Instant Shaman (three)

There was a time when I would have agreed with William Everson, certainly one of the major proponents of shamanism in poetry—his famous proclamation for poets is “Shamanize! Shamanize!”—when he writes regarding spirits “… these spirits are collective images, actually we call them today archetypes, but in primitive times they were thought to be separate consciousness.” This makes perfect rational sense. But I also think of work of Dr. Raymond Moody, who is a scholar of the classics, and a doctor of medicine and psychiatry, and whose seminal book Life after Life has had a profound affect on our society’s way of looking at death. A more recent book by Dr. Moody, written with Paul Perry, is Reunions, Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones (Ivy Books, New York, 1993) which describes various techniques of encountering the dead, one of which is mirror gazing. I have heard Dr. Moody speak several times at the annual conferences held in Montreal by the Spiritual Science Fellowship and he is an excellent and fascinating speaker.

On several occasions I have visited mediums and astrologers, and I remember one medium in particular, who told me important information that could not have been known to her, that was specific in detail and importance only to myself, and that gave me immediate relief from what I was concerned about. I have also walked along a street and seemed to feel the presence of spirits walking with me, not of just one or two, but of dozens, so many in fact that it seemed they were pressed up against me. I have also sat with one of the most famous astrologers in the world, Nöel Tyl, and listened while he summarized my life experiences giving not only the year in which experiences occurred but also the exact month, from my birth to the present. Astrology is very different than Spiritualism but both indicate that there is a dimension to existence other than our consensual reality, and we suffer a loss in vision when people rationalize, justify, and excuse away what lies outside the bounds of rational and intellectual thinking.

Another important editor and author on poetry and shamanism is Jerome Rothenberg. I remember the excitement when I first read his anthology of “primitive” poetry Technicians of the Sacred (Anchor Books, New York, 1969). Rothenberg, in his Introduction, writes that the assembled poems show “some of the ways in which primitive poetry and thought are close to an impulse toward unity in our own time, of which the poets are the forerunners.” Then he describes the areas where these intersections of “primitive & modern” occur, one being “the poet as shaman, or primitive shaman as poet & seer thru control of the means… an open ‘visionary’ situation prior to all system-making (‘priesthood’) in which the man creates thru dream (image) & word (song), ‘that Reason may have ideas build on’ (W. Blake).” And in a sidebar he lists the following as examples of this, they are: “Rimbaud’s voyant, Rilke’s angel, Lorca’s duende, beat poetry, psychedelic see-in’s, be-in’s, etc, individual neo-shamanism, works directly influenced by the ‘other’ poetry or by analogies to ‘primitive art’: ideas of negritude, tribalism, wilderness, etc.

In Reunions, Dr. Raymond Moody writes that for the ancient Greeks “visions took place in a state between sleeping and waking.” This psychic state can be accessed by various means, for instance, by mirror gazing, or for the ancient Celts, by gazing into a cauldron of water. Moody has constructed a “psychomateum,” which he describes as “a modernized version of the ones found in ancient Greece, with the same goal in mind, that of seeing apparitions of the dead.” Moody writes,

The word psychomateum, taken literally, implies that the spirits of the dead are summoned as a means of divination so that they can be asked questions about the future or other hidden knowledge…the facility I created for this study is not a psychomateum since our purpose was not to arouse the dead for divination. Rather people came (and still come) in hopes of satisfying a longing for the company of those whom they have lost to death…

Regarding shamanism, Moody writes,

In Siberia…Tungus shamans used copper mirrors to “place the spirits.” In their language the word for “mirror” was actually derived from the word for “soul” or “spirit,” and hence the mirror was regarded as a receptacle for the spirit. These shamans claimed to be able to see the spirits of dead people by gazing into mirrors. He also writes, … most people who hear for the first time about shamanism assume that the shamans were either charlatans, mentally ill, or that they possessed some extraordinary faculty that most of us lack. We have already seen that shamans claimed to be able to take voyages into the spirit world through their magic mirrors, where they then saw spirits of the dead… the inner world of those ancient tribal practitioners is accessible to us all.