SOUL AND INITIATION
It is an axiom for all religions that in order to understand reality, arrive at heaven, or achieve bliss we must die and be reborn. That is, we must “die to ourselves” and be reborn as new selves. This metaphorical death takes precedence over literal death. It is the death of the ego in order that the self may come into being. Every society has developed so-called rites of passage to promote this metaphorical death and rebirth at biologically significant times: birth, puberty, sex/marriage, and death. Western culture has all but done away with formal rites, so that all-important initiations have to be reinvented and undergone informally.
Unlike monotheistic cultures such as ours, which have polarized and opposed body and soul, life and death, traditional cultures see death as the corollary of birth—while life is continuous. Like the ancient Greeks, they distinguish, as it were, between bios, which is life in the biological sense, and zoe, which can be applied to the life of the individual soul as well, going on beyond the death of the body. Initiation is the continuous adjustment of ego to soul through a series of discontinuities—a series of deaths and rebirths, from ancestor to child, child to adult, adult to parent, parent to elder, and elder to ancestor. Actual rites of passage tend to be seen as culminations of much longer processes. For example, when children are initiated into adulthood, they are often still regarded as incomplete until they are married—and even until they have children themselves, as if the whole of life were an initiation.
The most striking rites of passage are usually male puberty rites. Young boys are typically abducted at dead of night by frightening daimons, who snatch them away from the safety of their families into the wilderness or bush where they are starved, deprived of sleep, buried in shallow graves, incised with scars, and, above all, circumcised.1 The daimons are played by elders, disguised as sacred animals perhaps, or ghostly ancestors, or uncanny otherworldly beings. The important thing is that the candidate should “die” and become assimilated to the dead. Sometimes, among Australian Aboriginal tribes, for example, they are not allowed to use their hands, to speak, or even to look, except at the ground; and they have to be fed by their sponsors. This is a symbolic death but also a rebirth, because the rite is seen as a return to infancy, where the initiate has to be taught how to eat and talk all over again.2 Puberty rites are not perhaps so much an initiation into manhood as “personhood”: beforehand the candidate is a nonperson, rather as the Maoris say that a child is “dumb” before he is tattooed on the face and thereby enabled “to speak.” Girls are typically secluded with the women of the tribe at the time of their first menstruation, and initiated into the mysteries of womanhood, together with its sacred lore, stories, and songs. If for some reason initiation is delayed, a boy or girl can enter their twenties without becoming a proper person. Physiological change is subordinate to psychical transformation. Initiation is like the inner meaning of biology.
After the very real pain and fear of the symbolic death, the initiates are taught a new secret language or allowed into a secret society, or simply granted admission to the “men’s house.” They learn how the world and its inhabitants were made—the creation myths—and how the arts of fire-making, cooking, hunting, planting, weaving, pottery-making, and so on, were introduced by daimonic or ancestral “culture heroes.” Beneath the surface of ordinary life there is another, more potent life that suffuses every area of existence with a divine order. Initiation is the acquisition of the double vision that enables us to see through this world to that Otherworld; or to see this temporal world through the eternal viewpoint of that other.
Rites of passage are what Western culture conspicuously lacks. Even the Church’s acknowledgments of their necessity—baptism, confirmation or First Communion, marriage ceremonies, and funeral rites—have fallen into desuetude. It is unsurprising, therefore, if teenagers are troublesome. Either they stay at home, or as if at home—tied to their family in a childish state—and growing ever more sulky, self-centered, and self-pitying candidates for “brat camps”; or they are driven unconsciously to try to initiate themselves through danger and pain. Young men spontaneously cluster into tribal initiation groups who get drunk and take drugs; get scars, piercings, and tattoos; get into fights. In his book One Blood John Heale makes it clear that the younger members of gangs in London and Manchester regard a prison sentence or even getting shot as a rite of passage.3 Desperate to prove their manhood, they welcome rather than fear these calamities because they are more afraid that, without them, they will never gain “respect”—the recognition owing to persons as such. They would rather die, literally, than live without having undergone the metaphorical death of initiation. They might try sex, too, in the hope that this will somehow induce manhood. But, for all their swagger, it only induces despair, because manhood must precede sex and cannot be attained through it. Many marriages are essentially the union of children, who want more from marriage—a sense of self—than marriage can supply.
For a while the gang, with its private language, rules, taboos, and fierce comradeship, can provide a dawning sense of manhood; but gang membership is, of its nature, a transitional state and cannot be prolonged indefinitely. Each member must be initiated into the tribe at large if the rites are not to become meaningless ends in themselves—and end in tears. But the tribe at large is a fragmented, secular society with no formal connection to the imaginative life of the soul, no sacred consensus of myths. Worse still, it is organized horizontally rather than vertically. That is, there are no elders who, wiser by virtue of their greater age, can initiate the young, because the young inhabit a different culture from the elders, to whom it is unintelligible, and vice versa. The only formal societies in which the elders can successfully break down the initiation candidate, instruct him in “sacred” lore, and reconstruct him as a full member are hierarchical organizations such as the military, sports clubs, organized crime rings—and even the pecking order of office life.
It is no wonder, then, that attempts to “educate” youth into “responsible behavior” or to lecture youth on “health and safety” fall on deaf ears. A youth craves danger and pain to find out if he can stand it, if he is a man or not.
So, what looks like self-destructive behavior in young people is the result of confusion: they do not want to die in actual fact; they want initiatory death—and rebirth into a greater reality, a larger imaginative world, that will release them from the tormented consciousness confined within their heads. Many suicides result from a failure of imagination. We are trapped inside ourselves, in an ever-narrowing cell, and cannot imagine a way out. In despair, we know the situation must change, but we do not realize that we ourselves have to change first. We cannot make this imaginative leap, so we make the literal one—the only change left to us. If we had been able to manage some small measure of initiation we might have glimpsed the eternal world of Imagination itself, in whose light temporal problems and prisons are put in perspective and seem more like opportunities for further transformation than dead ends.
Unlike the tribal child who experiences that imaginative fullness firsthand, we have come to believe that there is no Otherworld. The ancient Greeks knew about it: Athenian citizens were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. So secret was the rite that no one ever did more than hint at its content; but we know that a great revelation was granted as a special privilege to the participants, whose lives were not the same again. Imagination thrives on mystery. But mystery has come to be rather frowned on, as insufficiently “accessible,” like the Latin Mass; or mystery is treated as a “problem” to be solved.
Children retain a proper desire for the mysterious Otherworld. They like fantasy literature, comic book superheroes, horror films; they like daimons, from elves and orcs, to vampires and werewolves. Unfortunately, they are given fake daimons in ersatz Otherworlds provided by the prancing “little people” on a television screen or by computer role-playing games—virtual realities of which they remain essentially passive observers.
The idea of imagination implies deep participation and the harnessing of real desires in order to effect self-transformation. Passive fantasy is ruled not by desire, but by wish. The fantasy world of wish is the powerless world of the child, who can make any wish he or she wants because all are equally impossible. We may wish for many things—money, power, happiness, glamour, fame—but all wishes boil down to the same wish: to be magically and effortlessly changed into someone else. Of course, we might desire wealth and celebrity, for example, and we might acquire them if we have talent, an ability to work hard, and a bit of luck. Whether or not our desire is gratified is another question, because the desire for wealth is at root a desire for freedom, notably freedom from anxiety; whereas the desire for celebrity is at root the desire for the glory of soul. In the world of wish, however, no talent or effort is required: riches or celebrity are achieved by winning the lottery or appearing on television. Untalented children—girls even more than boys, it seems—on TV talent shows tend not to say, “I want to be a good singer”; they say, “I want to be famous. I want everyone to know who I am.” Behind this sad wish is the fear of the uninitiated: that they are not proper humans, that they are invisible. They long to be seen—seen as proper and whole individuals.
If we lose the transforming power of initiation, we go on living in the childish wish-world where self-transformation is feebly counterfeited by literal attempts at change, whether through travel, hoping to return as new people, or buying new things we don’t need, or “making over” our homes or ourselves—if clothes and makeup fail, we try surgical alteration. Such measures can be manifestations of soul’s beautifying impulse; but more often they are ways of disengaging with soul. It depends on whether there is a face behind the makeup or an empty mask.
Soul in general may desire many things, and our souls in particular may all need different things. But what all souls want is attention. Like the daimonic elves and fairies we used to leave food out for, or the dead we used to propitiate on Halloween, or the gods for whom we burned sacrifices, the soul needs feeding—where “feeding” signifies heeding. Soul will not abide neglect. If we want to avoid the poison shirt, we must attend closely to all the images in which she appears to us, no matter how apparently inferior or insignificant, repellent or frightening. Only by talking to soul, and listening, can we know ourselves. If our puffed-up egos ignore her, we will lose her—not really, for soul cannot finally be lost. She is the Ground of all Being. But we can temporarily drive her away and stalk the Earth as disconnected, empty shells, like zombies.
Just such a “loss of soul” is a condition recognized by all traditional societies, for whom it is the principle cause of illness. Because it cannot be lost forever, it is simply lost in the Otherworld; and because this is also the world of the dead, we are in danger of having to follow it there—that is, dying. In the folklore of Ireland, it was common to find humans who had been abducted by the fairies and compelled to live in their realm for seven, fourteen, or even twenty-one years, after which they were allowed to return to their earthly village, old, spent men and women—mere husks of humanity—to die.4 For the fairy people, the Tuatha dé Danann, were pleased to take young men for their strength, to help them in their wars and games; young women to marry; young mothers to suckle their young. For all their dazzle and glamour, riding in laughing cavalcades, their silver eyes flashing, as witnesses tell us, the Tuatha dé seem to long for the robustness and substance of humans, just as we long for their beauty and wisdom.5
Those who are “taken,” as the Irish say, are said to be “away.” What remains—what the fairies leave behind in the beds of the taken—is a “log” or “a body in its likeness or the likeness of a body.”6 This occurrence was presumably pan-European in the old days, for the elves, hulder folk, trolls, vilas, and others of mainland Europe were no less rapacious than the Irish “Good People.” It is the equivalent of what modern tribal cultures call loss of soul. It is so serious a condition that the afflicted person wastes away to an empty husk and, unless the soul is retrieved, dies. This is why the chief function of shamans is to retrieve souls that may have wandered off during sleep or illness, souls that may have been lured away or even violently abducted by daimons, sorcerers, or the dead.
In Ireland people were especially vulnerable to abduction before the Church had performed its rites of passage for them. Babies before baptism, young women on the eve of marriage, young mothers who had not yet been “churched” after giving birth—all these could be the more easily snatched because they were in an in-between state.7 Soul loss is explained by modernity as a primitive diagnosis for babies who do not thrive, for young girls who are anorexic, for mothers who lie like logs in bed with postnatal depression. But because these sorts of disorders are more psychological than organic, the “primitive” explanation may be just as near the truth—certainly the afflicted could well benefit from a shamanic cure, if we still had such a thing.
Sometimes a shaman cannot retrieve a soul. As the northern Australian shaman Willidjungo remarked: “I can look right through a man and see that he is rotten inside … sometimes when people steal a man’s soul in the bush he comes here to my camp. I go look; he is empty inside. I say, ‘I can’t fix you up. Everything is gone. Your heart is still there, but it’s empty. I can’t fix you up.’ Then I tell everybody he is going to die.”8 We have all met someone like that, I guess. Willidjungo is vividly describing a common malaise among Westerners: that sense of emptiness that comes from having lost any connection with a deeper self. We go to psychotherapists much as Willidjungo’s clients go to him. They do not retrieve our souls as shamans do; but, if they are any good, they help us to travel into the Otherworld of the unconscious and locate our own souls, often lost at some decisive moment in the past.
If we do not lie down and die like Willidjungo’s extreme cases or like the hexed African, it is probably because of the strength of our egos, which go on driving us through our increasingly meaningless lives. We are not as vulnerable as members of traditional cultures whose egos are so intimately connected to the soul that they can easily wither away once the soul is lost, like the man who dies when his animal counterpart—his “bush soul”—is killed. But, at the same time, the tribesperson is less vulnerable to the emptiness that so often besets us, who have severed the multiple tremulous threads that connect us to other souls, not only the collective soul of the tribe, but also to the souls of earth and sky, animals and rocks and streams. We can even suffer from a condition unknown to the African or Australian Aboriginal—what psychologists call “depersonalization.”
It is not like depression, although sufferers are depressed. They feel strange and changed, “unlike themselves.” They no longer recognize themselves. Their actions seem to be automatic, as if they were robots. This lack of connection with themselves—their souls—is also, of course, an alienation from the world, which sometimes looks, literally, two-dimensional. It seems, as it seemed to Hamlet, “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.” Everything is monotonous, dry, empty, and dead9—enough to wither away any member of a traditional culture. But our indomitable egos go on driving us through our routines as if we were the machines we feel ourselves to be.
Indeed, we may begin to suspect that the materialistic view of humans as nothing more than computer-driven machines is the result of the collective depersonalization to which our culture has in large measure succumbed. Estranged from soul we have cut ourselves off from that imaginative life that naturally shows itself to us in brilliant personifications. So our psyches now present themselves as dark, empty voids. Worse still, because loss of soul is also loss of world-soul, our cosmos reflects our individual psyches. It becomes the black, empty, “hostile” abyss of outer space. Such a view of the universe simply did not exist before the seventeenth century. The mathematician Blaise Pascal was perhaps the first scientist to take on board the modern vision of space, and to shudder at “the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant and which knows me not … The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me.”10
It is disconcerting to suspect that “depersonalization” is not just a psychopathological condition but to some extent our common state of mind; sad to think that we have swapped a vibrant, animate cosmos for a mechanical, soulless universe, like the perpetual winter presided over by the wounded Fisher King in the Arthurian legend. Only the Holy Grail can heal his wound and restore fruitfulness to the Wasteland. And what is the Holy Grail? Nothing less than the Soul of the World. Only a conscious effort of imagination to summon her daimons back can save us, together with an act of psychological faith that they will come.
In 1938, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim was snatched from his comfortable home and sent to Dachau and Buchenwald. He was amazed at how fragile his world was, how easily it could be smashed. In less than a day he lost his belief in the strength of order and civilization. It was not so much the brutal beating he took on the train en route, but its senseless and arbitrary nature. On his arrival he found that these conditions continued: the smallest infringement of arbitrary rules was savagely punished. In fact, you did not even have to break a rule—“punishment” was random and indiscriminate. He came to believe that the purpose of the camps was not to punish, nor to create workers, nor even to exterminate—it was to destroy the prisoners’ belief in their self-determination and their belief that they were persons as such. It was, we might say, to destroy their souls. According to the chemist and novelist Primo Levi, who spent time in the death camps, the forcing of prisoners to operate the crematoria themselves “had a meaning, contained a message: ‘We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.’ ”11
What was important to the Nazis was that every prisoner should live in fear of death at every moment. And it was this fear that corroded the soul, causing prisoners to turn on each other, even to police each other, so that there was little need for external force. It was the unspoken aim of the Nazis to prove a point: that the Jews, for instance, really were untermenschen, subhuman, without souls. When the point was proved, as it were, they could be burned as so much trash. If the aim of the Nazis had been merely to kill, they would not have punished so brutally those who tried, and failed, to commit suicide.12
Those who did not kill themselves tried to hang on to their humanity. There were a few who were able to use the privation and violence as a means of initiation, but only those already advanced in sanctity could do so, given the extreme nature of the “initiation.” For the remainder there was the constant fear of being reduced to the condition of müsselmanner, or “Moslems”—so-called because they had succumbed to a kind of fatalism, as Moslems were erroneously supposed to have. These unfortunates, reduced by the unremitting fear of death to naked egos, single points of craving, clinging to life and burning with desire, mostly for food, soon burned out, and were left dragging themselves around like automatons. They even ceased to feed themselves. But the other prisoners were reluctant to help feed them, because their condition was highly contagious. So the “Moslems” were shunned, and soon died.13 They formed “the backbone of the camp,” writes Primo Levi, “an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”14 The soul, it seems, can be all but extinguished before bodily life has ended. It cannot be destroyed, but it can be irretrievable—in this life at least. Nothing is clearer proof of the vulnerability of the soul than the fate of the “Moslems”; yet, paradoxically, nothing is clearer proof of the soul’s existence than to look into the vacant eyes and naked craving of one whose soul is lost.
Bettelheim was interested in what he called the psychology of extreme situations, such as those he encountered in the concentration camp. But we are all liable to suffer soul-mutilation in far less extreme circumstances, whenever we are faced with tyranny, whether from a parent or a peer, a boss or a spouse. All they have to do is have power over us and to abuse that power, especially by imposing arbitrary rewards and punishments. As we have seen, arbitrariness is the key to successful brainwashing. It is in our nature to seek order and meaning so that we try to satisfy the powerful ones by predicting what they want and carrying it out. But we never can satisfy them, or detect their plan. Just when we think we are doing the “right thing,” we are reprimanded; but we might find ourselves being praised for something we simply guessed at. We endlessly debate with ourselves as to whether or not we are doing the “right thing,” or doing the thing right or not—and we end up policing ourselves. The powerful one becomes internalized, replacing our own selves.
Looking back, I was perhaps not as unfortunate as I thought at the time when, at puberty, I was isolated in the bush with my peer group, deprived of food and sleep by elders, subjected to arbitrary and complicated rules, tortured, and made to learn large amounts of sacred lore before I was deemed worthy of entry into the tribe. This was called a British public school education, where the “bush” was a rural spot and the “elders” were those upperclassmen who took it upon themselves by tradition to initiate new boys with ordeals and to make them learn all the school slang, like a sacred language, along with all the arcane customs, rites, and meanings of ties, badges, colors, and so on. Everyone colluded in the view that the school was providing education, but in fact the education was poor and secondary. It was unwittingly providing initiation, to “make a man of you.”
It is important that the fear and pain inflicted on initiation candidates are not personal. The smallest pinch delivered with malice hurts more than the hardest knock incurred by accident. In tribal life, it may be your father or uncle who is circumcising or starving you; but, painted or masked, he has become an impersonal daimon who is conducting you by force into the Otherworld. It is equally important that fear and pain be the prelude to an unmasking and a revelation of the beauty and mystery of tribal myth and religion. For if the torment is personal and prolonged beyond a certain point it does not bring the soul forth, but brutalizes it. Certain boys at school were not admitted to the “tribe” but went on being tortured in a personal way—that is, they were victimized and bullied. For some, the consequent loss of soul led to nervous breakdowns, or even suicide.
All rites of passage are “little deaths” in preparation for the last rite of physical death—and rebirth into the ancestral afterlife. However, all cultures recognize a special class of person who undertakes this final death and rebirth, as it were, prematurely. These people are the medicine men, witch doctors, or shamans who are in charge of the tribe’s sacred life as opposed to the secular life managed by the chief or elders. Their highly specialized initiation provides the blueprint for other, more usual initiations, rather in the way that mythic heroes pattern our own styles of ego and their stances.
The life of the shaman can be a lonely one. He is singled out and set apart from the tribe. He often does not marry, unless he marries a female daimon, rather as a poet “marries” his Muse. Thus it is not uncommon for a shaman to try to ignore his vocation, which typically comes in the form of a sudden illness or apparent madness, a violent revelation or a “big dream.” The sickness is essential, because all shamans are “wounded healers” who cannot heal until they have healed themselves. To this end, they leave their bodies and fly into the Otherworld.
The topography of the Otherworld shows a surprising uniformity across the world: an upper and lower region such as a skyworld and an Underworld; a world tree that links them; dangerous means of access, such as narrow bridges or gaps, gates and rocks that slam and clash.15 After the perilous journey, uncanny daimons—often the souls of former shamans—kill, flay, or dismember them. Then they are remade, raised up, and taught the sacred songs they will need to summon their daimonic helpers or familiars, and master the demons of disease. For their principal task is to tend the souls of the tribe when they are sick and retrieve them when they are lost. They combine the roles of doctor, priest, and poet, which we have, whether wisely or not, divided and deprived of proper religious initiation—especially our priests, who, instead of being chewed up like Inuit shamans by huge spirit bears, spit out, and reassembled, simply take theological examinations and dine with a toothless bishop.
The shamanic calling—perhaps I should say the heroic vocation—is universal, but only occurs to the few. Because our culture has no official place for shamans, I dread to think how many go unrecognized or do not understand their calling. How many are madmen in an asylum, or suicidal poets, or anorexic girls fasting like saints? For it seems to be the rule that once a shaman is called he or she must shamanize, or die.
But, in a way, this is the rocky boat we all find ourselves in, because we are all called by a daimon. If our fate is less dramatic than that of shamans who refuse or fail to understand their vocations, still we are liable to wither away or lead only half a life if we ignore the daimon’s call.
We may further wonder whether the rise of the modern rational ego with its Heraclean strength, its sense of being the heroic exception, and its corresponding obduracy does not mean that we all require something more stringent than the usual rites of passage (which in any case we are largely denied). Perhaps because we all, to a greater or lesser extent, participate in a worldview that is radically estranged from the reality of soul, we all need the equivalent of the shaman’s initiation if we are to open friendly relations with the Otherworld; or, to put it psychologically, to maintain equilibrium between our consciousness and the unconscious. If this is so, we should face up to what exactly is required by the shamanic vocation. And, if the shaman’s initiation seems at first sight shockingly violent, it is not more so, I suggest, than the psychological wrenching we suffer in psychotherapy—or simply in the course of lives beset by the agonies of love affairs, bereavements, and illnesses that have strong elements of psychopathology.
First of all, we have to travel into the Otherworld. Of course, we all can—and sometimes do—travel involuntarily or spontaneously into the Otherworld; but only the shaman can travel there and back at will. He can do this because he has himself become a denizen of the Otherworld—become, that is, daimonized. This is why he is such an ambiguous figure, both central to the tribe and also marginalized; both welcomed and feared. He is uncanny, and a shape-shifter who may take animal forms. He is certainly not the serene, spiritual, guru-like figure that some New Age devotees would have him be—he is more likely to be turbulent and trickster-like, colluding with the psychopathology soul is so fond of, rather than promoting the calm transcendence of spiritual disciplines.
Central to the shamanistic cultures of the arctic and subarctic regions, from North America to Siberia, and then down through Asia to Indonesia, is the necessity of dismemberment.16 This occurs, too, among the shamans of South America, who use one or more of over a hundred hallucinogenic plants to effect initiation. The Siberian shaman Dyukhade was dismembered by an otherworldly blacksmith, who seized him with tongs the size of a tent, cut off his head, sliced his body into pieces, and boiled the whole lot for three years. Then he put the head on his anvil and hammered it, dipping it in cold water to temper it. He separated the muscles from the bones, and then put them together again. He covered the skull with flesh and rejoined it to the torso. He pulled out the eyes and replaced them with new ones. Lastly, he pierced Dyukhade’s ears with his iron finger and said that, now, he would be able to hear “the speech of plants.” After this, Dyukhade found himself on a mountain. Soon after, he woke in his own tent.17
A Yakut shaman described how his disembodied head watched the preparation of its body. In a procedure analogous to the butchering of reindeer, “they hook an iron hook into the body and distribute all the joints; they clean the bones, by scratching off the flesh and removing all the fluid. They take the two eyes out of the sockets and put them on one side.” The bits of flesh are then scattered on all the pathways of the Underworld, or they are eaten by the nine (or three times nine) spirits that cause sickness, whose ways the shaman will thereby know in the future.18 While the shaman is being systematically dismantled and reassembled, blood oozes from his inert body as it lies in his tent surrounded by anxious relatives.19
If dismemberment is not universal, something very like it is so widespread that it might be called archetypal. In the early stages of initiation into Tibetan Buddhism, for example, the neophyte must meditate in a graveyard and be dismembered by the spirits of the dead. Throughout Asia and the Americas, it is common for initiation candidates to see themselves as skeletons20—that is, stripped down to the bone before they are reconstituted. Among the Aranda of Australia, the initiate is lanced through the neck by a “spirit” while sleeping at the entrance to the initiatory cave. The spirit then carries him inside the cave, tears out his internal organs, and replaces them with new ones. Instead of the “iron bones” of the Siberian shaman, the Aranda initiate has quartz crystals inserted into his body. These are supposed to be of celestial origin and only quasi-material, as if they were “solidified light.” They confer powers, such as the ability to fly.21
Meanwhile, shamans among the Angmagsalik of Greenland are initiated by a shamanic bear, which is larger than an ordinary bear but so thin that its ribs are visible. Sanimuinak was eaten by such a bear. It came out of the sea, circled him for a while, and then bit him in the loins and ate him. It was painful at first; but then all sensation left him. However, he remained conscious until his heart was eaten. At that point he lost consciousness and was dead. He awoke some time later, at the same spot. He walked by the sea. He heard something running after him. It was his pants and boots and frock, which fell down so that he could put them on.22
Initiations are not always so violent. The farther south in North America you travel, the more the motif of dismemberment is replaced by the more familiar fasting and praying of, say, the Plains peoples. A characteristic Native American initiation has been described by the Sioux medicine man Leonard Crow Dog, who was only a boy at the time. The ritual process may not involve dismemberment but it is not without its trials, tribulations, and horrors. The whole experience is one of radical transformation, beginning with Leonard’s symbolic “cooking” and purifying in the sweat lodge. He is then taken to his “vision pit,” dug like a grave on a nearby hill. He stays there for two days and three nights without food or water, praying for a vision until the tears run down his face. At last an inhuman voice speaks to him out of the darkness, saying, “This night we will teach you.” He finds himself out of the pit and in another world—a prairie covered in wildflowers and with herds of buffalo and elk. He meets supernatural beings: an ancestral wise man, an eagle that confers power on him, a pale, hairy, formless creature with whom he has to wrestle. Then someone is shaking his shoulder. It is his father. The vision quest is over, and Leonard returns, reborn, to the village, where he begins life as a medicine man.23
Shamanic dismembering may seem alien to us until we remember that something like it lies at the roots of Western culture and is therefore an active component of our psychology. The core myth of dynastic Egypt, for example, was the death and resurrection of the god and culture-hero Osiris. His brother Set trapped him in a sarcophagus, which was flung into the river Nile and floated out to sea. His sister Isis roamed the world looking for him, like Demeter searching for the Kore. She finally rescued Osiris, only to see him torn by Set into fourteen pieces. She reassembled and revived him, and he became the ruler of the Underworld.
In Greek mythology, “twice-born” Dionysus was torn to pieces as a child by Titans and then boiled in a cauldron. He was rescued and resuscitated by his grandmother, Rhea. His dismemberment was repeated ritually by his maenads during his Mysteries, with a goat playing the part of the god. Orpheus, the archetype of the shaman in our culture, was also of course dismembered by maenads after he had returned from the Halls of Hades, having failed to retrieve Eurydice, his very soul. It was said that his head floated all the way to Lesbos, where it was enshrined and able to utter prophecies.
In Norse myth the all-father Odin, chief among the gods, but also a culture hero, is hung for nine days on the windswept world tree without food or drink and pierced with a spear, in order that he might receive the runes—the precious art of writing. He even plucks out one of his eyes in exchange for knowledge.
Christian mystics can sometimes be recognized as shamanic types. We think of St. Francis of Assisi fasting in the wilderness, where a fierce angel pierces him with fiery darts, giving him the first stigmata—the five wounds of Christ; or of St. Teresa of Ávila, whose exquisite agonies were inflicted by heavenly arrows; or St. Mary Alacoque, whose heart was ripped out in an ecstatic trance by Christ Himself. He put it in His heart—the Sacred Heart of subsequent veneration—where it was inflamed before being replaced in her body.24
The pain of initiation is like an operation by soul on the body to free itself from an identification with the body. Like all ascetic practices, it opens us into a more imaginative state of mind, transcending biology. Our culture tends to treat us humans as only biology, as a type of organic machinery. If we become ill our medicine is geared up for mechanical solutions. It is particularly admirable in its assiduous efforts to keep us alive. Death is medicine’s enemy. The reason for this is that the archetype behind medicine is personified by Apollo’s son Asclepius. He was so good at medicine that he started raising people from the dead. Naturally Hades complained to Zeus that he was being deprived of his rightful subjects—whereupon Zeus put a stop to Asclepius’s activities by striking him with a thunderbolt.
Soul lives in the realm of the dead and so will always undermine Asclepian projects, such as our own medical ideal, to promote physical life at all costs; will always undermine the ego’s project of building bodily strength, health, fitness, and fantasies of immortality. As an expression of soul, though, the body is a rich mine of images. Its ailments are metaphorical as well as physical; its symptoms are questions. What burden am I carrying, asks Backache; what do I not want to hear, asks Ear Infection; what am I loath to swallow, asks Eating Disorder; what is wrong with my emotional life, asks Heart Disease; what is constricting me, asks Lung Problem … Even crass physical ailments such as a broken leg may be soul’s way of compelling the headstrong ego to stop dead and reflect on her. Every pain is a potential portal to the Underworld, where the Rich One waits with death, yes, but also with his unimaginable treasure.
One of Christianity’s strengths lies in its treatment of suffering. Its God was the first not only to incarnate himself as an ordinary man, but to experience through Crucifixion maximum suffering. Thus Christians can detach themselves from personal suffering by the double movement of substitution and exchange, placing their suffering in Christ that He may suffer for them as they in turn suffer for Him. At the same time, Christian literalism has tended to polarize the shamanic experience. It becomes either a wholly spiritual rebirth or a literal resurrection of the body. The shaman’s initiation is neither: it takes place in the daimonic “in-between” realm, neither wholly spiritual nor wholly physical—completely concrete and real, but not literally so. It is not disembodied and angelic, but full of psychopathology—wrenching, twisting, alchemical scorching, butchering. In a sense Freud tried to bring back this kind of initiation by uncovering the discomfiting truth about the soul’s perversity, by wresting it away from spirit’s repression and reinstating the in-between world of “abreaction” in which the awful moment when soul became fouled or choked can be lived again in all its intensity, releasing the sufferer into another, richer, and more mythic life story.
Actually we all intuitively understand the concrete yet metaphorical nature of shamanic initiation, because whenever we suffer the loss of something or someone crucial to us, from a job loss to the death of a loved one, we spontaneously use the language of dismemberment: “I feel completely shredded,” we say. “I’m all in pieces … gutted … my heart has been ripped out … it’s surreal … like a terrible dream … I seem to be in another world.” These are the experiences that can transform our lives forever and for better if we can resist the temptation to sedate them and instead use the enormous energies they release to reassemble ourselves—with iron bones perhaps, for strength; new eyes for insight; and a new heart for affection.
If we want to initiate ourselves voluntarily, we are faced with a lack of understanding of the need for formal rites, as well as the rites themselves. We have to embark on our own path of ego-abnegation, perhaps ethically, through hardship and selfless service to others; or imaginatively, through patient and deep attention to, and constant celebration of, the minutiae of existence—which are not only the prerequisites of art, but of any life in touch with soul.
There is another way, too, by which we instinctively understand the reality of shamanic initiation and by which we are automatically initiated—through dreams. Our nightly dip into the oceanic unconscious keeps the ego fluid and encourages it to deconstruct itself as it takes on different roles and adopts different stances in the dreamworld—starts to realize it is only one facet of the great glitter ball of the psyche. If, however, it clings to one facet, as the rational ego does, everything else in the unconscious seems hostile. It tries to flee but finds itself rooted to the spot or running as if through molasses, because the literal, muscular stance does not function in the Otherworld. It has to face the images it finds so frightening. They will prove harmless, or, if they do not—if they inflict damage—that is precisely initiation. All initiation feels, to begin with, like breakdown and regression; but if the ego surrenders it finds that it is not plunged into madness and chaos, as Jung feared, but—as he discovered—into the clarity and precision of a myth.
When Jung sat at his desk and let himself plummet into the unconscious, as I recounted in Chapter Five, the myth he met with as he watched the dead blond hero float by, followed by the scarab, the red sun, and the fountain of blood, was his personal myth; but its deeper meaning, as a myth of our times, was revealed to him more clearly in a dream he had six days later, and to which he attached extraordinary importance.
“I was with an unknown brown-skinned man, a savage, in a lonely rocky landscape. It was before dawn; the eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried’s horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him. We were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over the rocks …
“Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain, in the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the dead, he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead.” Jung is filled, in the dream, with unbearable guilt at having killed “something so great and beautiful.” He wakes, turns the dream over in his mind, but is unable to understand it. He is about to fall asleep again when he hears a voice within him say: “You must understand the dream, and must do so at once … If you do not understand the dream, you must shoot yourself.” In fact, he has a gun by the bed. He becomes frightened. He begins to reflect more deeply on the dream, and suddenly its meaning comes to him: it is “the problem that is being played out in the world. Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way … I had wanted to do the same [my italics]. But now that was no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me”—or, I might add, any of us. “Therefore it had to be killed.”
The warning voice of what was doubtless Jung’s personal daimon told him that if he failed to understand the dream—the metaphor—he might have been compelled to act it out literally—to undergo literal rather than initiatory death. In killing Siegfried he is killing the kind of ego no longer appropriate to him, or to Western culture. It is a painful moment. Jung felt “an overpowering compassion, as though I myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as well as of the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice … his conscious attitudes.” But “there are higher things than the ego’s will, and to these things one must bow.”25 Paradoxically, the alliance with these higher things is in the first place an alliance with the “lower”—the primitive, shadow part of ourselves: the savage who initiates the killing.
Death is the last and unavoidable initiation. It is up to us how we approach it.