[The following excerpt from a longer work by the Paris-born Brazilian scholar Marcel de Lima
Arising out of the 18th century’s rationalism was a counter current of fascination with what went beyond reason, and seemed to express the inexpressible and the sublime, but it is only in the Romantic movement that a crucial dimension of the modern conception of the shaman is developed, namely that of artist. Indeed artistic creativity and imaginative capacity take on a religious and transcendent coloration. Such a view of the artist as isolated seer and healer for society aligns him closely with our figure of the shaman, so that it is in the 19th century’s exploration of the higher reaches of the imagination that we find a rekindled interest in primitive religion, past and present.
In order to achieve the required
altered states of mind, the shaman has to undergo a ritual. The ritual is a
magical performance, as defined by Sir James George Frazer, himself the heir to
this Romantic tradition, wherein the shaman “mimicks the doings of divine
beings in order to arrogate to himself the divine functions and to exercise
them.” By doing so, the shaman performs a sacred drama that was originally
carried out by mythical personages who controlled the operations of nature in order
to “wield all their powers.”
Therefore, the shaman becomes a
living link between the magical reality of the mythical beings and the course
of nature. Frazer contrasts the myth as figurative language with its magical
correlate in the ceremony of mimicry:
We shall probably not err in
assuming that many myths, which we know now only as myths, had once their
counterpart in magic; in other words that they used to be acted as a means of
producing in fact the events which they describe in figurative language. ...
The principle of mimicry is implanted so deep in human nature and has exerted
so far-reaching an influence on the development of religion as well as of the
arts.
That is why outsiders often regard the ritual as
something barbarous and coarse. Behind the brutality and the bloody sacrifices
performed in a rite lies a meaningful purpose perceived only by those who know
the mysteries. The magical flight comes about through a ceremonial performance
in which the shaman acts as an artist of ecstasy, who performs like a madman in
a trance. Usually, a shamanic ritual involves artistic expressions such as
dance, theatre, music, and poetry as a means to help alter the shaman’s state
of mind. Therefore, one can see the shaman both as a healer or medicine man and
as an artist.
In fact, as Joan Halifax declares,
the multifarious roles of the shamanic figure have also undergone under some
transformations as a means to adapt the archaic technique to the world’s
changing cultural practices:
The lifeway of the shaman is
nearly as old as human consciousness itself, predating the earliest recorded
civilizations by thousands of years. Through the ages, the practice of
shamanism has remained vital, adapting itself to the ways of all the world’s
cultures. Today the role of the shaman takes many forms – healer,
ceremonialist, judge, sacred politician, and artist, to name a few.
It is argued here that special
kinds of artists may also express themselves in shamanic forms, i.e., they
bring to art a sacred meaning, often entering themselves into other layers of
consciousness in their search for artistic expression. Claude Lévi-Strauss
makes the connection between art and the primitive, giving it an enclave-like
capacity that is present even today: “whether one deplores or rejoices in the
fact, there are still zones in which savage thought, like savage species, is
relatively protected. This is the case of art, to which our civilization
accords the status of a national park.” In addition, of all the artistic
expressions sharing primitive roots poetry arises as one of the closest forms
to the venting of man’s primal utterance. As explained by Ruth-Inge Heinze,
“these individuals [shamans] bring problems to the surface so that they can be
dealt with, and they translate ineffable messages of the sacred into secular
language.” Thus, one can
understand certain artistic expressions through a shamanic perspective.
Western thought has long
considered “primitive” peoples as a minor representative of literary culture
because of their reliance on oral rather than written representations. Many
recent poets have sought to change this view based on a new poetics that would
represent more fully human cultures the world over, including those peoples
whose works have been marginalized by an exclusive range of Western traditional
literary culture. This movement has been concerned with a complex redefinition
of cultural and intellectual values involving the idea of an ethnopoetics. This
new poetics, which paradoxically can be traced back as far as the Paleolithic,
is concerned with experimental works ranging from the Romantic period up to
modern
poetry. It is my contention that shamanism is itself a
phenomenon that can be best represented under the light of this new conceptual
idea that brings together poetry and ethnography. Hence I will now present a
general outline of ethnopoetics, and then include my own presentation of poetic
experimentation stemming from Romanticism into modern poetics, in order to
contextualize it into my argument and to articulate it in preparation for the
presentation of my three cases of study. An ethnopoetics can indeed allow the
artistic representations of shamanic practices to reflect more fully the
worldview of cultures to which art, as culture in general, is intrinsically
linked to religious values as a whole, revealing the complexity of “primitive”
as opposed to civilized.
Jerome Rothenberg proposes to
formulate a poetics in the context of the revolutionary cultural
countermovement that took place in the West as a reaction against “the official
ideologies that shoved European man to the apex of the human pyramid.” This
artistic movement, which stemmed from cultures “described as ‘primitive’ and
‘savage’ – a stage below ‘barbarian,’” was born out of the work of “some
thinkers and artists who found ways of doing and knowing among other peoples as
complex as any in Europe and often virtually erased from European
consciousness.” Rothenberg calls this poetic discourse, or rather “ a range of
such discourses,” ethnopoetics, which he defines thus:
The word “ethnopoetics” suggested itself almost too
easily, on the basis of such earlier terms as ethnohistory, ethnomusicology,
ethnolinguistics, ethnopharmacology, and so on. As such it refers to a
redefinition of poetry in terms of cultural specifics, with an emphasis on
those alternative traditions to which the West gave names like “pagan,”
“gentile,” “tribal,” “oral,” and “ethnic.” In its developed form, it moves
toward an exploration of creativity over the fullest human range, pursued with
a regard for particularized practice as much as unified theory and further
‘defined’ […] in the actual discourse.
Ethnopoetics has been around for millennia and should
not be “confined to the modern world.” As Rothenberg points out, in being
“maybe as old as human consciousness itself,” ethnopoetics represents a search
for the primary need to know what it is to be human, and to explore the human
potential to its fullest.
The explicit discourse around
ethnopoetics, as Rothenberg explains, “involved the magazine Alcheringa
(founded by Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock in 1970) and included the 1975
gathering, at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies in Milwaukee , of the first international
symposium on ethnopoetics.” A successor magazine, New Wilderness Letter,
was founded by Rothenberg and Charlie Morrow, in order to recognize “poesis in
all arts & sciences, all human thoughts & acts directed toward such
ends: the participation in what the surrealist master André Breton called a
‘sacred action’ or what Gary Snyder defined as the ‘real work of modern man: to
uncover the inner structure & actual boundaries of the mind.’”
The interest in ethnopoetics, and
the coining of the term, which Rothenberg had introduced in the second issue of
George Quasha’s magazine Stony Brook, developed out of writers who drew
not only on the Romantic poets and their concern with the irrational and
primordial, but also on anthropology, which helped them to flesh out the
Romantic idea of primitive. Jerome Rothenberg spent time with the Seneca
Indians, and Gary Snyder’s M. A. thesis in Anthropology was a study of
Northwest Coast Indian myths. His early book of poems, Myths and Texts,
is actually a reference to Boas’s work, while also raising the crucial question
for ethnopoetics of the relation of the oral performance, taking place in a
specific tribal context, to the written text which represents and misrepresents
it. It is as an attempt to address these textual limitations that Rothenberg
develops his theories and practice of “total translation” which involves using
sound and stretching words to the semantic breaking-point in performance. The
Journal Alcheringa included sound recordings and drew on an eclectic
mixture of poets and ethnographers, as did their conferences. Hence, in their
effort to redefine the range of primitive poetry and insert it into the
traditional Western discourse of the written word instead of excluding it,
these writers presented not only words of songs and chants, but also picture
poems, sound poetry, dreams and visions inserted in scenarios of ceremonial
events. The emphasis was thus given on performances in which the singing voice
gave way to ritualistic poetic narratives including laments, prayers,
prophecies, etc.
Rothenberg,
and Snyder, though taking different paths, with Snyder developing the
ecological implications and Rothenberg the aesthetic connections with
experimental modernism, represent, together with the work of Nathaniel Tarn and
Dennis Tedlock, a nexus of ideas which interrogate not just the relation of the
written to the oral, but the authority of the West and of scientific
objectivity over the primitive. Drawing on Stanley Diamond’s
reconceptualization of the primitive, they are able to avoid some of the more
simplistic use of Indian culture, though their work has still been criticized
for cultural expropriation.
Another convergent aspect between the poetics of
shamanism and ethnopoetics is their search for communal living and
environmental protection. These issues, which have been neglected, if not
obliterated, by the agenda of the search for comfort in modern civilization,
have, on the other hand, as Rothenberg reminds us, been of primary concern for
“primitive” cultures despite their growing vanishing status in Western societies:
Our belief in this regard is that a re-viewing of
“primitive” ideas of the “sacred” represents an attempt – by poets and others –
to preserve and enhance primary human values against a mindless mechanization
that has run past any uses it may once have had. (This, rather than the
advocacy of some particular system, seems to us the contribution of the
“primitive” to whatever world we may yet hope to bring about.) As a matter of
history, we would place the model in question both in the surviving, still rapidly
vanishing stateless cultures and in a long subterranean tradition of resistance
to the twin authorities of state and organized religion.
Borrowing the title of his anthology from Robert
Duncan’s concept of “Symposium of the Whole,” Rothenberg is in a way proposing
the “dream of total art,” that is, a complex “redefinition of cultural and
intellectual values,” by means of a new reading of past and present poetic
representations. Robert Duncan in fact advocates a new artistic totality that
will include many of the areas that have been consistently outcast by Western
society at large:
To compose such a symposium of the
whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be included. The
female, the proletariat, the
foreign; the animal and vegetative;
the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure – all that has been
outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we
consider we are.
Rothenberg looks for a new primary scene for this
dream of total art other than the “imperial and swollen mold … from Greece ,” and
finds it among the proto-poets/artists of the Paleolithic past. The works of
these marginal artists, which have amazingly survived the onslaughts of
modernity, represent, as Rothenberg asserts, “a complexity of act and vision”
which merits calling their creators “technicians of the sacred.” Rothenberg’s
allusive term here is only too conspicuous; he is clearly referring to shamanic
practices in terms of their artistic representations, borrowing from Eliade’s groundbreaking
work on shamanism. Rothenberg uses his own term as the title for a book wherein
he presents a worldwide range of native texts that he parallels with the
writings of contemporary poets, along with his own editorial comments,
providing a vast anthology of ethnopoetical material. The idea is still that of
a shamanic séance, in which all the senses are summoned to perceive
synaesthetically.
Shamanic practices and shamanic
art are linked to the oral tradition, which in the Western poetic tradition has
been either excluded or set apart. Hence, as Rothenberg indicates, “a recovery
of the oral is crucial” to ethnopoetics, which, without meaning to exclude any
written form, calls for their simultaneous expression: “the oral recovery
involves a poetic deeply rooted in the powers of song and speech, breath and
body, as brought forward across time by the living presence of poet-performers,
with or without the existence of a visible/literal text.” Rothenberg therefore
calls for a fully human poetics that does not exclude the oral tradition and
whose range is
the range of human culture itself, and the forms
they take (different for each culture) run from wordless songs and mantras to
the intricacies (imagistic and symbolic) of multileveled oral narratives; from
the stand-up performances of individual shamans and bards to the choreographies
of massed dancers and singers, extended sometimes over protracted periods of
time.
Ethnopoetics is poetry of experimentation of the human
potential in all times and places. Yet, it is not a movement concerned with the
experimental qualities typically associated with modern poetry. As Rothenberg
puts it,
ethnopoetics -- which looks away
from the modern and experimental to focus on the ancient and autochthonous
cultures (often under threat of mass extinction or long since blown away) – is
the product (as study and praxis) of our most dedicated and outrageous
modernism, even surviving (under fire) into that postmodernism taken as the
older movement’s early and forever problematic offspring.
Hence, a
poetics of archetypal representations long forgotten by the Western tradition
makes itself needed:
The recovery of archetypes (as image and/or symbol)
that infuse our own work at its most heated: the animal and trickster side of
us; the goddess and the feminine; the sense of ‘earth as a religious form’ and
of a living, even human, universe; and the commitment to imaginal geographies
and journeys that lead into our own lives and minds.
By means of an ethnopoetics it
will be possible, as Rothenberg believes, to “show how ethnographic revelations
can change our ideas of poetic form and function.” As I will show in the texts
involving Black Elk and María Sabina and in those by Carlos Castaneda, the
participants, as Rothenberg calls them, are “not only poets but – in an age of
intermedia works and genre cross-overs – other artists as well; not only
anthropologists and folklorists but the indigenous poets and shamans for whom
the others often act as conduits to the world of print and text.”
The issues present in the
conceptual representations of ethnopoetics are indeed far ranging and, likewise
those found in the representations of shamanism at large (some of which I have
already addressed), resemble those of a human, rather than primitive, poetics:
The reinterpretation of the poetic past, the
recurrent question of a primitive-civilized dichotomy (particularly in its
post-Platonic Western manifestations), the idea of a visionary poetics and of
the shaman as a paradigmatic proto-poet, the idea of a great subculture and of
the persistence of an oral poetics in all of the “higher” civilizations, the
concept of wilderness and of the role of the poet as a defender of biological
and psychic diversity, the issue of the monoculture and the issue of cultural
imperialism, the question of communal and individual expression in traditional
societies, the relation of culture and language to mental processes, the
divergence of oral and written cultures (and their projected reconciliation),
and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images (the goddess,
the trickster, the human universe, etc.).
As can be seen, my own dealings with the
representations of shamanism and of shamanic practices have a lot in common
with Rothenberg’s proposition of a “new poetics.” In fact, as I intend to show,
the three cases of study presented are also part of this ongoing movement
toward an ethnopoetics. Starting off with Black Elk and the poetic description
of his shamanic vision, passing through María Sabina and the (re)discovery of
ancient healing chants by Western scholars and poets, and culminating in Carlos
Castaneda’s allegorical representations of magical thought, I attempt to insert
my own work within the range of discourse, from Romantic literary representations
to contemporary ethnopoetic narratives. My own case studies point toward the
plurality of voices echoing this forgotten, and often marginalized wholeness of
the human enterprise – voices which are vivid and ever-present in cultures
worldwide thought to be primitive, as an expression of their complexity.
An
ethnopoetic discourse toward a poetics of shamanism can also be found in
Eliade’s writings, and his statement on the ecstatic origins of literature at
large: “The shaman’s adventures in the other world, the ordeals that he
undergoes in his ecstatic descents below and ascents to the sky, suggest the
adventures of the figures in popular tales and the heroes of epic literature.”
As Eliade explains, literary narrative dealing with underworld journeys, as
well as with supernatural events, typical of epic and heroic tales as those by
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, are borrowings from shamanic
narratives, which describe the shaman’s spiritual ecstatic journeys: “Probably
a large number of epic ‘subjects’ or motifs, as well as many characters,
images, and clichés of epic literature, are, finally, of ecstatic origin …
borrowed from the narratives of shamans … their journeys in the superhuman
worlds.”
Eliade
goes on to say that poetic inspiration itself finds a parallel in shamanic
practices. The shaman’s preparation for entering the spiritual world suggests
the same mystical freedom that pervades poetic creation:
Poetic creation still remains an act of perfect
spiritual freedom. Poetry remakes and prolongs language, that is, the creation
of a personal universe, of a completely closed world. The purest poetic act
seems to re-create language from an inner experience that, like the ecstasy or
the religious inspiration of “primitives,” reveals the essence of things. It is
from such linguistic creations, made possible by pre-ecstatic “inspiration,”
that the “secret languages” of the mystics and the traditional allegorical
languages later crystallize.
Thus, we can say that this secret language, with which
the shaman summons the spiritual beings, parallels, if not originates, the
inner experience that will be translated into poetry.
1 comment:
all of this is out of Santos' 'The Poetics of Shaminism' ?
and much here of your post is 'on-the-money'
as what we call myths, it seems to me, have their roots and basis/ basics ..... actually .... in facts.
so, this brought a tear to my eyes.. the external one AND the internal one:
Poetic creation still remains an act of perfect spiritual freedom. Poetry remakes and prolongs language, that is, the creation of a personal universe, of a completely closed world. The purest poetic act seems to re-create language from an inner experience that, like the ecstasy or the religious inspiration of “primitives,” reveals the essence of things. It is from such linguistic creations, made possible by pre-ecstatic “inspiration,” that the “secret languages” of the mystics and the traditional allegorical languages later crystallize.
"Thus, we can say that this secret language, with which the shaman summons the spiritual beings, parallels, if not originates, the inner experience that will be translated into poetry.
am now into Saraswati's introduction to (his translation and 'take' on the Sri Saundarya Lahari
which also takes us wayyyyyy back into the Paleolithics/Neolithics of the
"just-what-was-yet-is" a simultaneity ... and what is
unconditional
thanks, will track down The Poetics of Shaminism and
will send you (my) Shakthi drawings via a pdf... soonly.
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