by Jack Lindsay
The initiations of the medicine-men involve a death-rebirth action. There is a ritual decapitation and cutting to pieces of the aspirant.[418]
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3. Siberia, Tibet, China
The Ostyak shaman sings that he climbs by a rope let down from the sky, pushing aside the stars that block his way. In Buryat rite a large tree is planted in the middle of the yurt, with its top going through the smoke-hole. Silk strings, representing the rainbow and its colours, are fastened to the treetop and then carried over to a tree a short distance off (named the Pillar). Some of the shamans climb to the treetop and make offerings there to the gods. In the old days, said the informant, they could walk the silk string. The rite was called Walking the Rainbow. At the shaman’s investiture the large tree planted in the yurt represented the porter-god who allowed the shaman to enter the heavens; it had red and blue ribbons stretched from its top to a row of birches outside. The ribbons represented the path into the spiritworld. The shaman climbed the yurt-tree and some at least of those outside; at times he leaped from top to top along the whole row: from one heaven into the next. In the Altai rite the shaman in his spirit-journey to the underworld chanted and mimed the passage through the earth-hole, the jaws of the earth, and the sea that must be crossed by means of a hair. In rites like these, or that of the Australian initiate, we see how the image of a world-tree was born.
In Tibet we find a rite in which the thread or cord connecting the two worlds is used. At the New Year festival held at Lhasa near the Potala Palace, a man slid at lightning speed down a rope stretched from a palace pinnacle to a stupa in the courtyard, bringing heaven’s blessings to the assembled people. The subjective experience of the cord linking body and spirit is thus recorded. ‘A woman whom I met in a village of Tsarong had, some years ago, remained inanimate for a whole week.’ While in this state, ‘she could cross rivers, walking upon the waters, or pass through walls. There was only one thing she found impossible: to cut an almost impalpable cord that attached her ethereal being to the material body which she could see perfectly well sleeping upon her couch. The cord lengthened out indefinitely, but, nevertheless, it sometimes hampered her movements. She would “get caught up in it”, she said.’
There is a long tradition behind such ceremonies. In pre-Buddhist (Bon) beliefs we meet a rope that originally bound earth to heaven. The gods came down it to meet human beings. After the fall of man and the coming of death, the link between heaven and earth was broken. The first king of Tibet came down by a rope from heaven. The early kings did not die; they climbed back to heaven; but since the rope has been cut, only souls can ascend, the bodies stay on earth. But in many magical practices, especially Bon, men still try to climb up to heaven by a rope, and they hold that the pious dead are pulled up aloft by an unseen cord. In Buddhist beliefs there was a staircase or rope once connecting heaven and earth; the Buddha descended from the Trayastrimish Heaven by a staircase to ‘clear a path for mankind’; from the top of it all the Brahmalokas could be seen above, and the depths of hell below. The staircase was a pole or axis of the universe.
Tibet is very rich in thread rituals, which express a moment of decisive change in personal and social life. In initiations the lama attaches a string to the novice’s arm during the rite or the day before; often blades of grass, corn-ears, or other small objects are hung on the string. These objects have been with the lama during retreats and are thought to be endowed with spirit forces during his concentrations. ‘The initiated candidate keeps the string upon him during the night, and the following morning the lama himself removes it along with the grass, the ears of barley, or whatever has been attached to it. At the same time the disciple tells him all the dreams he has dreamt. It is said that strange transformations sometimes take place in these objects, they increase or diminish in size, they even disappear altogether.’ The spirit forces of the lama, stored up in the string, flow into the initiate; the removal of the string is a cutting of the umbilical cord, enabling the initiate to rise up into a new life.
At marriage, during the feast, the ceremony is completed by the groom’s mother putting scarves round the necks of the bridal pair. They are thus linked organically together. When a man dies, a hair is plucked from the top of his head to let the soul fly out; a feast is held; at the end of it a priest ties one end of a long silk scarf to the corpse and adjures the spirit of the dead man not to return and vex people, but to keep strictly to the paradise road. ‘The officiating lama then takes the free end of the scarf in his left hand, and preceded by another priest blowing on a thigh-bone trumpet, and ringing a bell or sounding a skull-drum, he leads the corpse to the burial ground.’ To investigate infectious diseases, the lama-doctors tie a rope to the patient’s wrist, then stand some distance off, holding the end of the rope and feeling the pulse through it. The rope thus is felt to be a better transmitter of the man’s vital forces than his body itself, or rather, it canalizes those forces in a way that no part of the body can. In New Year rites sacred emblems of sticks and strings are hung at the palace gates to stop evil spirits from entering; scarves, ceremonial silk scarves and knotted silk cords, are given at midnight, as New Year comes in, by the Dalai Lama to all officials. Here we see the thread both as a barrier against hostile powers and as a transmitter of new life. One of the Eight Lucky Signs of Tibet is the Diagram of the Twisted Entrails.
At Gyantse, Tibet, the New-Year Scapegoat is driven out with a bloody sheepskin round his head and a yak’s entrails round his neck; he is otherwise naked. We can detect a deodorized version of this kind of rite in the Hungarian Lent when at Carnival ‘the Jailbirds are carried out’. These were two lads wound from head to foot in straw ropes, one wearing a plumed hat, one with a scarf tied round his head; their faces were sooted; and they held hatchets or axes. They were paraded in a quête with chains.[419]
In China Chuang tze (iii 4) states that ‘the ancients describe death as the loosening of the cord on which God had hung life’.
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4. India
The hair-bridge occurs in a death ritual among the Badagas of the Neilgherry Hills, India. An elaborate service is held, in which the dead man is relieved of all major sins; these sins were in turn laid on a calf, while after each statement the folk chorused, ‘It is a sin.’ The recital ended with a shamanist account of the death journey, intended to help the dead man on his way after being cleansed of all guilt fears. ‘The dark chamber of death shall open to his soul. The sea shall rise in waves, surround on every side, but yet that awful bridge, no thicker than a thread, shall stand both firm and strong. The dragon’s yawning mouth is shut, it brings no fear. The palaces of heaven throw open wide their doors. Chorus: Throw open wide their door. The thorny path is steep, yet shall his soul go safe. The silver pillar stands so near, he touches it. He may approach the wall, the golden wall of heaven. The burning pillar’s flame shall have no heat for him. Chorus: Shall have no heat for him.’
In the Vedas and Upanishads we find the cosmic thread fully developed. These cords (the winds) hold all things together, as breath holds together and articulates a man’s body. ‘I know the stretched thread on which these living beings are woven; I know the thread of the thread and also the great brahman’ (Atharva-Veda x 8, 38). This thread, sutra, is the atman: ‘Do you know, Kapya, the thread by which this world and the other-world and all beings are bound together?...He who knows the thread, the ruler within, he knows brahman, he knows the worlds, he knows the gods, he knows atman, he knows all things’ (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad ii, 7, 1). When the ropes of the winds are cut, the universe will break up, fall apart (Maitri Upanishad i 4). As ‘it is by the air, as by a thread, that this world and the other world and all beings are strung together...they say of a dead man that his limbs have become unstrung, for it is the Air that binds them like a thread’ (Brih. Up. iii 7, z).
By the time of the Brahmanas the thesis of the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm, defined by images of thread or rope, is fully worked out. The
ritual myth of Prajapati defines the process of creation (of unification and articulation). After the worlds, the gods and living beings have been produced, Prajapati becomes ‘unstrung’. His reconstruction is symbolically expressed by the building of a fire altar. ‘With his joints unstrung he is incapable of standing up and the gods put them together again by means of sacrifice.’ The priest periodically repeats the action of the gods, reuniting Prajapati ‘totally and entirely’. In an episode in the Sarabhanga Jataka (v 130) the Bodhissatta Jotipala (Keeper of Light) stands in the centre of a field where a post has been erected at each of the four corners; he ties a thread to the neck of his arrow and with a single shot penetrates all four posts, the arrow passing a second time through the head of the first post and returning to his hand. Thus he ‘sews’ all things to himself by means of a single thread.
Further, the Sun binds all worlds to itself by means of a thread; the worlds ‘are attached to the Sun by the four points of the compass’ (Shatapatha Brahmana vi 7). The Sun is ‘well-meshed’ since it sews together the days and the nights (ix 4, i, 8).
We also find the thread as a binding or inhibiting power. Varuna and Vritra, as well as the gods of death, are Masters of Bonds. They tie up and paralyze living beings; they bind the dead. Vritra imprisons the waters. But Varuna can join with Indra to loosen and release human beings. Indra also releases the waters shut up by Vritra in the hollow of the mountain. The gods have ‘the power to bind and loose’: Matthew xvi 19. (Yoga denotes an action or process of binding; the root yuj, join, is found also in the Latin jungere, jugum, join, yoke. The yukta is the unified man.)
The thread plays a key in the basic Hindu marriage rite and in the inauguration of the Brahmin. ‘All marriages under Hindu custom are performed by the husband tying a thread round the bride’s neck.’ The sacred prostitutes of south India, the devadasis, are dedicated to their profession by a symbolic thread marriage. If we turn to the Chittagong hilltribes we find the Khyoung bridal pair tied together with a new-spun thread. The Chukma are bound with a muslin scarf, and, while being tied, they feed one another, their hands being guided, among much hilarity, by the bridesmaid and the best man. That is, their ritual aspect as infants is stressed to bring out the navel-string force of the scarf that ties and links them; they are being newly born.
In the Deccan at the foundation of a new village, mother earth was first worshipped, then the headman and Brahman recited incantations, winding a cotton thread smeared with red lac round the site, or pouring a stream of milk round the bounds. Here we see maiden-castle circuiting, and indeed all customs of beating the bounds have at root the same desire to enclose an area both practically and ritually. The fact that the red thread can have as its substitute milk brings out the way in which both are related to the mother’s anatomy. We see here also the basis of the many legends of how a large area was gained by a trick: the ‘area covered by a hide’ turns out to be the area enclosed by the hide-thread. In north India at Hoshangabad we again find the red thread used for a ritual control of the flow of spirit force. At the end of sowing each cultivator built a little shrine; at the ends two posts of a certain wood were set up, with leaves round the top (as in the hut set up for a marriage), and these were tied to the thatch with red thread. Red thread was also tied round the horns of the cattle.
A Lepcha of Maria Basti declared: ‘If in a dream a man sees a thread fall down towards him from heaven, he must read this sign as an order from heaven to become a shaman [Bongthing or Mun]. Those chosen in this way must obey and devote themselves to the shamanist function. It’s possible that a man may see a thread descend on another. In this case he must tell his dreams to the man in question, who must obey the summons. If, however, someone cuts the thread when it’s falling on a chosen person, the latter will die suddenly.’
We may add here a marriage rite of the East Indies among matrilinear folk, where the husband has to be adopted into the wife’s kindred. Seven women, who include the bride’s mother (or if she is dead, the aunt) take small torches and go round the man seven times. The mother has on her head a flat bamboo-basket with twenty-one small lights made of dhatura fruits. The women sprinkle water and blow shell-trumpets, crying the hymeneal Ulu-ulu. Then the lights are thrown over the man’s head, to fall at his back. The basket is set before him and the wife’s mother stands in it. She touches his brow with water, paddy, dhurba grass, betel and aleca nut, white mustard-seed, curds, white sandal-paste, vermilion, looking-glass, comb, bits of clay from the Ganges’ bed, a yak’s tail, etc., while the others cry Ulu-ulu. The man’s height is measured with a thin thread, which the mother eats in a bit of plaintain. She then puts a weaver’s shuttle between his folded hands, ties them with thread, and calls on him, now bound hands and feet, to bleat like a sheep in token of submission. Finally she touches his breast and turns the key.
At healing sessions of the Pahang Negritos of the Malay Peninsula, the shaman or halk holds in his fingers threads made of palmleaves or very fine cords. These threads stretch to the Bonsu, the sky-god who lives above the seven stages of heaven and is thought to have dropped them down; at the end of the session Bonsu raises the threads up again. The seven-staged heaven is of Indian origin, but the thread image has immemorial roots.
The powerful and rich relation of Buddhism to tree-cults deserves a long analysis. In Ceylon the Tree of Buddha (ficus ruminalis) is a sacred object in every Buddhist monastery. Ritual ‘games of gods’ are still played. People climb two sapu trees which incarnate a god and a goddess. The Tree of Buddha is a milk-tree; and every important moment of his life is connected with a tree. Yet the tree is clearly a mother-deity; in ritual the king pours milk over it.[420]
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5 . Africa
Here the sky-ascent is often achieved by means of a spider-thread; and since this thread is identified with the thread of the shamanist spirit journey, the spider turns into a culture hero. Thus, in Loango he has a ladder up to heaven, down which he brings fire. In one version the wind tosses on high the thread spun by the spider; the woodpecker climbs up and pecks holes (stars) in the sky; then man climbs up and gets fire. The Burotze (E. Africa) say that Niambe made animals and man, but man kept killing the animals; Niambe resurrected them, but at last, losing nerve, he climbed to heaven on a spider-web. The Louyi (Upper Zambesi) say that Nyambe the creator lost his nerve on seeing how men imitated all he did or made, so he climbed away up the spider-web. The Soubiya say that the highgod Leza was once a very strong man, who span a spider-web and climbed up to heaven; others tried to follow, but the thread broke and they fell, so they put out the spider’s eye (spiders being thought to be blind).
Other African tales tell of ascent or descent by string, rope or chain, without introducing the spider. The Tshy-speakers of the Gold Coast say that once there was sky and earth, but no men; rain came, then a great chain was let down, with seven men hanging on it; they had been created by the sky-god and were the first men. The Fo (W. Africa) say that in a great famine all the beasts grew lean but the dwarf-antelope, whose mother was aloft with the highgod Mawu; each day she let down a rope and the antelope climbed up to browse in heaven; the other beasts, watching, at last detected the trick; then they too tried to climb up, but the mother felt their weight and cut the rope. The Upotos [Upper Congo] say that in the days before Libanza, highgod and resurrector of the gods, two sisters lived in a tall tree. They were fine singers and a long string hung from their tree, so that those wanting a song gave a pull. The sisters had some adventures, then Libanza came along. The rest of the tale does not concern us here; but the tree and string were clearly cosmic, for the folk tell of Libanza’s great beard like a staircase, which the people climbed on visits to him. A Tjonga song (E. Africa) shows how familiar the idea of thread-ascent was: ‘O how I’d like to plait a string and go up to heaven. I’d go there and find rest.’ A Masai story recounts how highgod Engai intended to make various gifts to primal man; he bade the man sacrifice a calf (for the priest), tie up the meat in
a hide, and then tie a bit outside the door of the hut; then fire was to be made and meat thrown in. Engai let cattle down from the sky, but they rubbed and bumped against the hut-walls where the man was ritually hidden. He cried aloud and rushed out. Engai rebuked him, ‘You’ll receive no more because you were surprised.’ The man found that someone had cut the hide-strip and that the cutting was the reason no more cattle came down from heaven. This story is confused, but deals with some sort of trance rite during which contact is achieved with the spirit world, from which various benefits are got. The breaking of the ritual taboo of silence and seclusion is equated with the cutting of the string; communion with the spirit world is lost.
In the Loanga area the Bavili equate rainbow and navel-string. ‘Luayi: the umbilical cord’. As Xama Luayi it is the protecting beneficent rainbow, so that as a power it may mean protection, maternal love, sustenance. Further, they equate rainbow and snake. The sacred Xama snake is seldom seen save as a part of the rainbow. The natives say it is huge and lives in the forest; if it is killed, the rain will not fall; pieces of it (probably talc) are at times found and highly prized. The sacred snake Nlimba grows into the sacred snake Ndundo, which in turn becomes Xama Luayi, the delivering rainbow that drives away the evil Xama Ngonzola. The six rainbow colours are equated with six rainbow snakes.
Among the Loanga a couple doing penance are taken into the sanctuary of the earth-god. The priest traces a circle round them with iron, then he tethers a cock to the woman’s ankle, a hen to the man’s. He watches how the fowls behave as they approach one another, and draws omens as to the future fortune of the guilty pair.