The Nomadic Alternative – Page 251
The Nomadic Alternative
Page 251
VII
separate ceremonies - a body of information, classified secret and handed down from time immemorial - songs, legends and ceremonial usages, most of which concern the doings of the ancestors; these are the ancestral spirits who act as a corps of helpful supervisors, and come to the rescue when things seem desperate. For if we admit the existence of a Bestiary in the mind, we must also allow for an interior Gospel, illuminated with heroic figures or guardian angels.
These are the alcherings ancestors of the Aboriginal's 'dreamtime', Hesiod's "benign spirits wrapped in mist", the Yazatas or Beast-Slayers of the ancient Persians who helped travellers over the bridge of knives, the Cherubim who visited William Blake as often as the Tyger, or the Ten Avatars of Hindu mythology which Sir William Jones described as "descents of the deity, in his capacity of Preserver".
These mysterious presences are human, not bestial. But thanks to the metaphor-making capacity of the brain the helpful spirits can also take the form of a favourite animal, to become the totemic ancestor or the 'spirit vehicles', owl, goose, eagle or duck, that waft the Siberian shaman on his interior voyage to Heaven.
VII
After puberty the intense friendships of the young hunters for each other give way to increased flirtatiousness with the opposite sex. Boys and girls spend much, if not most, of their time together, visiting each other, handling each other, and generally sounding out the marriage market. In Wayward Servants Colin Turnbull has described the promiscuous comings and goings of young Pygmies, their experimental love-making in the moonlight, and one hilarious episode of a boy who climbed over his girl-friend's parents in the middle of the night to get at her, their main complaint being that he made too much noise. The rigid segregation of boys and girls, thought to be absolute in Islamic societyhas perhaps been over-emphasized.
I remember an Afghan khan looking wistfully at a field of ripening [illegible].
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