Anatomy of Restlessness (12 page)

 

Shamanism is a religious ideology peculiar to hunters and herdsmen.
³⁰
It appears to be north Asian in origin, yet is diffused throughout North and South America, Oceania, Indonesia and Australia. Shamanist practices are historically documented in lands as far apart as China, Ireland of the Iron Age, Pagan Scandinavia, among the Scythians and Thracians, in Classical Greece after the opening of the Black Sea trade route, and even in Siberia in the nineteenth century. Its basic features are a Celestial Being identified with the Sky, direct communication between Heaven and Earth, and an infernal Region connected to these loci by a Cosmic Axis.

A shaman, as Professor E. R. Dodds describes one, is ‘a psychically unstable person who has received a call to the religious life. As a result of his call he undergoes a period of rigorous training, which commonly involves solitude and fasting, and may involve a psychological change of sex. From this religious “retreat” he emerges with the power, real or assumed, of passing at will into a state of mental dissociation'.
³¹
Each trance repeats his symbolic death; he achieves it by fasting, followed by dancing to the monotonous beat of a drum. He often resorts to pharmacopoeia, hemp, and the shamanic mushroom – the Fly Agaric, which is probably the Soma of Vedic texts. Ostyak and Vogul shamans eat this mushroom and fly to the Sky ‘where they live in the Sun's rays like insects in human hair'.
³²
Herodotus describes some Scythians ‘howling for joy' in what seems to have been some kind of sauna bath with the added benefits of hemp.
³³
Strabo talks of shamans or seers ‘walking in smoke', and the first part of Aristophanes'
Clouds
seems to be little more than a moralistic take-off of a shamanistic seance.

The shaman's body ‘dies', and his soul flies off on the wings of ecstasy to the Sky or to the Underworld. Dodds says, ‘From these experiences, narrated by him in extempore song, he derives the skill in divination, religious poetry, and magical medicine which makes him socially important. He becomes the repository of a supernormal wisdom.'
³⁴
Feared, sexually ambivalent, set aside from the ‘normal' life of the tribe, he remains the hub of its creative activity, its culture hero.

A fable of Aesop tells of the Golden Age when ‘the other animals had articulate speech, and knew the use of words; and they held meetings in the forests; and the stones spoke and needles of the pine tree ...'
³⁵
In his trance, the shaman forsakes his human condition and regains this Paradisal Time. He identifies himself with a ‘helping spirit', usually an animal or bird, and learns to imitate its language. A costume completes the transformation. The Tungus have duck and reindeer costumes, the duck for ascents to the Sky, the reindeer for descents to the Underworld. By putting on the costume he becomes that animal or bird. ‘I transformed myself into my holy shape of a black-throated loon and flew from tree to tree where my festival was celebrated.'
³⁶
In the Ynglinga Saga, Odin's body ‘lay as though dead, and then he became a bird, or a beast, a fish or a dragon, and went off in an instant into far-off lands'.
³⁷
Is this the underlying idea behind the symplegma of animals, so recurrent a feature of the Animal Style?

The shaman changes himself into his alter-ego. Yet he is the focal point of all tribal activities, his protective spirit is the one which the tribe will adopt as its totem. The Teleut believe that the eagle is their protector; their words for eagle and shaman are the same. Attila was surrounded by sorcerers, and eagles were emblazoned on his shields. The undivided Turks had golden wolf-head standards. Ssu-Ma-Chi'en records that ‘King Mu attacked the Ch'uan barbarians and brought back with him four white wolves and four white deer.'
³⁸
Chingis Khan's ancestor was a wolf sent down from the sky, whose wife was a white deer. The Hungarian chronicles tell of the origin of their race: two hunters crossed the Maeotic swamp chasing a doe (the totem of those lands which they then annexed); the doe turned itself into a beautiful woman, and the sexual implications are obvious. The animal totem represents the ideal of the tribe; hence the urge to denigrate or subdue the totems of other tribes; hence one possible explanation for the ‘animal combats' of the Animal Style.

Mental disorders are common in northern Asia. The harshness of the climate is sometimes blamed. Shamanist candidates, ‘morbid and sensitive', tell of the relief that shamanising brings. The deliberate
dérèglement de tous les sens
of the shaman's ordeal stabilises an otherwise disintegrating mental condition. Periods of sanity are offset by bouts of psychosis or excursions into the world of dreams. Modem reports of hallucinations under trance include a disordering of space and form, the disintegration of eidetic images into spirals, whorls, volutes, carpet patterns, nets and lattices; colours are of otherworldly brilliance; there are half-faces, faces split in half about a central axis, X-ray vision, and ‘amputated limbs, mutilated bodies, detached heads and fusion of parts'.
³⁹

All works of art, even mechanical artifacts, reflect the aspirations of their makers, and are eye-witnesses of the past. The art of urban civilisations tends to be static, solid and symmetrical. It is disciplined by the representation of the human body and by the mathematical skills attendant upon monumental architecture. To a greater or lesser extent, nomadic art tends to be portable, asymmetric, discordant, restless, incorporeal and intuitive. Naturalistic representations of animals, themselves often in violent motion, are combined with a compulsive tendency towards ornamentation. The northerners rarely concerned themselves with human activities, admitting only an occasional mask. Colour is violent; mass and volume are rejected in favour of bold silhouettes and a pierced technique of openwork spirals, lattices and geometric tracery. Animals are depicted from both sides at once, their heads abutted to form a frontal mask. The so-called X-ray style is common and shows a schematised view of the animal's skeleton. So is the convention of
pars pro toto
, especially with the amputated limbs of animals, and the fusion of parts to form a repertory of fantastic beasts. The similarities between hallucinatory experience and nomadic art cannot be explained away as pure chance.

In Siberia and elsewhere there was a close relationship between the shaman, as creative personality, and the craftsman, especially the metal-smith. ‘Smiths and shamans come from the same nest,' says a Yakut proverb. In nomadic society the smith was not the underprivileged artisan of civilisation; for the Mongols he was a hero and a free knight. Shamanism has always been connected with mastery over fire; metallurgical secrets are handed down within a closed circle associated with magic and sorcery. There were the Irish ‘Men of Art', the Hephaestus tradition in Greece, the shaman-smiths of the
Kalevala,
and German and Japanese metallurgical secret societies.
⁴⁰

The shaman's disordered appreciation of reality verified the ‘spiritual' truth of the artistic traditions of his tribe. In time, models strayed from their archetypes and became slack and repetitive. But as the shamans were able to renew the spiritual content of their beliefs, so the Animal Style was able to renew its vitality and power through to the Middle Ages and beyond.

 

In one of his gloomier moments Pascal said that all man's unhappiness stemmed from a single cause, his inability to remain quietly in a room. ‘Notre nature,' he wrote, ‘est dans le mouvement ... La seule chose qui nous console de nos misères est le divertissement.' Diversion. Distraction. Fantasy. Change of fashion, food, love and landscape. We need them as the air we breathe. Without change our brains and bodies rot. The man who sits quietly in a shuttered room is likely to be mad, tortured by hallucinations and introspection.

Some American brain specialists took encephalograph readings of travellers. They found that changes of scenery and awareness of the passage of seasons through the year stimulated the rhythms of the brain, contributing to a sense of well-being and an active purpose in life. Monotonous surroundings and tedious regular activities wove patterns which produced fatigue, nervous disorders, apathy, self-disgust and violent reactions. Hardly surprising, then, that a generation cushioned from the cold by central heating, from the heat by air-conditioning, carted in aseptic transports from one identical house or hotel to another, should feel the need for journeys of mind or body, for pep pills or tranquillisers, or for the cathartic journeys of sex, music and dance. We spend far too much time in shuttered rooms.

I prefer the cosmopolitan scepticism of Montaigne. He saw travel as a ‘profitable exercise; the mind is constantly stimulated by observing new and unknown things ... No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, however much opposed to my own ... The savages who roast and eat the bodies of their dead do not scandalise me so much as those who persecute the living.' Custom, he said, and set attitudes of mind, dulled the senses and hid the true nature of things. Man is naturally curious.

‘He who does not travel does not know the value of men,'
said Ib'n Battuta, the indefatigable Arab wanderer who strolled from Tangier to China and back for the sake of it. But travel does not merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind. Our early explorations are the raw materials of our intelligence, and, on the day I write this, I see that the NSPCC suggests that children penned up in ‘high-rise' flats are in danger of retarded mental development. Why did nobody think of it before?

Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths first, things and people second – paths down the garden, the way to school, the way round the house, corridors through the bracken or long grass. Tracking the paths of animals was the first and most important element in the education of early man.

The raw materials of Proust's imagination were the two walks round the town of Illiers where he spent his family holidays. These walks later became Méséglise and Guermantes Ways in
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
The hawthorn path that led to his uncle's garden became a symbol of his lost innocence. ‘It was on this way', he wrote, ‘that I first noticed the round shadow which apple trees cast on the sunlit ground', and later in life, drugged with caffeine and veronal, he dragged himself from his shuttered room on a rare excursion in a taxi, to see the apple trees in flower, the windows firmly shut for their smell would overpower his emotions. Evolution intended us to be travellers. Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been a sporadic condition in the history of man. Prolonged settlement has a vertical axis of some ten thousand years, a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time. We are travellers from birth. Our mad obsession with technological progress is a response to barriers in the way of our geographical progress.

The few ‘primitive' peoples in the forgotten comers of the earth understand this simple fact about our nature better than we do. They are perpetually mobile. The golden-brown babies of the Kalahari Bushmen hunters never cry and are among the most contented babies in the world. They also grow up to be the gentlest people. They are happy with their lot, which they consider ideal, and anyone who talks of ‘a murderous hunting instinct innate in man' displays his wanton ignorance.

Why do they grow up so straight? Because they are never frustrated by tortured childhoods. The mothers never sit still for long, and their babies are never left alone until the age of three and more. They lie close to their mothers' breasts in a leather sling, and are rocked into contentment by the gentle swaying walk. When a mother rocks her baby, she is imitating, unaware, the gentle savage as she walks through the grassy savannah, protecting her child from snakes, scorpions and the terrors of the bush. If we need movement from birth, how should we settle down later?

Travel must he adventurous.
‘The great affair is to move,'
wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in
Travels with a Donkey,
‘to feel the needs and hitches of life more nearly; to come down off this feather bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot, and strewn with cutting flints.' The bumps are vital. They keep the adrenalin pumping round.

We all have adrenalin. We cannot drain it from our systems or pray it will evaporate. Deprived of danger we invent artificial enemies, psychosomatic illnesses, tax-collectors, and, worst of all, ourselves, if we are left alone in the single room. Adrenalin is our travel allowance. We might just as well use it up in a harmless way. Air travel is livening up in this respect but as a species we are terrestrial. Man walked and swam long before he rode or flew. Our human possibilities are best fulfilled on land or sea. Poor Icarus crashed.

The best thing is to walk. We should follow the Chinese poet Li Po in ‘the hardships of travel and the many branchings of the way'. For life is a journey through a wilderness. This concept, universal to the point of banality, could not have survived unless it were biologically true. None of our revolutionary heroes is worth a thing until he has been on a good walk. Ché Guevara spoke of the ‘nomadic phase' of the Cuban Revolution. Look what the Long March did for Mao Tse-Tung, or Exodus for Moses.

Movement is the best cure for melancholy, as Robert Burton (the author of
The Anatomy of Melancholy
) understood. ‘The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow ... to teach us that we should ever be in motion.' All birds and animals have biological time clocks regulated by the passage of celestial bodies. They are used as chronometers and navigation aids. Geese migrate by the stars, and some behavioural scientists have at last woken up to the fact that man is a seasonal animal. A tramp I once met best described this involuntary compulsion to wander. ‘It's as though the tides was pulling you along the high road. I'm like the Arctic Tern. That's a beautiful white bird, you know, what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.'