GoatMan

  She tells me that shamanism originates from when we were all hunters and gatherers, surviving on whatever we could find or kill. A shaman would try to become one with an animal in order to track and hunt it.

  But it’s also an animist worldview. In this system it’s not just humans who can have a soul or who are considered persons; animals are very much people, too. This presents a bit of a conundrum for the shamanic hunter because if you’re hunting and killing and eating an animal and an animal is a person, well, you’re engaging in murder and cannibalism. So another reason a shaman would want to become an animal is to ask forgiveness from the animal spirit for killing it. This seems a little bit paradoxical from my point of view.

  “So part of this becoming an animal is to sort of lessen your guilt?” I ask Annette, seeking clarification.

  “Well, it’s like you recognise they are your kin. They are your relatives, and we have an ongoing agreement. Hunting is a pact. And in order for Deer to allow itself to be met and killed, you have to pay your honours by right behaviour, and part of this is to become the prey. But you have to fulfil your part. Humans aren’t doing that.”

  She tells me about a people, the Yukaghirs, who to this day are practicing shamans and hunters in Siberia: “These hunters try and take the humanness off themselves and become one with the animal, so they can think like the animal and track it.”

  She refers me to a book, Soul Hunters, by the anthropologist Rane Willerslev, who (partly to escape being murdered by the Siberian authorities) lived and hunted with a group of Yukaghirs for eighteen months deep in the forests of Siberia. In his book Willerslev describes a hunter called Old Spiridon, who hunted elk dressed in elk fur, with elk ears on his hat and the skin from the legs of an elk covering his skis, so he’d sound like an elk moving through the snow. Willerslev was with Old Spiridon as he closed in on an elk and her calf and watched as he began moving and acting like his prey to such an extent that the “female elk…captured by his mimetic performance, suspended her disbelief and started walking straight towards him.” Then Old Spiridon shot it and its calf dead. This is all very logical and easy to comprehend: “becoming” an elk clearly helps with killing elks, just as calling like a duck helps with killing ducks. What’s less easy is Old Spiridon’s description of the encounter. He said that he was seeing the elk as “a beautiful young woman, beckoning to me.…If I’d gone with them, I would have died myself, at which point I shot them both.” Not only did Old Spiridon become an elk, the elk at the same time became a human. For Annette and the Yukaghirs and the other shamanic peoples of the world, the divisions between human and nonhuman are much more flexible than I’m used to.

  When faced with a story like Old Spiridon’s, the Western–born and bred like me will say that he’s making it up for effect, and if he’s not making it up, then he must just be delusional. Or, if we’re adopting a more modern, respectful-of-different-cultures approach, we’ll say, “Ahhhh, the wise one must be speaking in metaphor: he means it’s as if the elk became a woman or the shaman became like a goat. And when the lying/delusional/wise primitive insists that no, he’s not speaking in metaphor and that the elk was a woman and, yes, the shaman became a goat, we smile and nod and say, “Yes, of course, wise one,” and then, sotto voce, “They haven’t quite got the concept of metaphor yet, though, huh?”

  Now, I’m rather scientifically inclined and not one to elevate ancient belief systems as necessarily more in tune with the natural world. For instance, when the ancient Aborigines reached Australia, they hunted 60 percent of the large mammals to extinction.3 However, I’m also trying to become a goat, and, furthermore, Annette, a shamanic practitioner, is kind and smart and doesn’t seem delusional or primitive or intellectually unsophisticated. She does have a very different view from mine of what animals and people are, though.

  Willerslev asks: What if we just consider the possibility that these shamanic people mean what they say when they say they can become animals and animals can become people? I think he’s on to something. I mean, two groups of people looking at exactly the same situation and coming to wildly different conclusions, both of which are correct depending on underlying assumptions held about the world—that’s never happened before, right? Willerslev goes on to trace the difference of opinion as to the transmutability of humans and animals back to different underlying philosophies as to what constitutes being a person.

  Now, gentle reader, I’m not a professional philosopher, so if you are, I suggest you just close your eyes for the next few paragraphs because I think I’m about to wade in and bludgeon in most gruesome fashion a discourse that has been continuing for hundreds of years across thousands of pages of philosophical treatise. And with that caveat . . .

  Willerslev in his book argues that for Western-educated minds like mine, the underlying assumptions one holds about one’s self and other selves are still profoundly influenced by the philosophy of René Descartes and his famous thought experiment described in his book Meditations on First Philosophy, published way back in 1641.

  The story goes that Descartes, sitting by the fire one night, asked himself: What can I know for sure? All of the reality I think I experience could be an illusion perpetrated by a malignant demon. Or, to bring it up to date: We could all just be in a big computer simulation, dude. Although it seems that I’m sitting in a chair by a fire, how do I know it exists? I could be dreaming, or I could just be a weird disembodied mind somewhere, somehow being fed the illusion that I’ve got a body and that there’s a chair it’s sitting in. I can doubt everything; how do I know I even exist? From this methodical doubting of existence, Descartes tries to establish a solid foundation for some certainty. He reasons that there’s one thing at least he can be certain of, and that is that there’s something doing all this doubting. All of physical reality could be an illusion, but in order to have that doubtful thought, some thinking must be happening, and therefore the “I” that’s doing the thinking has got to exist: Cogito ergo sum. I think; therefore I am.

  Having established this one certainty in an otherwise doubtful world, he goes on to argue that one’s mind, the I, must be a different thing from one’s body. This is because two things need to have the same essential properties to be the same. Descartes argues that while it’s easy to conceive of dividing a physical thing like a body or a pencil into parts, he can’t “distinguish any parts” within his mind; the mind is “something quite single and complete.” Therefore, the body is essentially divisible, and the mind is essentially indivisible, and because one thing can’t have both these contradictory properties, the mind and the body must be separate.

  So Descartes managed to elevate reason as the fundamental characteristic required for something to have a self, and to separate the reasoning mind from the physical body. Conveniently, if you’re a Christian, as Descartes was, the argument that the mind and body are different plays nicely with the notion that a person has an eternal soul that, after the death of the body, can separate and go to heaven. Furthermore, Descartes argues that because animals can’t reason (they couldn’t think: I think therefore I am), they can’t be conscious. So they’re effectively just biological automata, and any of their cries of pain or what have you can be ignored as being purely mechanical, like the chimes of a clock (Descartes was a pioneer of vivisection).

  His classic bit of reasoning has become known as Cartesian dualism, and dualism in various forms has had a pretty big effect on Western science and philosophy—mind versus body, reason versus instinct, civilisation versus savagery, humanity versus animality, objectivity versus subjectivity—and these dichotomies have been causing no end of problems ever since. But for our present purpose the important implications are that animals don’t have consciousness and, more fundamentally, our own consciousness is independent of the physical world.

  But now we turn to the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Join me as I swim so far out of intellectual depth I’ll be at risk of drowning.

  The phenomenologica
l alternative to Cartesian dualism, elaborated in the 1960s by Heidegger, among others, turns Descartes on his head. For one, Heidegger points out that it’s actually not possible to think without thinking about something: Descartes’s “I think; therefore I am” should actually be “I think about something; therefore I am.” While one of the things we can think and reason about is our own mind, we can think about plenty of other things, too. And that opens a crack: What makes thinking about your own thoughts more fundamental than thinking thoughts that make up other aspects of your perceived existence? Heidegger basically rejects the idea that the fundamental aspect of your being, your I, is a mind that can reason.

  Sure, when we’re pontificating about ourselves, we might reason that our mind could be disembodied or that it looks out from just behind our eyes (at the pineal gland in the centre of the brain is where Descartes imagined it), making decisions and telling our body to do things. But this rational consideration is just one mode of thinking, which for the most part doesn’t reflect what it’s like to exist anyway. After all, we can only work from the evidence available, and I don’t know about you, but my moment-to-moment existence is bumbling along as things momentarily capture my attention: oh, a little itch on my nose; uncross and recross my legs; oh, look, a lady; back to work; this chair is uncomfortable; scratch my nose; hold on, this is freaking me out; I’ve got to remember to breathe! Oh wait, phew, breathing happens automatically. It’s funny, that, when you think about it.

  Voilà, bumbling along—a mixed bag of sensations that when it’s feeling philosophical can reason abstractly like Descartes, but at a more fundamental level is inescapably and inseparably, as Heidegger calls us, a “being-in-the-world.”

  So how does this relate to people becoming goats and goats becoming people? Well, according to the phenomenological view, our selves exist as a result of our interactions with the world. Willerslev argues that the Yukaghirs, rather than having a Cartesian view of a person as a self-contained mind that isn’t fundamentally dependent on the external physical world, the Yukaghirs take a more phenomenological view. Rather than viewing their selves being independent discrete minds, they think of themselves as so dependent on their physical context that what they are is constructed by where they are and what they’re doing. This also helps explain the importance of setting for shamanic rituals. So when shamans change their behaviour and physicality by mimicking an animal, they are changing their context; and since what you are depends on your context, if you change your context radically enough you can actually move towards becoming that animal. Willerslev writes that the Yukaghirs are actually careful not to go too far in changing their body and behaviour because of the danger of fully becoming that animal, from which apparently there is no return.

  It’s quite difficult for me to imagine myself really believing I’ve become a goat, or rather (my mistake) actually becoming a goat by changing how I behave and how I move. It’s just not how I’ve been brought up. But if Old Spiridon, through his behaviour, managed to change his relationship to the world so much that the female elk didn’t see him as a dangerous human hunter anymore, and he saw the elk as a human in turn, well, for a moment, the elk and the person were also the person and the elk. As the Yukaghirs point out to Willerslev, from the elk’s point of view, it’s the person.

  This is the profound shift in perspective I need to try to achieve with my project. If I’m to experience the world as a goat, I need to change my context in the world to the extent that somehow I look at a chair and don’t automatically associate it with sitting. That I look at a word and don’t automatically read it. That I look at a(nother) goat and think of it as another person, like me.

  Before I leave Annette’s cabin to go and teach my master class, she has a final word on my project. She advises me to try to go further into “this mystical, spiritual process of honouring the animal and calling for its spirit.” She’s sure, however, that in the end I’ll have “to peel off the mysticality of it” because, she thinks, what I’ve set out to do, trying to use technology to get closer to nature, is a paradox: “No one would get such a crazy idea like this fifty years ago. This estrangement from nature has gone to completely idiotic extremes already, and it continues down the abyss.”

  “Our technology is changing us. That’s without doubt,” I say.

  “You have to decide if your project is really about trying to make a costume, or is the most important thing trying to find a way for people to feel their kinship, to bridge the gap, to feel like an animal? Because then you’re gonna do everything much simpler. Then it’s the mystical thing. Then it’s an education.”

  Back in London a couple of weeks later (everyone said the master class was probably one of the greatest examples of pedagogy in the history of design, by the way), I decide to go a little further into the spiritual aspect of shamanism and sign up myself and, after some persuasion, my friend Simon for a Saturday workshop in Newport, Wales, called “An Introduction to Shamanic Journeying.” Simon is an old friend, and though he’s not keen on Wales as a place to visit (childhood trauma), he does appreciate the odd foray into unreality, and we’ve been helping each other with our various more or less absurd projects since we were teenagers. On the way there we both decide to approach the day with an open mind (and I make Simon swear that he’ll not mercilessly ridicule anyone). We’ve been asked to bring a cushion, a blindfold, and a blanket so that we’ll be comfortable when we’re journeying, which makes me think we could be “away” for some time. I’m very much hoping that my animal helper spirit will be Goat (and if not Goat, then maybe something cool like Eagle or Cheetara).

  The Newport Clinic of Holistic Health is a terraced red-brick house just off the M4 motorway, and the workshop is to be held in the meeting room. Our fellow shamanic initiates are six ladies ranging in age from nose-studded student to late-middle-aged mother of grown-up children. I get the impression that a couple of group members are here to try and deal with personal tragedy, as I overhear them talking to Maxine, our group leader, showing her objects they’ve been given special dispensation to bring along to help with contacting specific spirits in the land of the dead.

  The chairs are cleared to one side, and once we’re all sat on our cushions in a circle, Maxine takes us through the basics of shamanic journeying on the whiteboard, helping us choose our personal axis mundi and so on. Your axis mundi is a place that you know well, that becomes your gateway from ordinary reality into nonordinary reality. The place you go to in your mind to climb up to the upper world or dig down to the lower world. A tree from one’s childhood garden is a “very good one, Thomas.” The day wears on, with Maxine telling us at some length her own personal story of how she was chosen to become a shamanic practitioner, until finally, in the late afternoon, we get to try journeying ourselves. We lie back on our cushions, I shut my eyes, and Maxine starts banging her drum, a fast intense rhythm, and I imagine my axis mundi and dig down into the roots, and down and down and down and, well, it sort of works…

  I see some patterns and start to hear a kind of heavenly harmonic singing, and then, as though it’s lit by flickering flames, appearing and disappearing in and out of the shadows…It’s kind of ghostly and difficult to fixate on and almost abstract, but it’s definitely…a rabbit. It dances in and out of patterns of light and dark, and it never stops to talk to me or tell me what I should do, but it’s definitely there flitting in and out of the flickering shadows. Just appearing and disappearing and kind of leaping and flying through the darkness. The beat of the drum gets louder and faster and then abruptly softens, and I hear Maxine calling us back to the world. I’m not sure how long I’ve been in nonordinary reality, maybe fifteen minutes, but our journeying session is at an end. After we all gradually sit up and let our eyes readjust to the room, we go around the circle and relate what we saw in our visions. Some of us didn’t manage anything. Stud-nosed girl supposedly went on an epic adventure, rriding on the back of a dragon deep into the land of the dead and th
en into space to discuss the state of the world with some lizard aliens and then flying to heaven to meet God or whatever (overachiever). When it’s my turn, I tell of my simple visitation by Rabbit and the heavenly singing. Maxine is pleased. I’m quite pleased, too; OK, it wasn’t Goat, but at least I was visited by a Spirit. When it’s Simon’s turn, strangely, Simon has also received a visit from Rabbit. That is odd. But what could it mean? Maxine can’t explain it either, but says it likely has some significance for our future work together.

  After looking into everyone’s eyes in turn to check that we have fully returned from nonordinary reality and are back in our bodies and thus are safe to drive, she sends us on our way with the warning to not try journeying without the aid of a shamanic professional.

  As we set off back to London, I ask Simon what he thought about us both seeing visions of Rabbit.

  “Er…You didn’t get that it’s from Watership Down?”

  Oh…Ah, yes. I remember. It seems our visions both drew quite heavily on a sequence from a childhood cartoon that featured a ghostly rabbit.

  “And the heavenly singing you told everyone you hallucinated was just Maxine.”

  Oh…Maxine was singing, and I was hearing it through my ears, not from the spirit world? Oh, I suppose that would make more sense. She’s a pretty wonderful singer, though.

  “You knob end,” says Simon.

  Feeling decidedly uncomfortable after our brush with the Welsh neoshamanic scene, I decide that perhaps I should take a head-on approach to this issue of altered perception. Annette hadn’t mentioned it, and Maxine skirted around the issue, but we all know that psychoactive substances are among the tools used at shamanic ceremonies. And so, gentle reader, I may or may not have found myself in possession of certain plant matter, which may or may not have given rise to the very worst experience of my life, crashing headfirst through the doors of perception and blundering around like an absolute lunatic, upsetting the furniture and everyone else, for that matter. And no, I’m pretty sure I didn’t get any closer to the experience of what it might be like to be a goat—unless being a goat involves being extremely freaked out and the world going all weird and geometric and getting locked out of your house in the rain with no wallet, no phone, no keys, and no shoes or socks. Which, let me tell you, is not a happy situation, because having bare feet in the rain makes you look like a total nut job, which means people are even less inclined to help you, especially if you’re wild eyed and don’t know what it is you actually want helping with. Using drugs of all kinds (both legal and illegal) to find relief from the anguish or the boredom or the worry of existence is a big part of human existence: getting out of one’s head, off one’s face and such, looking to alter one’s perception. But for me, in this case, I didn’t find relief at all. In fact, my worries and fears were epically magnified. I eventually convinced a taxi driver to take me to my girlfriend’s house. It was not fun…And that’s all I’ve got to say about that (except: kids, be extremely wary of strongly hallucinogenic plant matter).