The Nomadic Alternative – Page 183

equate their own rung of the social ladder with Hell and in fantasy dance their way towards a Heaven of suppressed hopes and ambitions.

The :Kung Bushmen, however, know themselves inferior to none. And they dance themselves into trance simply as a means of arousing the fiery medicine, or power to cure, that lies dormant in the pit of the stomach. Dancing stirs that medicine and makes it boil, bubble like water, ripen like berries or swell as the breast of a young girl. Trance dancers interviewed by Richard Lee reported the sensation of flying above the ground, of heat within their bellies, and of dwarfing the surrounding people. The Bushmen trust in their own bodies as fountains of all that is good "but project the blame for malevolence to forces outside the body". Men have the 'power within' to cure their own ills. They are not responsible to some benevolent or angry force without.

Now professional mystics, who answer a call to leave the chains of settlement, have always realized that the brief release of carnivals, pilgrimages and religious festivals might be prolonged indefinitely. The spiritual athletes either take to the perpetual pilgrimage of the road and walk their way to enlightenment; or they experiment with narcotic vehicles or harsh disciplinary exercises to resurrect the rewards and hardships of a wandering life, and by increasing the strenuousness of these exertions, by piling on the mortifications, they follow an itinerary that leads through barren wastes to an enigmatic Eden, that condition of supreme contentment the Buddhists know as nirvana.

II

The Sufis were nomadic revivalists who again injected into Islamic culture the natural asceticism of pastoral life. The word ŞūF signified their habit of wearing coarse garments of undyed wool in the fashion of the nomads. Dervishes were members of mendicant orders within the Sufi movement - holy scavengers who took their