Such practices take us back to earlier eras, such as the Stone Age, which stretches over most of the Quarternary and consists of three periods:
• Paleolithic: from the Greek palaios = ancient, and lithos = stone
• Mesolithic: from mesos = middle
• Neolithic: from neos = new
Joseph Campbell drew attention to the famous wall painting in the Grotte des Trois Frères in southwestern France, dating from about 15,000 BC. It features the “dancing sorcerer,” a shaman dressed in animal skins, playing some kind of musical instrument, probably a musical bow.
The dancing sorcerer, Gro e des Trois Frères. PHOTO: Author’s le In those days, the European continent looked like today’s Siberia. It was an immense frozen tundra through which wandered large herds of animals—bison, rhinoceroses, mammoths—as well as our human ancestors. According to the experts, they lived in small bands of hunters, spending summers in outdoor camps, winters in caves, where they left mysterious documents in the form of cave paintings. Campbell thought that the caves were used as percussion instruments. Sound produced by striking stalactites was ampli ed by the acoustic properties of large caves.
Soon after the magni cent dancing sorcerer was painted, a signi cant change in climate took place: the end of the ice age. The glaciers melted; some animals, like the mammoth and the woolly rhino died off; others migrated eastwards, some crossing over to Beringia before the ooding of Bering Strait.
The Mesolithic is characterized by the appearance of agriculture and the husbandry of goats and cattle (10,000–2,700 BC). It is in the Neolithic that skin drums became common.
American musician Mickey Hart, who wrote a study on drumming through the ages, considers that the individual who discovered the percussive power of stretched skin was a genius.
The drum plays a very important role in the work of the shaman. Its rhythms carry him, as if on wings, to the higher dimensions and, during the trance, allow him to work miraculous deeds. He ies like a bird in the world above, or he descends into the nether world as a reindeer, a bull or a bear.
Among the Buriats, the animal or bird that protects the shaman is called khubilgan, which means metamorphosis, from the verb khubilku, to change one self, take another form.3
However, the ight of the shaman is strewn with obstacles. The Buriats tell how their rst shaman was able to bring the souls back from the kingdom of death. Following a complaint from the Lord of Death, the Great God in Heaven decided to test the shaman. He caught the soul of a human and shut it into a bottle, stopping the spout with his thumb.
The shaman searched through the forests, the rivers, the mountains, even the land of the dead. Finally, astride his drum, he climbed all the way up to the upper world…4
Having watched the Great God in Heaven, he shape shifted into a wasp, stinging him in the forehead. Surprised, the Great God removed his thumb and the prisoner ed from the bottle. In revenge, the Great God broke the shaman’s drum, thus diminishing his powers. The punishment could have been worse!
Incidentally, during the fourteenth century, there used to exist in the area of Toulouse, in France, a middleman, the armier, who transmitted messages from the dead. Of course, the bishops frowned on this parallel clergy. In the mountain villages of the Causse district, such armiers, or âmiers (from âme = soul), continued to play their role of intermediaries between the living and their deceased parents until around 1900.
For Campbell, there is no shaman without a drum. The object is endowed with speci c properties. As with any drum, its tone depends on who was its past master. The instrument certainly often has a strange in uence. Mickey Hart relates how a skull drum—thod raga in Tibetan—came into his hands. The gift from a friend, the antique double drum was constructed from the skulls of two sisters who died in an epidemic. In India, such an instrument is called a damaru.
Monk holding a damaru and a
bone ute. PHOTO: Author’s le Although not very large— a skull ts in the palm of the hand—the drum had a powerful sound. Soon, Hart suffered from acute nausea. Further mishaps followed: he dropped things, fell, hurt himself; he narrowly escaped death when his car rolled into a ravine. Hart consulted a Buddhist monk, Tarthang Tulku,5 who told him that by playing a damaru he had accidentally brought something back to life. Fortunately for him, there then followed a luckier period, characterized by a revival of his own creative forces, long deadened, which led to a series of new musical compositions.6
Hart understood that the powerful drum was more than just a simple rhythm machine. Playing it had opened a door and had, at the beginning, freed some dangerous spirits. A transformation then took place through an intimate and fruitful chemistry. It seemed that Hart had been transported by ascending forces after having stagnated and nearly oundered into a potentially fatal abyss. The new path that opened to him was a call for artistic exploration of the magic of rhythm, he being rst and mainly a musician.
Again, the shaman is rst and foremost a healer. He sometimes relies on hallucinogens: in America, mainly tobacco or mushrooms; in Tibet, powerful incense fumigations. In appropriate doses, well known to healers, some plants, such as the iboga of Gabon, have highly bene cial effects. Its users call iboga the herb of wakefulness. For the non-initiated, the trip may, however, be short and painful. The presence of a master is absolutely necessary. The shaman himself may even get lost in the trance. He lets his soul leave his body to travel beyond. But he is supposed to control that excursion in the other, higher world, a trip destined to heal the patient, who also experiences the trance while remaining passive. In contrast, the shaman’s trance is active. An author wrote, “the shaman is a visionary and adventurer of the great beyond,” concluding, “clinical descriptions can’t account for the extraordinary wealth of the shamanic imagination, perhaps the universal embryonic form of artistic creation.”7
However, the dangers are many and go far beyond personal risk, as illustrated by the story of the tree with two branches, one bearing delicious fruits, the other poisonous ones. During a famine, a villager climbs the tree and absentmindedly picks a fruit. Luckily, it is an edible one. The villager is complimented and it is resolved to cut the other branch. Alas, the tree soon dies.
Might this perhaps suggest that western science, just like the tree with only one branch, lags behind the shamanistic pharmacopeia?
Let’s now draw nearer to those regions of current interest. Take for example the Magars, an important Nepalese ethnic group: 1,623,000 people, i.e., 7.1 percent of the total population according to the 2001 census. To this day, these hill people from northern Nepal still organize their religious life around a community of shamans. According to Anne de Sales, when a shaman starts a song, he pays homage to his ancestors. It is as if he were saying, “I was born from your dances, I was born from your drumming.”8
The Magars speak of a primordial Golden Age contrasting with the Blind Age, the dark period in which we now live. The eras that followed the Golden Age became increasingly more chaotic until the
North American witch doctor, 1590. ILLUSTRATION: public domain
rst shaman appeared and discovered that it was evil spirits and sorcery that were at the back of sickness and misery. Today, each shamanic initiation and each healing process hark back to that primordial Golden Age. The blending of the sacred time and of the present, of myth and reality, keep this tradition alive.
1 “Profession: traqueur de molécules,” ar cle by Amélie Padioleau in Notre Temps, no. 420, décembre 2004. The CNRS is the Centre Na onal pour la Recherche Scien que, the principal French governmental research organiza on.
2 Jacques André, Etre médecin à Rome, p. 17.
3 Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the White Gander, p. 166.
4 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 199.
5 Tarthang Tulku, born in 1934, le Tibet when he was 25, following the occupa on of his country by China. A er teaching in India for 10 years, he se led in Berkeley, California, where he founded a numb
er of associa ons (welcoming Tibetan refugees, preserva on of Tibetan culture). He is the author of a dozen books on Buddhism.
6 Cf. the Grateful Dead album, Blues for Allah, 1975; also Mickey Hart, Voyage dans la magie des rythmes [Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion], 1998
7 Luc de Heusch, “Possédés somnambuliques, chamans et hallucinés” in La Transe et l’Hypnose (ouvrage collec f), p.42, Imago, Paris, 1995.
8 Cf. Anne de Sales, Je suis né de vos jeux de tambours, as well as Holger Kalweit, Shamans, healers and medicine men.
5. The In-between Times
Before continuing our exploration of the sacred time and of the present time, let’s set a few reference points. Traveling deep into the Asiatic continent in search of the yeti, we encounter places, things and people with strange names, as well as unfamiliar rituals. Let’s start with a few ideas linked to practices once current in the West. The vocabulary will now be as familiar as the cultural background with which we are familiar. However, whatever the scenery, the phenomena described are essentially the same as those less familiar traditional celebrations in the most remote areas (the Himalayas, the Caucasus, China…).
Let’s start with a custom still very much alive in Europe: that of the Yule log, best understood through British traditions. The term Yule log comes from Scandinavia, where the winter solstice was celebrated on the feast of Yule. Yuletide, as a synonym of Christmas, was nearly abolished by the Puritans who associated it with the pagan Saturnalia, a feast the Romans celebrated with debauched revelry in December. Orgies were the most spectacular aspect of these holidays, during which everything seemed permitted: men and women went as far as exchanging clothes, a masquerade viewed as a regression to chaos. In these words:
Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness, Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.1 Shakespeare expresses the views of the seventeenth century Puritans, which prevailed until the celebrations, now rmly linked to the Nativity and Christmas, were again encouraged in the reign of Charles II during the English restoration. The Twelfth Night concludes the Christmas season with merrymaking, heralding the Epiphany, when the three Wise Men, the Kings of Orient, arrive in Bethlehem after a 12-day trip and offer incense, myrrh and gold to the child Jesus. Shakespeare’s play by that name was written as an entertainment for the Christmas season.
The Christmas carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas, speaks of a different gift every day. The number 12 becomes particularly important when one recalls that most ancient people used a lunar calendar. A lunar month is on the average 29.53 days long, with 12 months adding up to 354 days. Eleven or 12 days have to be added to make up a solar year of 365 days and a quarter.
Additional days were inserted at different times depending on the particular calendar. The Egyptians, using 30-day months, only had to add ve intercalary days to make up a year. The Gregorian calendar has retained one lunar month, February, which for a long time was the last month of the Roman year. With months of unequal length, the spiritual meaning of the inserted days has been lost; the additional days, spread from month to month, have become just ordinary days. It is dif cult today to imagine the state of mind that accompanied those special days. The carnival period has preserved some of the avor of these periods of feast and chaos, a time when the kings of clowns sit on the real king’s throne.
Today, instead of the shamans and initiates of old, spirits and demons are represented by wearers of masks and costumes, often burlesque characters. Gody, the ancient Slavic and German New Year period, coincident with Christmas and the solstice, has left strong traces in today’s customs. In Eastern Europe, such rituals have retained their vitality and embody a perspective older than Christianity. As darkness of winter overcomes the light, as the wind roars and spreads its frozen wings, the souls of the departed approach the windows, begging for a new life. Villagers huddle by the replace, fearful of lurking underground spirits transformed into animals such as the wolf, or the bear… During Gody, spirits appear, attracted by the light and come to talk to the living, who in turn fear them, for spirits know the future and can in uence man’s fate.
Gody mask, Poland, 2004. PHOTO: Author’s le The spirits are befriended through offerings of oats, straw, hay or bread. The communal banquet is followed by the distribution of the 12 gifts. Conjuring spells—against the wolf or the bear—are spoken in a language that has become incomprehensible. In the street, as during carnival, masked youth pursue the maidens, sometimes tying them up to carts or plows. Most often they are made to draw small carts, or are pulled around sitting in such carts. All this hazing aims at transforming the woman in a mare-goddess, the divine horse mother, supreme deity of yore. Epona, the Gaul goddess, for example, means Great Mare.
These rites bring us back to those “in-between times,” the additional days. According to religious historian Mircea Eliade, such interruptions in the ow of time ensure the cyclic renewal of time. Each year, the world is created anew. As a new creation emerges, the living dead rise, as there is no longer any barrier between the dead and the living. Time is suspended and the deceased hope for a return to life.
The orgy signals a reversal of values; social norms are dissolved, the king is subjected to ritual humiliation by taking the place of the slave; there is regression. It is a kind of ood that precedes the regeneration, the second birth.
In some societies, rituals of extinction and rekindling of the re dominate; in others, it is the expulsion of demons, through noise, dances and violent gestures; elsewhere, the scapegoat is expelled, either in human (as a wild man) or animal form.
What really matters is the absolute erasure of all sins and faults of the society as a whole, more than just puri cation. The past year is done away with, fully spent; all ashes are removed from the hearth. The time has come to restore harmony. A log that will burn brightly is carefully selected. The Yule log is a synonym of a new cycle. The creation of the world is re-enacted with the participation of the members of the community. During the “in-between time” they have lived in mythical time. Novelist and mythologist Jean-Charles Pichon speaks of the Saturnalia as “the Freedom of December.”2 Sadly, the citizens of the rich countries have forgotten the meaning of ancient feasts and this expression makes little sense for them.
1 William Shakespeare, Twel h Night (II, 2).
2 That is the tle of one of Pichon’s rst novels, La Liberté de Décembre, (édi ons Ariane, 1947). The irreversible disappearance of ancient tradi ons leaves a vacuum, an expecta on, most keenly felt by young people. JeanCharles Pichon writes: “The street gang is an e ort at returning to the Great Secret. We recognize in these spontaneous groupings many of the characteris cs of vanished cultures: emblems, totems, ini a on, clearly emerging as an a empt to create a society independent from the world of adults, irra onal perhaps, but easier to live with.” (L’Homme et les Dieux, p. 492).
6. Dasaï, Dasain or Dashain
Traditional holidays still perpetuate ancient signi cance in many countries. Such a celebration is the Nepalese Dashain held over a fortnight during September and October.
At the entrance of each village, a large swing is erected—a seesaw between the past and the present. Houses are cleaned through and through; banquets are prepared. There are dances, drink-ups, card games played for money. Kites, their strings lined with glue and broken glass, are launched in aerial combat: the goal is to cut the opponent’s string. All this to celebrate the nine faces of the goddess Durga, whose role is to extinguish the forces of evil, symbolized by the demon Mahisasur, in the shape of a water buffalo.
Barley seeds are planted in pots of holy water and dung, called kalash. After a few days, barley sprouts appear: the sacred herb, called jamara, a sign of the bountiful in uence of the goddess Durga. On the seventh day, the royal kalash is taken on a amboyant parade.
Over the rst nine days, pilgrims visit nine stations where they take a sacred bath, either very early or at night. These stations are placed at the con uence of rivers, near t
emples built on the nearby shores. On the eighth day, animals are sacri ced from sunset to dawn: rams, goats, buffalos, roosters and ducks are decapitated. Blood ows freely and is sprinkled on all that’s useful, including all kinds of vehicles, even airplanes.
At the beginning of Dashain, the world is empty and time stands still. After 10 days, the society is reborn, the demons have been expelled and the king consecrated anew. Dashain is over at the full moon and life resumes at its usual pace.
Nepalese are fond of esoteric practices and Dashain is replete with them: the whole universe is in the hands of opposing energies: one masculine, the other feminine (as in the yin and yang, heaven and earth, or Shiva–Shakti dualities). The universe is seen as kept in balance by these opposing, yet balancing, forces. Behind the feasts and the games lies an elaborate symbolic system.
The great swing, sometimes very simple, elsewhere richly decorated, is viewed by the naive tourist uninitiated to the world of symbols as a rustic toy or perhaps as a work of art. However, that object, which seems a mere child’s toy, is also the symbol of the balance between the two poles of opposing energies. A sense of common identity emerges in the community from participation in the festivities.
As we shall see, the yeti is the focus of a celebration as important as it is laden with symbolic resonance: the Dumje festival.
7. In the Footsteps of a Myth
The Asian Wild Man Page 4