SOUL AND MANA
What might it be like to experience the Soul of the World? The Romantic poet William Wordsworth catches some of its flavor while describing his childhood in The Prelude:
To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.1
Perhaps most children catch a glimpse of such an ensouled world; but few adults, or even poets, recapture that vision. Yet, for traditional societies, it is the norm. Back in the nineteenth century, E. B. Tylor called it animism. It is a word that, unfortunately, writes off what it seeks to describe, because for traditional cultures there is no such thing as animism—nor any kind of -ism; there is only a world that presents itself to them in the first instance as animate, daimonic, respiring with inward meaning.
The reindeer herders of Siberia, the Eveny, for example—a people who hunt as well as herd—recognize a principle that governs wild as opposed to domesticated animals; that governs, in fact, the whole landscape. It is pictured as an old man called Bayanay. He is the master of all the animals as well as the forests, rocks, and streams. But he is also acknowledged as the force or essence—that is, the soul—behind every visible surface, that which makes a thing what it really is. Every thing is a manifestation of Bayanay, yet he is also a continuous elemental animating power that, like the sea, “can wax and wane, surge or retract at different moments, in different locations or for different hunters.”2 Sometimes he works in your favor, at other times he works against you. Like his animals he is “capricious and hard to fathom.”3 You have to treat all his creatures properly, respecting both the body and soul of the animal you hunt so that, when it is reincarnated, it will again offer itself to you.
Everything imbued with Bayanay is a presence, like a consciousness, that has intention toward you. A place, a tree, even a tool, can look on you benignly or with hostility. You have to divine its mood with careful observation, adjusting your behavior accordingly. You can be helped in your divination by paying minute attention to barely visible signs: a crow’s flight, the splash of a fish, the snort of your reindeer.
“I came to understand Bayanay,” writes Piers Vitebsky, who lived among the Eveny, “as a vast field of shared consciousness which encompassed the landscape as setting, as well as all the human and animal roles in the drama of stalking, killing and cooking. This state of super-consciousness was so delicate and precarious that when talking of hunting, especially in the forest, one could not refer to animals by their ordinary names.”4 Thus kyaga, a bear—which contains the highest concentration of Bayanay—becomes abaga, grandfather, before the kill, as if, in this heightened state when soul shows itself, it is natural to assert the affinity of the animal with the human. After the kill, it is offensive to Bayanay if anyone is boastful or immodest. Delicacy and discretion are the order of the day when dealing with soul. No mention of killing is made; rather, the hunter says merely “Kungan churam,” “I have obtained a child.”5
Bayanay is synonymous with what Melanesian culture call mana, a term introduced to us by R. H. Codrington in the 1890s. It was taken up by other anthropologists who recognized the same phenomenon in the tribes they were studying. For everyone, it seems, has subscribed to something very like mana—a force present everywhere and in everything, like a world-soul. It is always ambiguous, as intangible as air yet able to manifest its presence. It is impersonal, pervading the universe uniformly; yet also personal, showing itself most clearly in individuals, as their own power. It is benevolent at one moment, malevolent at the next, always paradoxical. It can be acquired by humans through their deeds or just through the accumulated experience of age. It radiates from them, so that the more mana they possess the wider their sphere of influence among the living and the longer their endurance after death. Mana also sticks to our possessions. The more intimate the possession—a spear, a hoe, a headdress, or bowl—the more of our mana inheres in the object so that it cannot be used by others when we die. Being imbued with a portion of our soul, it must be buried with us or else destroyed lest it contaminate others with misfortune.
We echo these beliefs whenever we venerate the relics of a saint or treasure the pen of a Tolstoy. We still feel that we are touching a part of them when we touch their accoutrements, just as we attribute special virtue to an heirloom, such as grandfather’s watch, or even to our most precious belongings—the capricious old clunker we coax down the highway, or the new pair of running shoes that gives us the power to outrun the wind. We would not be human if we were not all to some extent “animists.”
We can see how Bayanay, mana, soul, is what we now tend to call the unconscious part of our psyches, the wilderness within. And just as our unconscious lives are completely other than us, they are also the substrate of our conscious lives. We can read the elaborate beliefs and rituals that surround the Eveny hunt as a guide to the way all relationships with the unconscious should be conducted. For like Bayanay, the unconscious is the unpredictable ground of our livelihood, as nourishing and as dangerous as a bear. The good hunter “has Bayanay.” He has the soul, the contact with the unconscious, that attunes him to the Soul of the World, and especially its manifestation as prey. If he dreams of having sex with a young woman before a hunt, this is a good sign because she is Bayanay’s daughter.6 Relations with Bayanay are often erotic, especially in his chief manifestation as a bear. A skinned bear resembles a naked human. Women who become too close to the forest are said to be seduced by bears and to share their winter lair, later giving birth to mixed litters of cubs and babies.7
Stories of seduction or abduction by daimons are universal, whether they are the Irish sidhe, the desert jinns, or, in modern times, little gray “aliens.”8 They are not to be taken literally, but neither are they laughable superstitions. They are myths—which, as I have tried to suggest, precede such distinctions in order to express a greater truth. “These things never happened,” said Sallust sublimely; “they are always.”9 Our relations with soul, the unconscious, are as reciprocal, erotic, and strange as marriage to a bear. They are not abstract or “spiritual” but as concrete as a bear hunt—which in turn is as nightmarish or dreamlike as an Otherworld journey. You enter the shivering, sentient forest, where you watch and wait for a long, long time. Even the tiniest sign is significant, portentous, laden with meaning. Then the sudden violent attack … “My friends,” said Vitebsky, “were transformed in some mysterious way so that they seemed almost afraid of themselves.” For, of course, the bear is also within. “In this terrible blend of nourishment and murder, in which the animal both colluded and was angry, one had to honour one’s prey and at the same time deceive it.”10
Always there is this ambiguity between the nourishing soul and the destructive, the friend and the enemy. Always the shudder of the alien, yet the recognition that the alien is also ourselves, with whom we must make exchanges and on whom we depend. As if there is a finite amount of mana in their environment, the Eveny believe that only so much game is allotted to each hunter in his lifetime, so that too much success means that he is not long for this world.11 Moderation and equilibrium rule the reciprocal relations of man to animal, as well as ourselves to soul.
We can see how intensely, even religiously, these relations are lived yet how fragile they are in the face of Western culture’s heavy-handed certainties, its black-and-white reality, and its insistence on facts. How quickly indigenous peoples learn to awake from the enchantment of their own culture as if from a dream, to deny that they ever believed their women married bears or that they made love to Bayanay’s beautiful daughter. Yet such a relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world is the background not only to traditional cultures, but to ours before the scientific revolution.
Up until about the early seventeenth century we had little sense of being a “self” borne by a body, still less of a “self” separate from a world “outside” us. Instead we participated in the world as a microcosm within a macrocosm, a part that reflected the whole. As Owen Barfield put it in Saving the Appearances, premodern man “did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside him to quite the extent we do. He was integrated or mortised into it, each different part of him being united to a different part of it by some invisible thread.”12 We were less like islands than embryos. We can see this, he says, in paintings where perspective was unnecessary because it was as if the artist was himself in the picture. The world was not extended away from us like a stage across which we moved; it was more like a garment we wore about us.13 There is a big difference between a world we look out at through our eyes, and a world in which we participate, deeply implicated in every fiber of our being. But perhaps to make art, whether with perspective or not, is nothing other than to attune our souls in harmony with the Soul of the World.
The metaphor of resonance is particularly apt when we move from the reindeer herders to the Pygmies of the African rain forest. Because visibility is poor in the jungle, the Pygmies are especially sensitive to sound. Their Soul of the World is called molimo, the Animal of the Forest; and it is never seen, only heard. In his book The Forest People, Colin Turnbull describes how the molimo is summoned.
First of all a special place is prepared and a special fire lit. Food and wood are collected from every member of the group because the molimo is a great, hungry animal who must be fed and warmed. Above all he is lured to the fireside only by song, especially when someone has died or when the hunting is bad. On these occasions it is as if the forest is sleeping and must be awoken by singing. It is a solemn occasion, and a dangerous one. All the men must sing; no one is exempt. Any woman or child who inadvertently runs into the molimo, dies.
The singing may go on for nights on end. And every night the molimo responds. Its answering song is heard far off in the forest. As it approaches, its call is sometimes deep, gentle, and loving—sometimes a hair-raising growl, like a leopard’s. “As the men sang their songs of praise to the forest,” writes Turnbull, “the molimo answered them, first on this side, then on that, moving around so swiftly and silently that it seemed to be everywhere at once.
“Then, still unseen, it was right beside me, not more than two feet away, on the other side of a small but thick wall of leaves. As it replied to the song of the men, who continued to sing as though nothing were happening, it sounded sad and wistful, and immensely beautiful.”14
The Nganga people of Cameroon believe that we are born with four eyes: two open and two closed. The closed eyes open at death. If a child is born with all four eyes open he accordingly sees the invisible ancestors. This is disturbing; and two of the child’s eyes have to be closed by rituals so that he does not “go back”—that is, die. Conversely, for those people with a visionary vocation, the two closed eyes must be opened. A goat stands in for the person and, when it is sacrificed, gives its eyes to that person. One member of the Nganga, Eric de Rosnay—who was also a Jesuit priest—had his second set of eyes opened without his knowing it by a master called Din. Despite his ignorance of his own initiation, de Rosnay soon “began to see differently.” His eyes “were opened” to the hidden violence in people; and images came to him of what was in people’s hearts.15
The opening of the “goat’s eyes,” associated with death and the ancestors, is a potent metaphor for the power of intuition and insight. It is a concrete image of what William Blake called “double vision”16—the power of seeing through the surface of things to what lies beneath. Shamans use this power to “see into” people in order to diagnose what ails them. They can see, for example, a sorcerer battling with the ancestors for a patient’s soul. Blake, on the other hand, used it to make poetry.
This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to Believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro’, the eye.17
When we see with the eye alone, we are seeing the world as it appears; when we see through the eye, we see the world as it is. The first is literal eyesight; the second is metaphorical vision. Blake put it more succinctly:
With my inward Eye ‘tis an old Man grey;
With my outward, a Thistle across my way.18
With his eye he sees a thistle; through his eye he sees an old man. To see only a thistle is literalism. But, equally, if we were only to see “an old Man grey” we would be literalizing in another way, turning poetic vision into illusion or hallucination. The trick is to cultivate “double vision,” which sees the old man in the thistle or the dryad in the tree, but does not lose sight of thistle or tree. “For double the vision my Eyes do see, / And a double vision is always with me.”19 A sense of metaphor, of translation—of two worlds interpenetrating—must be maintained. But this is also the essential movement of the imagination. We see through the literal world to the shape-shifting Otherworld behind. Thus Nature herself is seen as the Otherworld. “To the man of imagination,” wrote Blake, “Nature is imagination itself.”20 It is only our abrupt literalism that freezes the flow of Nature, stops it in its tracks, and insists on a single “factual” reality.
All imaginative works reintroduce us to double vision. They show us another, deeper reality. No matter how prosaic the subject of a painting by Cézanne or van Gogh—a bowl of fruit or pair of boots—it glows with independent life. It is animate, like a person. It is a Presence. (It is a daimon.) “The alternative to literalism,” wrote Norman O. Brown, “is mystery.”21 Art embodies the same “double vision” required to see, read, or hear it aright.
To see the soul as a shadow, as our traditional cultures so often do, is a compact image of double vision. A person is seen in the first instance as twofold, as body and shadow, where “shadow” is suggestive of a dark twin, the unconscious, which is visible only when the overbearing light of consciousness is blocked. Yet although the shadow is completely concrete, it is also fleeting and ungraspable.
In defending soul I have had to be devoutly anti-literalistic. But, apart from the fact that it is always questionable to be too devout about anything, I ought now to speak up for the literalism we all find it so difficult to escape. Indeed, the myths of a Fall may be exactly that: stories of a lapse from the daimonic Otherworld of imagination, symbolized by our Edens and Arcadias, into the cold, gray world of facts. If there were no Fall, no lapse into literalism, soul would be everywhere manifest as it was when God walked with Adam in the cool of the day. It would not be hidden, secret, a mystery. There would be no call for us to exert our imaginative powers of reflection, insight, and mythologizing on which soul-making depends.22 It seems that we need that very literalism that, if it is not seen through, is so deadening. We have to acquire the “double vision” without which there would be no art or religion worth the name because there would be no reality behind this one, no depth.
We sense the presence of soul most, perhaps, whenever depth makes its appearance. Watching a play, dance, or musical performance (it is a satire on us that we form audiences, whereas in traditional cultures, everyone participates) it sometimes happens that performers and audience become as one, the dancers dancing out of their skins and the hair of the audience lifting. Soul has made a mysterious entrance, and this is what we all hope for but can never engineer or predict. Soul deepens—and then connects. Or connects by deepening. She appears in a landscape and it is as if perspective were inventing itself before our eyes, everything coming alive like a presence. She appears in a casual conversation and suddenly we are no longer talking to an acquaintance but to a friend, connected at a deeper, unspoken level. Soul is what turns ordinary events into experiences; what imparts to the passing moment depth, connection, and resonance. We cannot describe it but the effect is unmistakable: an experience of stillness in our heads and, in our hearts, a fullness. It should be obvious that soul is what is transmitted and received in the experience, similarly unspeakable, that we call love.
When Colin Turnbull was allowed by his Pygmy friends to help “bring the molimo out,” he was surprised to find that it was a length of metal piping stolen from a roadside construction crew. The original molimo was made of bamboo, carefully carved and decorated; but, the men told him, this metal one was better because the old ones rotted and, besides, took a lot of hard work to make. Turnbull had trouble squaring such a profane object, and such a profane attitude, with the sacredness of a molimo ceremony. But the Pygmies had no such trouble. It was only a metal pipe as long as it was “sleeping” in the tree they hid it in. As soon as it was “brought out,” it became the molimo. On the journey to the camp, for example, it had to be allowed to “drink” at every stream. But it only truly became transformed into the molimo when it was blown into, and made to sing.23
We humans can make anything sacred. To the profane mind, nothing is sacred—the soul of the forest is only a metal pipe, the blood of Christ only weak wine. Everything depends on the creative act of imagination. The more we imbue the world with imagination, the more the world is ensouled—and the more soul it returns to us, singing with meaning.