The Nomadic Alternative – Page 42

of fighting disease are - or should be - sexual. The Hippocratic Oath is a carnal marriage. Asked why he did not retire to Germany, Dr. Schweitzer quoted the Nibelungenlied.

Archaic societies - especially those exposed to stress - prefer to channel their collective anxieties through the medium of a shaman or specialist in the supernatural. The shaman is at once physician, prophet or seer, artist, craftsman and poet - androgynous and intuitive, feared for his absorption of magical powers, but the guardian of a tribe's tradition, the very hub of its creative activity. The mental condition of the shaman is the subject of heated debate and I am unqualified to discuss it. But in common with all visionaries, the young initiate, morbid, introspective and sensitive, receives a 'call'. Wandering alone in the forest or desert he passes through a 'dark night' experience like the noche oscura of St. John of the Cross - an internal Valley of the Shadow of Death, where fanged creatures pounce from the mind's antipodes, dissever the head from the body, and strew the limbs far and wide. But the parts reintegrate themselves. Whole and restored, the youth voyages through a bright place of magical landscapes to a Peaceable Kingdom, such as that described by Aesop, where "the other animals had the use of articulate speech and knew the use of words, and the stones spoke and the needles of the pine tree..."

The shaman wounds himself before he can cure the wounds of others.

Each shamanic seance - as we know it from Siberia - is a dramatic performance, in which he, as performer, passes in and out of trance, draws his audience out of themselves and cures their oppression.

Before each of these therapy sessions the shaman abstains from food; then, to the insistent beating of a drum, he dances himself into reverie, stamping and stamping, till his 'soul' rests ever more lightly in his body and finally 'flies' off on a psychic excursion - to the Infernal Regions to grapple with demons or up to the blessed light of Heaven. As master of theatrical expertise, the performer projects his curative journey onto the audience, who allow themselves to be guided over hellish pits or bridges of cutting knives before