The Nomadic Alternative – Page 187

this world. As the traveller wanders, enlightenment gradually

settles upon him till he finally reaches another world. The song compares the thighs of the pilgrim to the upspringing of fresh vegetation. All human ills derive from a settled life. Settlement or rest is ophidian sloth; settlers are as supine reptiles. But all that is good comes from the buoyancy of the journey and the traveller feels an undercurrent of air to lift him from the ground. He identifies himself with the Sun's Messenger, the Peregrine Falcon, whose jewel-like clarity of vision detects all things at once.

"Intelligence", says a line of the Rigveda, "is the swiftest of birds."

The song then moves onto a further plane of imagery. The traveller who finally arrives is compared to a gaming piece which has crossed the board and come to the safety of the opposite shore. Then only he can lie recumbent and travel everywhere. Once arrived he is perfect, as the Cathars or Albigensian heretics believed themselves perfect. No harm can touch him. He can do no harm whatever he does.

Finally the pilgrim becomes a Marutah or blast of spirit, and like the Kalahari Bushman is carried away by the wind.

The appalling discomfort of India, the pullulating populations, the inequality of rich and poor and the visible presence of death reinforced the illusion that the body was a cage for the soul. Life was a bleak vale of horror. To be twice-born (dvijâh) or liberated in life(jîvan-mukta) seemed the only sensible solution to the problem of confinement. Any practice to cheat death of its legitimate prey was taken for granted. Indian ascetics were expert in queue-barging their way to heaven. No other country - though Western civilization is catching up - developed or needed so bewildering a variety of escape routes.

If a life of perpetual voyaging finally conferred on the traveller the illusion of immortality, people trapped - or even partly trapped - by settlement experimented with the vision inducing properties of 'herbs of immortality'. Narcotic vehicles for psychic voyages adjusted their body chemistry and helped them advance the time of