"by the just judgment of God being left to himself and given over to the arbitrament of his own will, he became the sport, the laughing-stock, and the prey of demons." Thomas Smith, Life of John Dee
"Goblins, spirits, corpse candles and other unearthly visions have died a natural death and the country has been freed of the incubus of superstition. The 'wise man' who was consulted on all crucial points by our grandfathers, and even later, is as extinct as the dodo. There is no 'Cwrt y cadno' in Wales at present." (anonymous writer in the Western Mail, 1901, quoted in A People and a Democracy, edited Dai Smith; Cwrt y cadno is 'the fox's court'.)
Shamanism is now a vogue word. It was no doubt in the 1960s that it became fashionable. In poetry, we find that Ruth Fainlight's sequence 'Sibyls' is a covert version of shamanism; Alan Sillitoe wrote a poem called 'The Shaman' which was the title for a book published in 1968; Ted Hughes' Crow (1970) is based on shamanistic myths of the Koryaks and neighbouring north-east Siberian groups; J.H. Prynne's 'Aristeas: in seven years' (1968) recovers a shaman-tale from a Thracian legend recorded by Herodotus; Eric Mottram's Book of Herne is stuffed with shamanistic lore; John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy included an unmistakable Pictish shamaness in their play The Island of the Mighty; Maggie O'Sullivan has published a book called House of the Shaman; MichŠle Roberts has published a poem based on the tale of Odin's nine-day ordeal, generally held to be shamanistic; Geraldine Monk's sequence about the Pendle Witches is a shamanistic poem in light disguise; Iain Sinclair has frequently evoked the idea to illuminate his favourite performance and fetish-artists; Elisabeth Bletsoe's poem 'The Oary Man' uncovers a shaman figure in mediaeval England; a poem in Francis Berry's 'Ghosts of Greenland' describes a Norse witch in terms we would relate to a shamaness; Martin Thom and David Barnett have produced remarkable poetic versions of anthropological accounts of Siberian shamanism. In fact, this kind of primitive animistic priest has become a topos in English poetry, part of the shared imaginary. Partly, it is exoticism: the lure of Shamans is a more extreme version of the lure of Celtic bards; the shamans are the world-periphery, pristine and shadowy. Partly, it is an envy-formation; the poet does not consent to the desacralizing of poetry. The rise of the literary myth can sensibly be connected to the ambiguity, presented in Joyce Cary's The Captive and the Free (1957) felt by Christians about faith healing, and about the rational and merely educated clergyman. We should really be asking why ritual-poems are being written, in the home of Anglicanism, about Siberian rituals. The priest's loss of supernatural powers is also the poet's. As a secession from the literate middle class, the Siberian myth reminds me of the Georgian revolt: where Georgianism was N+1, the shaman myth is N+5. Georgianism made a cult of energy and the body, devaluing thought; shaman poems seize the assets of energy, physicality, and irrational lack of doubt in a far more assertive and demanding way.
The shaman-poem is the successor to the belief in spirits which ran riot from the 1840s onward: Rupert Brooke joined the Society for Psychic Research, HD and Rosamund Lehmann fervently believed in spirit mediums; all this can be more conveniently dealt with in the persona of a Siberian wearing a necklace of bones. Our concept of shamans comes from prose texts, not from shamanistic poetry, which has been collected, but which has in no instance entered the general stream of available and widely read books; consequently, it is the attitude of the prose writers which has been picked up, not the ideas of the shamans themselves. The history of these attitudes among anthropologists remains to be written; it is hardly possible, however, that they were not influenced by a modern current of anti-imperialism, and so ethnographical poems can be seen either as a flight to the periphery, an imaginative attempt to leave imperialism behind: or as a kind of cultural tourism.
The adulation of shamans is supported by a quite different ideology; including the notion that inequality and exploitation came into the world with the arrival of agriculture (or literacy?). This belief was particularly incredible after the work of the Fifties and Sixties (by Laing, Esterson, and various feminists) which frequently identified oppression in the family, and so in face to face relations; so that the Corporation and the State were merely extensions of fundamental types of human association, and not the origin of evil. If you know that the Innocence of hunter-gatherers on the score of violence, deceit, exploitation, extermination of prey species, etc., is only a moral fable, then the superiority of primitive art over Western art also becomes pale and tenuous. Bingle bangle bungle I'm so happy in the jungle. The primitivism of sophisticated, urban Westerners is a sophisticated game: we can do what we like because of our wealth. Boundless subjectivity (as we attribute it to witch doctors and their chants) is a form of the most modern thing, individualism, and is rather like the expansive urge which led to overseas settlement and to economic development. The release of what Freud calls unconscious processes is not really analogous to art which is primary in the chronological sense. Liberation is to be understood as a fight against the Christian framework which imprisoned European art until recent times. Free art neither resembles the art of Siberia and Borneo, nor can this become a bestseller and a staple of Western consumption. Shamaning has extended to become the intelligentsia's equivalent of yelling out Baby let's go crazy apeshit yeah! Everybody freak out! Shamanism in Western art has got about as much to do with Siberia and the Palaeoarctic as Aladdin has to do with China. But the exoticism, the supernatural, the fine song and dance, offer a superb opportunity for a coup de théâtre, as was pulled off by Nigel Kneale with his 1959 TV series,'Quatermass and the Pit' (unexcelled in its way). Once such an idea is made to work (in cinema, television, or poetry), then its relationship to some notional reality in the Manchurian forest, or to elaborate pretences taking place in the forests of Manchuria, is no longer of interest. We do not take our witch doctor mythology from Eliade and Radin (on The Trickster), rather we re-interpret that data (itself of much interest) and fit it into pre-existing categories supplied by our own culture. The sources of such a legendary are easy to find in our own past. Take Tennyson's poem about Vivien, for example, with this evocation of Merlin's beard: 'He spoke in words part heard, in whispers part/ Half suffocated in the hoary fell/ And many-winter'd fleece of throat and chin'. Doesn't he sound a fabulous wise old magus figure? and the sexy witch, Vivien: 'There lay she all her length (...) a robe/ Of samite without price, that more exprest/ Than hid her, clung about her lissome limbs.' Is there any difference between a wizard and a shaman? Ah, but sorcerers have been eliminated from our art and forced into the realm of childhood. For us grownups, shamans are hip and sorcerers are uncool. The appeal of the shaman is the idea, smuggled in unconsciously, that the audience gives him total credulity, credulity shared by him or herself. Obviously, Western artists latch onto this because our culture is based on scepticism; our science and machines work because we are furiously sceptical, and therefore intercept a certain amount of the lies and propaganda on which society floats. Art suffers from this scepticism. We bring in magic, but only disguised as tourism, erudition, or (bizarrely) right-on Thirdy-Worldyness.
Francis Berry's poem uses the same Norse source as Thomas Gray's "The Descent of Odin"; he shows the aged witch using the female narrator as a medium:
Of the seal, of the floe, of the ice,
About her eyes which spin glass,
About a fish, about a tusk, about the walrus,
About a special peg, or bone, which dances
Both in and out, about the grass, about a flap
A bleeding flap, or wound, and in it plunges,
Winces, prances,
A thudding sire, a bull, a thing, a fire,
About the bull, about the calf, about the eyes
Of spirits' wild glass.
Seal, floe, ice, eyes, fish, tusk, bone, flap.
You can even, today, join covens whose spokesmen will claim that their knowledge and tradition is thousands of years old. Some of it may really go back as far as the 1950s. My attention was drawn to this while wandering round the Small Presses Book Fair, which certainly had a good many more stalls dedicated to occultism than it did to poetry. The witch industry has by now caught the bandwagon, and claims that "we are your shamans". It also claims — and why not? — to stand for the liberation of women, sexual liberation, freedom from nasty foreign ideas, greenness and love of the earth, decentralisation, satisfying concreteness, and so forth.
What is artistically useful is the conventionality and predictability of our common image of the Primitive and the World of the Spirits. A poet could not produce free associating poetry, and poetry set in the world of a Tunguz or Koryak, unless we were thoroughly familiar with the scene and could catch most of the bits as they fly past us. Only at this point does the opposite quality of unpredictability become a virtue. Our Petit Trianon, Doctor Who, British Museum primitivism offers educated poets a way out of realism into a mythic world. Unexpectedly, it becomes the poetic equivalent of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Asger Jörn, a boundless subjectivity when all forms have been burst. At the juncture of the retrievable and the unknown, we find the sublime.
(for O'Sullivan review which should follow, see relevant issue of Angel Exhaust)