the film via the body-mind of one individual, Max Renn (James Woods).

Renn runs a small cable TV station, Channel 83, which specializes in softcore sex and hardcore violence. While looking to commission a new show, he is intrigued by the latest illicit interception made by Harlan, Channel 83′s satellite broadcast pirate. Renn watches a short scene from a show called ‘Videodrome’. We see a rust-red chamber, lined with electrified clay, in which naked women are beaten and tortured by men clad in enveloping black uniforms. No plot, no dialogue, no characters, just "torture, murder, mutilation". Max tries to track the show down, encountering an intricate maze of leads, and it is revealed that what he has seen is in fact a prototype of a new TV show to be broadcast in the near future by a large, sinister defence corporation, CONSEC. He had been shown pre-recorded tapes by CONSEC plant Harlan to expose him to a signal which is transmitted together with the televisual images. The violent imagery supposedly opens up neural receptors, allowing the signal itself to sink in, and to eventually induce a tumour (or new organ) to grow in the brain—which in turn triggers bizarre hallucinations. It is also revealed that this Videodrome signal was invented by an eccentric, McLuhanesque media prophet, Brian O’Blivion, who was killed by CONSEC—they intend to utilize his creation to facilitate extensive mind control over the population.

Max’s hallucinations begin with video cassettes turning fleshy, and imagined episodes of sadistic violence against women. Never a friend of the censors, Cronenberg is confusing expectations here by following the censors’ own ‘screen violence leads to real violence’ logic. But, as in reality, things are not quite so clear-cut. On viewing some Japanese porn intended for Channel 83, Max remarks, "There’s something too soft about it. I’m looking for something that’ll break through, y’know, something… tough." Thus, before he’s even aware of Videodrome, we can see his attraction to the violent, penetrative shades of sexuality. And later, when confronted by CONSEC head Barry Convex, he comes close to having his rationalizations about Videodrome undermined. "Why would anybody watch a scum show like Videodrome?" Convex asks, "Why did you watch it, Max?" "Business reasons," is Max’s glib answer. "Sure, sure," Convex smiles. "Why deny you get your kicks out of watching torture and murder?" Convex knows Max better than he knows himself. This is precisely how CONSEC was able to lure him into being exposed to the signal, placing him under their control and giving them access to his TV station for the broadcast of Videodrome.

Then there is Masha, an ageing woman who commissions shows for Max. She can also sense Max’s hidden desires. She asks him what kind of TV show he would produce, given the chance, "for the subterranean [read: unconscious] market. Would you do… Videodrome?" Cut immediately to a scene between Max and Nikki Brand, a radio personality with a strong and guiltless penchant for scarification and masochism. Here, after Renn has frantically tried to persuade her not to ‘audition’ for Videodrome, she takes a cigarette and burns her breast.7 Previously, we have seen Max pierce her ear during sex. Nikki’s role in the film, then, is to initiate Max into the expression of his sadistic impulses.8

But the relationship is never allowed to settle into an easily categorized top/bottom, male/female one. And it is here where the role of the body becomes paramount in the revelation of Max’s unconscious dynamics. The first body-image hallucination that Max experiences involved his stomach opening up into a throbbing vaginal slit. In a startlingly literal scene of self-penetration (=self-knowledge?), he forces his handgun into his stomach, which then, inexplicably, closes up, leaving Max to search vainly for the gun. It is this slit which provides CONSEC with their control over Max. Fleshy video cassettes are inserted into his slit to ‘play’ a programme (or program) on his psychic video (or biocomputer). So Max’s body has become the site where his unacknowledged receptivity has manifested, with a vengeance. Aleister Crowley once wrote, "The act of repressing has the effect of exciting."9 Max’s repression of his passive receptivity (which seems to be more insidious than the repression of his sadistic aggression) leads to this receptive aspect emerging even more strongly? allowing CONSEC to control him with relative ease. But categories are mixed up again when Harlan tries to insert a cassette, only to have his hand ‘bitten off’ by Max’s slit. Vagina Dentata is evoked as Max (with help from O’Blivion’s daughter) turns his apparently receptive organ into a tool of assertion.

It may be time to pause here, and return to alternative therapeutic theories. In his many books on his clinical discoveries, Arnold Mindell has described his concept of the ‘dreambody’. He envisages this aspect of humans as a very fluid and pervasive version of the standard unconscious. It manifests in dreams, hallucinations and fantasies, as well as in bodily symptoms—the two areas are seen as opposite poles on the continuum of the dreambody. Mindell’s theories, developed through extensive work with ordinary patients in therapy, psychotics and the terminally ill, suggest that bodily symptoms reflect processes in the psyche which are trying to manifest. These processes are often natural developments in the individual’s evolution, stifled by various repressive mechanisms. His basic method for therapy involves ‘amplifying’ the symptoms (analogous to Jungian amplification of dream symbols) until their full intensity and meaning is experienced. Evading both Sontag’s criticism of models of illness that seem to blame the patient, as well as avoiding any absolutist mind/body split, he states: "I don’t believe that a person actually creates disease, but that his soul is expressing an important message to him through the disease."10 There is still a duality here—that of the individual ego and the unconscious, or the ‘soul’. I don’t think that many (except perhaps radical Taoists or Buddhists) will deny that this split exists; my main point is that it negates, through re-modelling, any absolute mind/matter division. Many consciousness researchers have realized that the ego/unconscious split is an imposition of our culture, and has been bridged in the past—and may well be bridged in the future, with the creative use of the many techniques of psychic integration we have at our disposal. What is important for now, though, is to recognise that the body, diseased or not, can be seen as a reflection of the unconscious—the regions of the soul, or Self, that the ego is removed from. Antero Alli describes this nicely: "The physical body is the visible manifestation of the so-called Subconscious Mind. The body is the fingerprint of the soul, a Rorschach of the Self. Nothing can be hidden. The body communicates it all."11 These last two sentences may be the motto of Cronenberg’s work—the unconscious is never as ‘un-conscious’ as we like to think.

I’d also like to briefly look at another objection to psychosomatic theory—that this view doesn’t acknowledge the effect of the external environment on a person. In fact, in all but its most extreme versions, the philosophy I’m describing here has plenty of room for this side of the equation. In his vision of a utopian state, where medical science is entirely balanced, Mindell sees a world where a doctor will sometimes prescribe drugs, sometimes operate, sometimes work on body processes, sometimes bring the whole family in for therapy. And sometimes, "the doctor might say, ‘My dear man, go home, and wait and see what happens. Your problems are coming from planetary disturbance, and there is no sense in taking your problems personally. Wait until the city government makes certain changes. Write them your dreams now."12 Given the cultural milieu of Max Renn’s world, this may be a valid way of looking at his body mutations. Indeed, in his essay on media, identity and modern sci-fi, Scott Bukatman sees the body, in Cronenberg’s films, "as the overdetermined site for the expression of profound social anxiety. The subject of the Cronenberg film is hardly human action: it is instead … the structures of external power and control to which the individual (in body and soul) is subjected." Though valid, for me this is also too one-sided. Far better to view ourselves in terms of a continuum, a focused point in an organism-environment field, in the words of Alan Watts.13 Alternatively, in Mindell’s process terminology, "The inner world and outer world dreambodies are two-way streets, and it’s impossible to place blame, for we all contribute to the body as a whole. Our dreambody is part of the entire world’s dreambody, yet the world’s dreambody is also found within us."14

To return to the film itself, we can now discern a process of psychic integration, of sorts. In the final scene, Max ends up in a derelict boat—a ‘condemned vessel’. Inside, he is informed by Nikki, or at least her televisual image (if there is any difference), that it is time for him to let his body die. His present physical form, like the boat, has outlived its usefulness. He is shown himself committing suicide on the TV—placing a gun to his temple, saying "Long live the New Flesh," and firing. The screen explodes and spews out guts and intestines. Max proceeds to carry out his suicide, and the blast of the shot echoes over a blank black screen before the credits roll.

It is unfortunate that the intended ending never made it into the final cut—not due to censorship, but to inadequate gloop.15 The original script called for a scene following Max’s apparent suicide, where Max, Nikki, and Bianca O’Blivion meet in the Videodrome chamber and engage in a polysexual union, each producing new mutated sex organs, Nikki and Bianca developing cocks to match Max’s slit, all of them physically melting into one another. The New Flesh, the New Self. The Videodrome chamber, previously the site of Max’s fantasies of violence and torture, is transformed through (ego?) death into a place for a more creative, viscerally psychedelic existence—boundary dissolution and mind manifestation in the flesh. The womb connotations of the chamber were quite consciously wrought—"Freudian rebirth imagery, pure and simple."16 The dark orange/red colour of the chamber and the rusting boat Max finds himself in blend and evoke both decay and bloody birth. Note also Nikki’s advice to Max to "go all the way through". However, Cronenberg thought the scene may not have had the intended effect, that the mutated sex organ prosthetics may have been laughable.

As it is, we are left with a taste of the tragic finality that was to characterize his films’ conclusions throughout the eighties.

It is fitting that Cronenberg’s last overt ‘disease movie’ (to date) brushes closest to the roots of the quest for meaning in bodily illness. In The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, a lonely, obsessive scientist who has virtually perfected the world’s first teleportation system. There is one glaring fault—it cannot teleport live, organic matter. A baboon ends up being turned inside-out by the process. "I must not know enough about the flesh myself," says Brundle after the disastrous experiment. "I’m gonna have to learn." His first lesson occurs in bed with Veronica (Geena Davies). In post-coital play, Veronica pinches Brundle’s skin. "I wanna eat you up," she says. "That’s why old ladies pinch babies’ cheeks. It’s the flesh—it just makes you crazy." A flash of ‘Eureka!’ descends on Brundle, and he quickly realizes that he has to program that same ‘craziness’ for the flesh into his computer, so that it can cope with teleporting organic matter.

Another baboon is put through, this time successfully, and they agree to wait for tests on the animal to be performed before a human goes through. But Brundle gets drunk and jealous one night, believing Veronica to be with her ex, and teleports. He fails to notice a housefly in the telepod with him—the computer gets confused, and decides to splice the two genetic patterns together. Brundle emerges, apparently invigorated; but deep within him are insectile DNA patterns waiting to erupt.

Now, neuroscientists, psychonauts and tribal cultures alike know that we’ve already got some animals inside us. Evolution has built up layers of brain tissue, so that the human brain can be seen as being composed of an old reptilian brain, an overlaying mammalian brain, and the most recent and explosive development, the uniquely human neocortex. It seems that this neocortex developed so rapidly that it failed to fully integrate with the older animal brain sections, leaving a neural discrepancy that has been held by some to be responsible for humanity’s notorious inhumanity.17 And yet techniques for forcing integration of these layers have existed for many thousands of years. Frequently, researchers have come to the conclusion that the copious animal mythologies of tribal cultures around the globe, and the many pagan human/animal hybrid deities, represent an ancient awareness of our animal inheritance. And perhaps the most direct method of contacting and integrating this inheritance lies in the shamanic practice of shape-shifting.

I believe that in The Fly the genetic splicing idea and its subsequent developments represent a science-fiction model of this ancient consciousness-expansion technique, which finds its modern equivalent in Austin Osman Spare’s ‘atavistic resurgence’ (Spare’s art contains numerous shape-shifting motifs). Using various trance techniques, a state of consciousness is induced which allows total identification with a certain animal. This may be used for achieving certain effects in the world, but often it functions as a method of psychic integration—balancing. It seems clear that Brundle’s experiences propel him through an unexpected and violent process analogous to many aspects of the traditional shaman’s vocation. Aside from the shape-shifting aspect, the film also contains the following correspondences:

• What the teleporter does is what the shaman goes through during the initiatory experience—deconstruction/reconstruction, or death and resurrection. Like a shaman, Brundle (initially) becomes ‘superhuman’ as a result of this experience, incredibly strong and energetic. He says, "I’m beginning to think that the sheer process of being taken apart atom by atom and being put back together again… Why, it’s like coffee being put through a filter—it’s somehow a purifying process."
• An almost certainly unintentional, but amusing hint sneaks into the script. After seeing Brundle go through the teleporter, a woman he’s just picked up gasps, "Are you some sort of magician?"
• The shamanic initiation is reversed in the film. Brundle gets taken apart and put back together, then experiences an ‘initiatory sickness’. "I seem to be stricken by a disease with a purpose," Brundle quips, as any proto-shaman might.

You may object that what eventually happens to Brundle puts across a very negative message about the bizarre, rapid cancer he develops as he becomes more and more fly-like. And yes, we should always bear in mind while making the above connections that Cronenberg’s films are essentially morality plays—they show where the wrong paths may lead, as warnings. I feel that the tragic conclusion of The Fly is due to two main factors. First, there is the law of repression = excitation. Brundle’s initial repression of his animal nature, his relationship to his flesh, seems to be too rapidly torn away. His moment of realization in bed with Veronica is merely a conceptual lesson. His animality is yet to be unleashed through the teleportation ‘accident’, and his body, the canvas of the unconscious, reveals not only what he has repressed, but how much he has repressed it. (In a way, Brundle doesn’t escape being turned inside-out like the first baboon.) Secondly, there is the incomprehension and revulsion of others, represented here by Veronica. "I know what the disease wants," says Brundle. "It wants to turn me into something else. That’s not too terrible, is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else." "Turned into what?" Veronica asks. Although understandable, to me this attitude seems to resonate with our culture’s general fear of change, especially when it involves disturbing aspects (which it usually does). Even though The Fly manages to echo the shamanic roots of the idea of transformative illness, the impulse remains strangled by Cronenberg’s acute awareness of the dangerous stagnancy of Western society.

I mentioned at the start of this essay that I believe Cronenberg may have recently been moving towards some answers to his cinematic explorations. His (probably) unconscious connection with ancient mind/body/disease awareness is one of these tentative ‘answers’. The other came as the result of his fusion with his literary idol William S. Burroughs, in his film version of the novel Naked Lunch.

I do not have space to delve deeply into the fascinating relationship between Cronenberg’s previous treatment of disease and the ‘sickness’ of junk addiction in this film.18 My main focus is on how Cronenberg utilized Burroughs’ ‘Talking Asshole’ routine, the story of how a guy teaches his asshole to talk—and eventually gets his mouth sealed by the mutinous asshole. Though the routine appears verbally in the film, its visual influence is most interesting. The insectile typewriter that Bill Lee uses, and is given instructions by, has a ‘talking asshole’ through which it speaks. On one level, it functions as an alien intelligence using Lee as an agent; on another level, it is Lee’s unconscious mind guiding his actions.

The Talking Asshole is Burroughs himself, in the sense that it’s the part of you that you don’t want to listen to, that’s saying things that are unspeakable, that are too basic, too true, too primordial and too uncivilized and tasteless to be listened to… but are there, nonetheless. So in a sense, the mind/asshole schism, the head/mouth versus the asshole, is maybe more of a Freudian schism—the asshole’s really the unconscious and the head’s the superego. More than it being a true mind/body schism, it’s a sort of mind/mind split, I think.

David Cronenberg, Naked Making Lunch

So—for the first time, Cronenberg arrives at the previously described re-modelling of the Cartesian split. The somewhat gentler tone of his recent work may indicate a level of resolution in his mind/body dilemmas; for his own work, the visceral extremities of Videodrome and The Fly may no longer be necessary as stimuli to achieve consciousness of the body. The body is no longer separate from the mind—it is merely the physical aspect of the mind’s hidden depths. The gulf to be bridged is no longer that unfathomable metaphysical abyss between spirit and matter—these are already united. What now needs to be achieved is the dissolution of culturally sanctioned ego boundaries that make us all such fragile and illusory islands in the ocean of Self.

Whether Cronenberg is able to achieve the cinematic New Flesh he fell short of in Videodrome, and whether our culture can develop respect for our bodies’ intimate relationship to the deepest levels of our Selves, remains to be seen.

Postscript: Crash!

When I was writing Crash I did a fair amount of research, particularly from this book called Crash Injuries, a medical textbook full of the most gruesome photographs as well as a lot of extraordinary material . . . Upon viewing the photographs in Crash Injuries taken immediately after violent car crashes—all one’s pity goes out to these tragically mutilated people. After all, any of us who drive a motorcar may end up like them 5 minutes after starting the engine . . . But at the same time, one cannot help one’s imagination being touched by these people who, if at enormous price, have nonetheless broken through the skin of reality and convention around us . . . and who have in a sense achieved—become—mythological beings in a way that is only attainable through these brutal and violent acts. One can transcend the self, sadly, in ways which are in themselves rather to be avoided—say, extreme illnesses, car crashes, extreme states of being.

J.G. Ballard, Re/Search #8/9

After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body…

James Ballard, Crash

Seeing Crash (after aeons of waiting for the media-hounded censors to stop sitting on it) made me think of two things I had written two years before in Psychoplasmics. My tentative conclusion that Cronenberg’s work may become "gentler in tone", avoiding the "visceral extremities" of earlier films, turns out to be—thankfully!—a bit premature to say the least. While there’s no sign of a return to gloop, Crash is undoubtedly one of his most intense and provocative films—and easily one of the most uniquely disturbing films ever to make it onto the ‘mainstream’ cinema circuit.

The second part that struck me was my use of the driver/car analogy to look at mind/body dualism. My assertion that, in dualist thinking, the body has as little to do with our self-identity as a car does, is both revealing and flawed.

Firstly, by equating ‘body’ with ‘car’, it opens up the connection between the body and the environment. After the demise of classical physics, awareness of our physical manifestation in this world can no longer be seen in terms of strict separation. Our bodies are ultimately no more self-contained and isolated, no more in need of abstracted ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ to transcend boundaries, than atomic particles are.

The flaw in my analogy is my failure to recognize that, even in a dualist, logos-dominated and bios-denying culture, there will still be very strong bonds between self-identity and body/environment. The fact that the interdependence of these things is not consciously dealt with results in the dynamics of the relationship being driven by neurotic and destructive elements in our psyches. Eating disorders, fitness-fanaticism, brand-name fetishism, fashion, all these things are signs of how deeply body-image (body consciousness) and objects in the environment are embedded into our sense of our selves. Crash is the pathological conclusion of the neurotic body-environment relationship, and hints at the initiation of a new relationship. Just as Process-Oriented therapy seeks to intensify bodily symptoms to force their unconscious meaning into consciousness, Crash pushes our culture’s deviant eroticism and obsession with vehicles (bodies or cars) into a place where they may be transformed, and true body-environment consciousness—where no fixed divisions hold inside and outside apart—may be reborn. "The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality. Vaughan had articulated my needs for some positive response to my crash." (James Ballard, Crash)

The experience of seeing the film made many threads of connection between car crashes and eroticism more tangible to me than reading the book did, however vivid and striking Ballard’s prose is. One instance was when several characters were watching a video of test crashes while rubbing each other’s crotches. The slow-motion footage of cars hurtling into each other, their windows exploding out as they shatter, brought to my mind Wilhelm Reich’s focus on the idea or feeling of bursting in his patients. Many patients felt the therapeutic attack on their bodily armour, their rigidified energy structures, as a threat to their self, their entire being. In conjunction with this element of the psyche, which identifies with the body’s armour, and fears its downfall, there are also elements that desire the dissolution of these muscular cramps, longing for the free flow of bio-energies. The patient simultaneously wishes for and dreads the very same thing. Through exploring one patient’s fantasies and experiences of armour-dissolution, Reich came to this conclusion: "The destruction of the armor, the penetration into the patient’s unconscious secrets, is unconsciously felt to be a process of being pricked open or being made to burst."19 He goes on to make clear the connections between armour-dissolution and orgasm, and between the breakdown of the sense of ‘self’ in orgasm and the dissolving of identity in the process of dying.

To the extent that we base our identity, our conception of our selves, on the tense stiffness that our bodies have developed in this body-negative society, a threat to this hardness will be sensed as a threat to us. Yet it will also be, somewhere, our greatest desire. The bursting of energetic tension in the body becomes our gravest fear, often associated with death and dying; and at the same time it will be an erotic, life-affirming fantasy. One need only note the tendency of most people to invest personal energy in their possessions, to bestow upon exterior objects (especially houses and cars) an underlying quality of "me-ness", a symbiosis with our personal essence, and the formula for the psychic logic behind Crash is self-evident—not the wild alien pathology many have seen it as.

The car has been the 20th century’s dominant ‘image of self’ provided by technology, though this dominance seems quite mute and tacit. Much has been written about the computer as a self-image (or more precisely as an image of the mind or brain), perhaps because the emergence of this technology coincided with the popularization of psychology. Cars, however, seem to have slipped into our everyday lives, and thus into the deepest levels of our psyches, without overt recognition of the extent to which we identify with them, or allow them to mediate our experience of the environment. Their hard metal shells make them perfect totems of the armoured body, the petrified self. Their mutilation, destruction and deformation in violent crashes is thus the perfect exterior analogy for the melting, bursting and dissolution of hardened bio-energies, and their release in explosive eroticism.

On the same weekend that I saw Crash there was a brilliant documentary on Channel 5(!) called Damage. It looked at the increasing number of women and girls who cut or burn themselves. This is often associated with eating disorders like bulimia, and like such disorders it’s more common in females than males (one psychiatrist astutely observed that men with similar impulses and motives often harm their bodies in less obvious ways like getting into fights and playing violent sports). Most of the girls and women interviewed had seriously scarred arms. They cut themselves whenever they felt a seething rage or unbearably intense depression overwhelming them. And most of them said that the feeling they got from the experience was one of utter release—some were blissfully nostalgic about the experiences. Of course, they suffered too. Self-recrimination for harming themselves, recrimination from loved ones for harming themselves, even medical staff scolding them for ‘trying to get attention’.

What was clear, though, was that these were not suicide attempts, not half-hearted flirtations with death with which to guilt-trip others. These people were (in my eyes) responding positively to a very negative situation. I admired some of these teenagers immensely, for staying true to their survival instincts amidst vast negative forces, however strange their method seemed. Yet the clinic featured in the programme, which specialized in self-harming, was "radical" for taking the step of not reprimanding patients for cutting themselves. For most people, all they see in someone cutting their skin is negativity and self-destructiveness. Perhaps if more people were educated about the long history of life-affirmative self-mutilation practices (the American Indian Sun Dance being a famous example), these people’s spontaneous rediscovery of them wouldn’t get caught up in the knotted tangles of guilt, shame and fear that our culture wraps around nearly every intense, direct confrontation with our bodies.

This isn’t to suggest that scarification is some cure-all for mental distress! For my purposes here, I’m just trying to get a slightly closer understanding of the obsession with wounds and scars that runs through Crash.

Our identification with the environment, at present, is usually unconscious, and often neurotic. Cars are often status symbols, emblems of power or (supposed) desirability. The characters in Crash are seeking to merge with their environment in a more urgent, erotic, bodily way. Aside from the immediate experience of physical mutilation (which, depending on whether you want it or not, can be liberating or catastrophic—sometimes both) these people are erotically fascinated by the way scars describe a history of the body’s interaction with the environment. This is conveyed explicitly in the novel. In the film, there are many scenes where people tenderly kiss and caress each other’s scars, fleshy relics of a time when the barrier between the body and the environment was literally shattered—a violent parallel to sexual union. For a while, violence destroyed the burden of being cut off from the outside, caged in a sealed shell of defences. So as well as being an exterior image of the armoured body, the car is also the place where these people try to merge with their environment. The perverse extremity of their chosen means to try and fuse with their surroundings is dictated by the extremity of their alienation from it (just as the natural sweet melting of bodily tension may evolve into a violent sensation of explosion in the chronically tense). The sad fact that their environment is overwhelmed by these metal boxes is also a factor.

A scar is at the centre of an astounding scene where Ballard fucks Gabrielle, a paraplegic crash victim. Instead of taking the usual route, he becomes transfixed by a huge gash in her thigh, and enters her here. It’s astounding in its sheer perversity, and in the fact that it wasn’t cut out; but it’s also the first time, I think, that there has been a literal equation of vagina and wound in a film (beyond degrading verbal remarks, and that slightly less obvious scene in Videodrome). For the Freudian, this equation is due to castration anxiety: boy sees that women have no cock, assumes it’s been hacked off, and fears the worst for himself. Many books have been written about horror films, particularly ‘slasher’ films like Halloween, where cuts are seen in this symbolic light.

A more solidly grounded link in the vagina/wound equation is menstruation. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove look at a few horror films as ‘fear of menstrual power’ films in their excellent book The Wise Wound. Whichever side you take, the dream-logic association of female genitalia and bleeding wounds seems to be one of the roots of the fear, excitement and attraction generated by bodily mutilation in horror films. The literal demonstration of this equation in a film, and the fact that erotic liberation and pleasure results from this odd union, is quite something. Cronenberg has already defined his own sub-genre within horror. With Crash, he makes explicit something that only psychoanalysts could dig out of other horror films, and transcends the genre completely.

As a final note, I should say that I agree with the censors on one point: Crash will make you commit irresponsible acts! As a direct result of seeing it (no, I didn’t go and cause a pile-up) I did something I had had the impulse to do many times before, but had kept in the ‘Er… Not Yet’ box in my mind. I went up on to a very beautiful, but very spooky moor near Leeds, and spent the night alone in the open. I experienced a lot of fear, but pushed through it and experienced a glorious sunrise as I chanted over a stone, soaking in the light and five minutes of rain that created a beautiful rainbow behind me.

If I had to pin it down, I would say the scene that inspired me most was where Ballard, Catherine and Vaughan encounter a car crash site. The whole sequence creates an utterly bizarre and compelling sensation that mixes fear, revulsion, excitement and fascination in a very powerful way. Our society’s secret morbidity is brought to the surface by encounters with crashes—truckers have a name for people who slow down on motorways to look at an accident on the other carriageway, ‘rubber-neckers’. This scene pushes that morbidity into the open, and transforms it into a strangely magical feeling of boundary-crossing. It may seem odd that I was inspired to spend a night on a moor by seeing some people hang out at a car crash. I would call it an imaginative response. And this is essentially what Crash is about—reacting creatively to extreme or negative situations. That it even shows signs of catalyzing the capacity for imaginative response in its audience makes it almost unique in cinemas today.

Footnotes

1. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p.46 [back to text]
2. See ‘Individual as Man/World’ and The Book by Alan Watts for perhaps the most rational and accessible discussions of these issues. Describing Behaviourism’s surprising relationship with Mahayana Buddhism, he notes that " . . . the universe is a harmonious system which has no governor, . . . it is an integrated organism but nobody is in charge of it. [The] corollary is that everyone and everything is the prime mover." [back to text]
3. Chris Rodley (ed.), Cronenberg on Cronenberg, p.79 [back to text]
4. ibid., p.xxv [back to text]
5. The recurring polarities of weak/strong, female/male have been the focus for relentless feminist criticism of Cronenberg’s work. Most of this criticism merely reveals the simple-mindedness of the critics themselves. The director consistently portrays these polarities as intertwined, shifting continuums; his aggressive male leads usually turn out to be weak in their lack of self-knowledge, and seemingly victimized female characters are often the strongest in terms of knowing their own desires. As the refreshingly perceptive Carol J. Clover has noted in her book Men, Women & Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, "…what filmmakers seem to know better then film critics is that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane." [back to text]
6. Also, the ‘plasma’ of Psychoplasmics comes from the Latin meaning ‘form’ and the Greek meaning ‘shape’. Interestingly, the word ‘psychedelic’ is nearly a synonym of psychoplasmics—it literally means ‘mind-manifesting’. [back to text]
7. This shot was originally censored. The impact of the film, in fact one of its central themes, is hopelessly distorted by this, and other cuts. [back to text]
8. The casting of Debbie Harry as Nikki Brand has interesting resonances. As lead singer of Blondie, she was often criticized for using her femininity and sexuality—visually, she fitted the role of blonde rock bimbo, but her attitude as lead singer undermined the stereotype. [back to text]
9. Aleister Crowley, Magick [back to text]
10. Arnold Mindell, Working with the Dreaming Body, p.13 [back to text]
11. Antero Alli, Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, p.38 [back to text]
12. ibid., p.78 [back to text]
13. See Leary, Metzner & Weil (eds), The Psychedelic Reader, pp.47-57, and Alan Watts, The Book [back to text]
14. Mindell, p.79 [back to text]
15. See Rodley, p.97 [back to text]
16. ibid., p.97 [back to text]
17. See Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler [back to text]
18. Maybe I can just mention another shamanic correspondence. When Lee’s typewriter is destroyed, Kiki takes him to get it repaired, asking if fixing the typewriter will also fix his life. Lee is led to a blacksmith’s, where the pieces of the typewriter are slung into a furnace, and re-forged into a Mugwriter – the head of a Mugwump. This represents a new stage in the evolution of Lee’s ‘assignment’ in Interzone; and it resonates clearly with the blacksmith frequently encountered in shamanic underworld journeys, where the shaman is ripped apart and then re-forged. [back to text]
19. Character Analysis, p.334 [back to text]

Bibliography

• Cronenberg on Cronenberg, edited by Chris Rodley
• ‘The Wrong Body’ by Amy Taubin & ‘Interview with David Cronenberg’ by Mark Kermode, in Sight & Sound, March 1992
• Exterminate All Rational Thought, edited by Damon Wise (magazine accompanying Cronenberg/Burroughs season at the Scala Cinema, King’s Cross, London, 1992)
• Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch, edited by Ira Silverberg
• Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag
• Working with the Dreaming Body, by Arnold Mindell
• Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, by Antero Alli
• ‘Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle’ by Scott Bukatman, in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn
• ‘The Individual as Man/World’ by Alan Watts, in The Psychedelic Reader, edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
• Echoes From The Void, by Nevill Drury
• Naked Making Lunch (documentary), directed by Chris Rodley
• Crash by J.G. Ballard
• Re/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, edited by V. Vale & Andrea Juno
• Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich
• The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove