40.
Experiencing the Shaman’s Symphony to Understand It
German ethnologist Holger Kalweit visited a shaman in a Tibetan refugee camp in India, and realized the importance of the observer’s inner participation. Ceasing to observe allowed Kalweit to understand what the shaman was doing. Others think that one of the points of indulging in shamanically-induced trance states is to observe them.
Six of us take our places in this tiny shelter built by the Indian government for refugees. A window with broken panes provides only a minimum of light, but an additional beam of light from the open smoke hole falls on the floor, which is of beaten earth. Tin boxes piled one on top of another, as with so many oracles, constitutes the altar. On a broken-down bed in the corner, an infant lies under a tent of fly screening. As for the rest, nothing but the once-white walls. A few pictures of bodhisattvas and saints over the would-be altar make up the house shrine. The lhapa, the god-man, takes his shaman’s pouch from the wall, and we hand him some incense sticks, half of which are lit at once. . . .
We now learn that, in addition to healing, he can allow us only three questions in a session. Now he begins to sing softly. Presently he adds drum and bell as accompaniment and looks into his copper mirror. Gradually, he gets into the swing of it. The drum turns faster, the chant becomes more penetrating, the bell strikes harder and harder. Only when he is sufficiently into the trance—or, as the Tibetans say, when the god is completely ready to enter into him—does he put on his apron, drop the lotus-shaped shoulder drape over his head, tie a red cloth around his forehead. Then, finally, he puts the crown of painted cardboard on over that.
Now the trance deepens. A soft, almost melodic whistling is heard. The old man, who is now possessed, trembles slightly. He kneels, still facing the altar, and sings indefatigably as he sprinkles water from the little bowls with a spoon and then tosses rice over us and into the air as a blessing. It takes a good while for the trance to become firmly established. From time to time the chanting swells. The god-man, who not long earlier was joking with me and mischievously suggesting that I have my ailments treated by a doctor, has now completely gone beyond. The drumbeats come ever faster, and the muttered chanting becomes more articulate. His body sways to and fro, back and forth, and wild glances from the corners of his eyes fall upon us. We are told that with these looks he sees the gods and spirits approaching.
While this is going on, his daughter continually works to keep him free of the tangle of khataks [ceremonial scarves]. And as the drumming and ringing mount to a deafening crescendo, the god—for it is he who now governs the body of the lhapa—jumps to his feet. The trembling of the body has now subsided. The lhapa now dances to and fro in the little room, leaping, casting his legs out to the sides, and spinning. In the meantime, we have purified our khataks in the incense smoke and are waiting to ask our questions.
Now what one hopes for from a great seance has taken place: a person has wound himself so deeply in concentration that he has even drawn the onlookers into this vortex of self-oblivion. The tiny room is fairly bursting with tension and expectation. Life has been captured within these four rude walls. I have long since given up my aim of observing carefully. I am too deeply moved by the selfless abandon of this man, the facility with which he follows the ebb and flow of the drum rhythm, entirely loses himself in the waves of sound. This shaman has drawn me to the utmost point into his state of mind; his rocking motions have become for me the flow of being. In this process, the development of trance—which our Western science has been unable to explain, no matter how hard it has tried—has revealed itself in the simplest way.
We ask our questions. But before he answers, there is more dancing and drumming. Then come the answers, poignant and prophetic—and right on the mark. Then finally the healing. Before that, once again, dancing. Another god is entering the oracle, as indicated by a change in the drumming, a different chant, and renewed whistling. Whistling always indicates the departure or arrival of a lha, another being. A cloth is laid over the painful spot, and the drum, held upright, is pressed onto it. Now the lhapa sucks the sickness out through the drum with his mouth. Then slowly, visibly for everyone, he spits out a black fluid. Next he rinses his mouth out with water. It is healing by sucking, the most archaic approach to healing sickness.
The seance now approaches its end. The lhapa kneels down, drums vigorously, and once again the chant reaches a climax. Then he pulls the crown from his head, and abruptly quiet returns. Only the soft whistling of the receding lha is still to be heard. Now there is utter silence. Suddenly a belch is heard in the room. The god has left us for good, and the man is there once more. Mischievously he glances at the round of exhausted, empathizing faces; we can still hear the drumming in our ears. (Toward the end of another seance, his daughter had to quickly lean against his back to keep him from falling over when the god left him.) He muttered audibly, stretched, and leaned against the wall, by way of conclusion tossed another handful of rice into the air, and finally came to himself again completely. At once everything was gathered up and stowed back in the shaman’s pouch. We began to make small talk.
To get into a trance, this lhapa did not use hyperventilation—he breathed completely normally—nor were any particularly violent body movements to be seen, only a slight trembling of the legs. He was old, and perhaps because of long practice, he had less need of drastic triggering techniques than younger shamans. He seemed to have developed his own style and to be completely tuned in to it. Nothing could have perturbed him. His whole consciousness attended to the eternally identical drum rhythm. His nerves had already been trained by many trances, and in the course of time his trance ritual had grown ever shorter. His ceremony made a greater impression on me than that of any other oracle. His chant, now tender, now erupting with great force in concert with his dancing, which lasted well over an hour, put me into the state of mind that all rhythmic repetition brings, the feeling of being on the threshold of trance. . . .
Almost all accounts of oracular seances fail to describe the general state of mind, the onlookers’ sense of experiential participation. The whole suggestive-hypnotic framework in which the patients are placed or into which they are drawn is an artfully arranged setup that is perhaps equal in effect to the subtle process of the trance. A session with an oracle is like a short psychotherapeutic treatment, although modern psychology comes nowhere near its power of psychological and emotional impact on the individual. Here, centuries, even millennia, of trial and error in generation after generation have accumulated a clear knowledge of how body and mind, feeling, thought, and action may be consciously altered and influenced.
The hellish din, the wild, unbridled movements of the oracle, the living presence of a god, the unexpressed expectations of the spectators—all this brings about a loss of ego that is further intensified by the general excitement and the tumultuous disorder in one’s normal thought flow. In this atmosphere, we find ourselves in another world, which purifies us of our everyday mental pettiness. The tumult of the seance aims at a first level of catharsis. The patients, impressed by the supernatural events, direct their attention entirely toward the arriving god; awe overcomes them.
To begin with, we are dealing with a deluge of stimuli, which then turns in a natural way into stimulus deprivation, a narrowing or focusing of consciousness that is the goal and purpose of the entire drama. Now we are sufficiently prepared to follow the oracle’s words with rapt and reverent attention and receive his message in an appropriate manner, for we are inwardly empty.
Helplessly our gaze roves about the extravagant, colorful scene of the drama, always seeming to lag moments behind the action. Everything goes much too fast. Thus compelled by our ineptitude to register everything purely, we are carried away on the current of events. An auditive and visual vortex develops around us that we are incapable of pulling ourselves out of. The high voice of the oracle and the sound of the bell vibrate in our ears. We actually experience the sound waves and feel our own “drumskin” vibrating in sympathy. The collaboration of the drum and bell seem to me to be no accident. The drum in the right hand and the bell in the left complement each other. The low dull sound of the drum and the high-pitched sound of the bell come together. If we really listen and let ourselves be carried along by the rhythm, then we truly enter into the action of the seance, which, if looked at purely in the light of reason, seems to be no more than a jumble of cheap effects. Anyone who does not deliberately fight against the spectacle can for at least a time let himself be drawn into the vortex of this wild symphony. I myself was always carried away again by the breathtaking spectacle, though I would rather have remained a detached observer.
The inner participation of the audience is of great importance, as the oracles also never tire of stressing. Once the ceremony took place under inauspicious circumstances. I had brought a number of other Europeans along, who regarded the goings-on as an insult to their rationality. This not only led to a very short seance, but also provoked the god to unfavorable comments about us. We did not believe in him, and therefore he produced no healing effect for us. The atmosphere was simply no good. As the oracle was constantly interrupted and struck at by the disparaging glances of the European participants, no real trust or mutual attunement could develop. Critical and fault-finding attitudes, lack of understanding and narrow-mindedness had blocked the free impulse to let go of ego.
By contrast, in good seances, I often forgot to keep the watcher in myself alert; I finally gave up my running commentary on events, stopped classifying. And then something developed that I would like to describe as a symphony. I could identify with the dancing shaman, the chanting oracle, and at least from time to time enter into his state of mind, experience in sympathy with him the fragmentation of the ego structure and the external world. I became myself a little bit of a shaman. The urge arose to emulate him. I wanted to jump up and join in his work. His ritual had a contagious effect. As the drama began to draw to a close, I felt a bit crestfallen, disappointed that it was already over. Finally it had been possible to abide in this whirlwind of ego-abandonment, just as a child spins in a circle in order to experience that feeling of giddiness that stands outside our normal ego-defined experience.
Already in the child’s game we experience the longing of our kind toward decentralization. Everywhere in the world children have discovered this game, and here lie the true origins of shamanism—in this longing for the happy feeling of ego loss. All of humanity seeks it in its clinging to love, in singing, dancing, dreaming, or spinning in the intoxication of alcohol or drugs. All of these, though diluted, are trance-fostering states or states tending toward trance. Trance is no special or exceptional state. The whole of our emotional life strives toward one point, to attain a pinnacle, the experience of flowing, in which compulsive and rational moments, which always dam the flow, are disabled. Our overall human quest for good humor, for feeling good, present here only as a hint, reaches the point of intense feeling in trance. And the whole atmosphere of the seance is itself in some way only a reduced, diluted reflection of the trance itself, of that state of sympathetic flow, dissolution, emptying out, pure being.