Whisperers

by J H Brennan

  Pronouncing the sacred word aum three times and the magic syllable djom nine times, he should impose his hands above the lamp and throw a pinch of incense upon the flame saying: “Oh sublime Pitri! O illustrious penitent narada whom I have evoked and for whom I have formed a subtle body from the constituent particles of my own, are you present? Appear in the smoke of incense and take part in the sacrifice that I offer to the shades of my ancestors. When he has received a suitable answer and the aerial body of the spirit evoked has appeared in the smoke of the incense, he should then proceed to perform the oblations and sacrifices as prescribed. The sacrifices having been offered, he should hold converse with the souls of his ancestors … Having extinguished his lamp, in darkness and in silence he should then listen to the conversation of the spirits with each other and should be present at the manifestations by which they reveal their presence.3

  The description of a prayer to the goddess Nari also underlines the mediumistic nature of Brahmin practice—and all the more convincingly since the prayer is in no way part of a public performance. After paying homage to the goddess and asking that after death the practitioner might be admitted to the higher spheres, the Brahmin is instructed to place both hands above a copper vessel filled with water and evoke a sage from times past. This is a popular evocation technique common to many countries and cultures. The water in the darkened bowl acts to fixate the gaze and induce an autohypnotic trance that facilitates a vision of spirits. In this particular instance, any manifesting spirit is requested to join in the Brahmin’s praises to his goddess.

  There are practices that may suggest shamanic roots to the spirit manipulations of Brahminic Hinduism. At the highest level of initiation, for example, the practitioner retires to his pagoda equipped with a wand, calabash, and gazelle skin. There he meditates in total darkness for several hours, all the while attempting to persuade his consciousness to leave his body in order to converse with the pitris “in infinite space.”4

  For several thousand years, up to and including the present day, Indian society has been ruled by the Brahmin caste, not necessarily directly, for the country assuredly had its rajas and maharajas and now has its democratically elected politicians, but covertly in terms of social, political, and religious influence. Since it is now clear that the Brahmins themselves were guided—and, according to Jacolliot, at the very highest level exclusively guided—by their spirit contacts, then we must conclude that all social, domestic, and political aspects of Indian life have been shaped by the intervention and guidance of spirit voices.

  Nor was India the only major Asian country to be so guided. There is a silk painting of Fu Xi on display at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, China. It shows a strong-featured, mildly threatening man dressed in an elaborate robe of furs and leopard skin. He is staring pensively to his left while being watched from close proximity by a tortoise. Above him is a range of Chinese characters.

  The artwork, created by court painter Ma Lin during the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), is a commemoration of the first Chinese king, a distinguished ruler who introduced the domestication of animals, the art of cooking, fishing with nets, the creation of a calendar, the breeding of silkworms, the invention of several musical instruments, and the use of iron weapons.5 Yet for all his accomplishments, Fu Xi does not appear on the conventional list of rulers as compiled by Western academics. For them, Chinese history begins with the Shang dynasty, probably established in 1600 BCE. Since Fu Xi is reputed to have lived around 2900 BCE, this places him firmly in the realm of myth.

  But while the Shang dynasty was the first to leave written records, there are now indications that this earliest of emperors may not have been so mythic after all. Although there are traces of anatomically modern humans in China as long ago as forty thousand years BPE (Before Present Era),6 archaeologists were once united in their belief that the first villages of the Yang Shao culture (indicative of the shift from hunter-gathering to a developed urban civilization) only appeared in the Yellow River valley about 4500 BCE. Subsequent excavations shifted the dating progressively back, until now it is accepted that by the sixth millennium BCE there were cultures in China using most of the inventions credited to Fu Xi, including that most typical of Chinese activities, the production of silk.

  But if Fu Xi really existed, neither silk, nor calendars, nor iron weapons were seen as his crowning achievement. According to Ban Gu, the first-century CE Chinese historian:

  In the beginning there was as yet no moral or social order. Men knew their mothers only, not their fathers. When hungry, they searched for food; when satisfied, they threw away the remnants. They devoured their food hide and hair, drank the blood, and clad themselves in skins and rushes. Then came Fu Xi and looked upward and contemplated the images in the heavens, and looked downward and contemplated the occurrences on earth. He united man and wife, regulated the five stages of change, and laid down the laws of humanity. He devised the eight trigrams, in order to gain mastery over the world.7

  The first three sentences of this quotation might be interpreted as referring to a primitive Paleolithic existence before the discovery of cooking. The remainder requires some elaboration.

  According to legend, Fu Xi was born in Chengji (now tentatively identified with Lantian County in China’s northwestern Shaanxi Province) on the middle reaches of the Yellow River. While he was still a young man, a great flood swept across the land, killing everyone except his sister Nüwa and himself. With a special dispensation from the emperor of heaven, Fu Xi married his sister and set about procreating the human race. Prior to the flood, Chinese society was a primitive matriarchy in which birth was considered a miraculous process involving only the mother. After the deluge, the role of the father came to be recognized and society moved toward a more patriarchal culture. Nonetheless, Nüwa’s contribution to a newly restored humanity was much more than that of a brood mare. She was said to have repaired the pillars of heaven and the broken corners of the earth, both of which had been damaged in a fit of anger by a monster named Kung Kung.

  All this is fairly standard mythological fare, but, surprisingly, geological investigation suggests there might be some (distorted) truth behind it. Toward the end of the Pleistocene era, about 9500 BCE, vast tracts of China underwent violent tectonic convulsions, resulting in massive changes to the natural environment. Among them was the elevation of the Great Han Hai, an inland sea that occupied what is now the Gobi basin and stretched westward from the volcanic peaks of the Khingan Shan some two thousand miles to meet the Pamirs. With a north-south reach of seven hundred miles, a stretch of water covering 1.4 million square miles drained into the surrounding countryside in a flood of biblical proportions.

  To the people who lived through these convulsions—and there is no doubt at all that China had a human population at the time—they must have seemed like the work of some supernatural monster and certainly left the “corners of the earth” in need of repair. At the same time, the Han Hai flooding was so devastating and so extensive as to take on the appearance of a truly universal inundation that threatened the very existence of the human race. Thus environmental conditions did at one time mirror the surviving myth, albeit at an earlier period than the myth suggests.

  The myth also depicts Fu Xi and his sister as civilizing influences. She repaired damage left by the flood, he was credited with the list of cultural achievements mentioned earlier. Was it possible the myth may have mirrored an additional reality? Could China have developed civilization at a much earlier period than is now generally supposed? The proposal addresses several difficulties arising from the orthodox picture. For example, China’s first supposed civilization, the Shang, has always seemed far too advanced for a culture gradually emerging from the Stone Age. A sophisticated philosophy of life was already in place. Not alone did it have a fully developed form of writing, but early texts are just as subtle and poetic as later works. There were imposing buildings, impressive tombs, horse-drawn chariots, wheel-thrown pottery
, exquisite metalwork. And all this apparently emerged fully formed. The myth presents a different, some would say more logical, picture. It depicts Fu Xi and Nüwa as representatives of an earlier civilization, all trace of which disappeared beneath the waters of a devastating flood. It depicts them, like survivors everywhere, as determined to rebuild what had been lost.8

  If, however, we accept the legend of Fu Xi as a picturesque representation of something that actually happened, we are still left with a mystery. The myth lists several aspects of the earlier culture that we would certainly expect survivors to restore as a matter of urgency—efficient ways of hunting and fishing, the institution of marriage to safeguard the family unit, the working of metal, and the techniques of building. But above them all is set the carefully preserved mention of “five stages of change” and “eight trigrams” that enabled Fu Xi to gain mastery over his world. What do these terms mean and what was he doing when he “looked upward and contemplated the images in the heavens, and looked downward and contemplated the occurrences on earth”?

  The answers to these questions are embodied in the oldest known examples of China’s most profound speculative philosophy. First came the question of what existed before the universe came into being. Chinese sages managed to imagine the almost unimaginable: a field phenomenon of pure potential that they labeled Wu Chi. This state of nothingness, beyond description or even speculation, is nonetheless the state out of which everything we experience arises. It precedes and, so to speak, “stands behind” matter, energy, space, and time. It is the ancient background to what physicists today refer to as the Quantum Foam, the ultimate substratum of reality created by the appearance, from nowhere, of fundamental subatomic particles that exist momentarily, then disappear again.

  The genius of the ancient Chinese lay not in their recognition of this state but in their realization that its sole knowable characteristic had to be that of change. Without change, nothing could have emerged from the Wu Chi. Without change, it would have remained pure potential forever. But change it did, as we deduce in retrospect: the Wu Chi became the Tai Chi or Grand Terminus, the totality of our manifest universe, known and unknown, including our planetary world and the humanity that inhabits it.

  Against this background, the Chinese made one further, vital deduction. If change was inherent in the great Wu Chi–Tai Chi transformation, then change was likely to remain inherent in the Tai Chi itself; indeed, likely to be its most fundamental aspect. Contemplation of these ideas led to further conclusions. In its original, pristine form, Wu Chi was a single unity. Once Tai Chi manifested, duality came into being; and this too must be an aspect of our universe. In fact, the manifest universe continued to mirror the processes that brought it into being. Inherent in its very structure was perpetual change, leading to the potential becoming actual, then transforming in its turn.

  These are not particularly easy concepts for the Western mind to grasp (and worse is to come), but a modern exponent of the ancient philosophy, Jou Tsung Hwa, puts forward a helpful analogy in the formation of tornadoes. He begins with the calm before the storm. The air is still and there is no tornado. This is the state of Wu Chi. Then the first hint of a breeze springs up, begins a circular motion, and eventually turns into a tornado. This is the state of Tai Chi. The state of calm, which once was all there was, has now become a duality: the original state of calm and the current tornado. But the tornado cannot last forever. The winds die down, a state of calm returns: Tai Chi has once again become Wu Chi.9

  Observation of natural phenomena persuaded the Chinese that everything involved duality. Anything there was at any given time, any object, any event, had a part that changed and a part that stayed the same. Even when the hurricane was raging, there were parts of China that enjoyed calm weather; and in the heart of the hurricane there was also an area of flat calm, the eye of the storm.

  All this is symbolized in the myth of Fu Xi looking upward to contemplate the heavens, and downward to discover what was happening on earth. He decided to call the unchanging part of phenomena yin and the part that changes yang. For convenience and practical application, he symbolized yin and yang as broken and unbroken lines. In doing so, he laid the foundations of the most influential oracle in the history of China—the I Ching or Book of Changes. Historically, that influence was most obvious in the Imperial Court. Courtiers, whose lives literally hung on the whim of their emperor, used the book constantly to divine their fate and seek advice on safe conduct. Sages used it as a basis for their advice to the emperor himself. Philosophers took up the work, allowing its insights to shape their own thoughts, which in turn shaped the society they lived in. How profoundly the I Ching influenced Chinese society as a whole is underlined by the fact that Confucius, who wrote his own commentaries on the oracle, claimed that were he to live his life again, he would devote it entirely to a study of the I Ching. Confucian thought continues to shape Chinese society to the present day, as, directly and indirectly, does the oracle Confucius so much admired.

  In its developed form, the I Ching is a lengthy and complex work, daunting to the Western mind. It incorporates a binary system similar to that which drives modern computers and interprets a total of sixty-four figures known as hexagrams, each comprising a different pattern of interacting yin/yang lines. Since the meaning of every line varies with its position in the hexagram and any line is capable of modifying the meaning of the whole, the oracle offers a multitude of possible answers. In the earliest times, the lines were generated by heating a tortoiseshell until it cracked—hence the appearance of the little tortoise in Ma Lin’s picture. If the crack was a single unbroken line, it was seen as yang; if broken, as yin. Later, bunches of dried yarrow stalks were used, as were coins. The exact method was unimportant, so long as it enabled the questioner to “tune in” to the currents of change pertinent to his query.

  We have it on the authority of Carl Jung that the I Ching is capable of producing meaningful answers. When he tried it for himself, he concluded that “had a human being made such replies, I should, as a psychiatrist, have had to pronounce him of sound mind.”10 The question, however, is how. There have been many convoluted answers—Jung’s theory of synchronicity is often evoked, for example—but the Chinese themselves were in no doubt. They attributed the I Ching’s accuracy to the intervention of spirits.

  There are indications that this belief may be based on something more than simple superstition. One of them is the I Ching’s long association with yarrow stalks. Any good horticultural reference will list yarrow as a temperate-zone plant that grows across the British Isles, Europe, and much of the United States. In China, there is a tradition that it may be found growing wild in areas devoted to sacred ceremonies. What few sources mention is that the herb, when correctly prepared, has psychotropic properties.

  The I Ching itself can also be used shamanically, as the American travel writer William Seabrook confirmed firsthand while visiting an apartment above New York’s Times Square. Some friends were experimenting with the oracle, and one of them, a Russian émigré named Magda, decided to try an unusual technique that promised direct access to the oracle’s wisdom. She generated a hexagram in the usual way using fifty yarrow stalks, but instead of finding its interpretation in the text, she entered a meditative state in which she visualized the figure painted on a wooden doorway. When the door opened of its own accord, she expected entry into a visionary experience that would clarify the meaning of the hexagram.

  When nearly half an hour passed without anything happening, Magda’s companions became bored and began to talk among themselves. But they were soon interrupted by a loud groan from Magda and the announcement that she was running in the snow, naked except for a fur coat. As they crowded around her she became agitated and began to growl like an animal. Her companions realized she was in some sort of trance, but when they attempted to waken her, she attacked them fiercely. They managed to subdue her eventually and when she woke she reported that entering the hexagram d
oorway had taken her into an environment not unlike the wilder parts of her native Russia, but in the process she had become possessed by the spirit of a wolf. Interestingly, the hexagram Magda generated was named Ko, which translates as “revolution.” The original Chinese text equates it with molting, the means by which an animal changes its coat.11

  Magda was not the only one to suspect the intervention of a spirit in the workings of the I Ching. By the time he came to admit it publicly in 1949, when his introduction to the classic Wilhelm/Baynes edition was first published, Carl Jung had been using the oracle for personal guidance and as part of his analytical practice for close to thirty years. He too liked to evoke synchronicity as an explanation of the oracle’s effectiveness but privately admitted that the answers were prompted by “spiritual agencies” that formed the “living soul of the book.”12 Nor should the remarks be taken figuratively. Although in his earlier years Jung insisted apparitions and even physical manifestations must be “projections” of the unconscious, from personal experience he was convinced that a purely psychological explanation would not do. In a footnote to a lecture he gave to the Society for Psychical Research in London, reprinted in the 1947 edition of his Collected Works, he admitted that he now doubted whether an exclusively psychological approach could do justice to the phenomena. A year earlier, in a private letter to the psychotherapist Fritz Kunkel, he stated bluntly that “metaphysic phenomena could be explained better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious.”13