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."Truly, truly,I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." 11 This noblemaxim represents the binding sentiment of the holy society thatis to say, the church militant, suffering, and triumphant of thosewho do not wish to remain alone.But, on the other hand, there have always been those who havevery much wished to remain alone, and have done so, achievingsometimes, indeed, even that solitude in which the Great Spirit, thePower, the Great Mystery that is hidden from the group in itsconcerns is intuited with the inner impact of an immediate force.And the endless round of the serpent's way, biting its tail, slough-ing its old skin, to come forth renewed and slough again, is thenitself cast away often with scorn for the supernormal experienceof an eternity beyond the beat of time.Like an eagle the spiritthen soars on its own wings.The dragon "Thou Shalt," as Nietzscheterms the social fiction of the moral law, has been slain by thelion of self-discovery; and the master roars as the Buddhistsphrase it the lion roar: the roar of the great Shaman of the moun-tain peaks, of the void beyond all horizons, and of the bottomlessabyss.In the paleolithic hunter's world, where the groups were com- SHAMANISM 241paratively small hardly more than forty or fifty individuals thesocial pressures were far less severe than in the later, larger, dif-ferentiated and systematically coordinated long-established villagesand cities.And the advantages to the group lay rather in the foster-ing than in the crushing out of impulse.We have already seen theOjibway father introduce his son to the solitude of the initiatoryfast the shrine, so to say, of self-discovery, sheer emptiness, withno socially guaranteed image or concept of what the god tobe found should be, and with the perfect understanding thatwhatever the boy should find there would be honored and ac-cepted as the boy's own divinely given way.And we have seenalso the manner of the masked gods of the planters, binding every-thing into the compass of their own hieratically organized world-society; offering the power of the group as a principle finally andabsolutely superior to any of those "ceremonies of their own"which the shamans had derived from the various sources of theirown experience.This, then, is to be our first distinction between the mythologiesof the hunters and those of the planters.The accent of the plantingrites is on the group; that of the hunters, rather, on the individualthough even here, of course, the group does not disappear.Evenamong the hunters we have the people the dear people whobow to one another politely, like brothers-in-law, but have com-paratively little personal power.And these constitute, even on thatlevel, a group from which the far more potent shamans stand apart.We have read of the Eskimo shaman Najagneq, who carried on awar against his whole village and then faced them out of coun-tenance when they came to accuse him in a court of law.And wehave read also of the more primitive Caribou Eskimo shamanIgjugarjuk, who, when he knew the girl he wished to marry, sim-ply took his gun, shot her family from around her, and broughther home.In the villages and towns of the planters, however, itis the group and the archetypal philosophy of the group thephilosophy of the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and diesbut therein lives, the philosophy imaged in the rites of the monsterserpent and the maiden sacrifice that preponderate and repre-sent perfectly the system of sentiments most conducive to group 242 PRI MI TI VE MYTHOLOGYsurvival; in the hunter's world, where the group was never largeor strong enough to face down a man who had achieved in hisown way his own full stature, it was the philosophy, rather, of the"lion roar" that prevailed.As we have seen, in some areas (e.g., North America) thisshamanistic, individualistic principle prevailed to such an extentthat even the puberty rites had as their chief theme the personalquest for a vision.In others (e.g., Central Australia, where apowerful influence from the planting world of Melanesia had beenassimilated),* a greater emphasis on the age of the ancestors anddisciplines of the men's dancing ground left to the individual verylittle of his own.Nevertheless, in the main it can be said that inthe world of the hunt the shamanistic principle preponderates andthat consequently the mythological and ritual life is far less richlydeveloped than among the planters.It has a lighter, more whimsicalcharacter, and most of its functioning deities are rather in thenature of personal familiars than of profoundly developed gods.And yet, as we have also seen, there have been depths of insightreached by the mind in the solitude of the tundras that are hardlyto be matched in the great group ecstasies of the bull-roarers, borneon the air, heavy with dread.II.Shamanistic Magic"From Wakan-Tanka, the Great Mystery, comes all power,"said an old chieftain of the Oglalla Sioux, Chief Piece of Flat Iron,to Natalie Curtis when she was collecting material for The Indians'Book in the first decade of the present century.It is all from Wakan-Tanka that the Holy Man has wisdomand the power to heal and to make holy charms.Man knowsthat all healing plants are given by Wakan-Tanka; thereforethey are holy.So too is the buffalo holy, because it is the giftof Wakan-Tanka.The Great Mystery gave to men all thingsfor their food, their clothing, and their welfare.And to manhe gave also the knowledge how to use these gifts how tofind the holy healing plants, how to hunt and surround thebuffalo, how to know wisdom.For all comes from Wakan-Tanka all.*Cf.supra, pp.88-115. SHAMANISM 243To the Holy Man comes in youth the knowledge that he willbe holy.The Great Mystery makes him know this.Sometimesit is the Spirits who tell him.The Spirits came not in sleepalways, but also when man is awake [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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