A couple of weeks ago, I was called a literary snob.  At first I got a little pissed off and then was told that it was a compliment.  I have no real interest in contemporary literature; I'll read contemporary non-fiction, but that's about it.  Since Harry Potter seems to come up in every lit class, I might have to see what all the hoopla is about.  However, last week I tried to open my horizon and read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
       It was alright, had a lot of violence and a decent plot.  But, spoiler alert, the last page the "judge" danced and danced the night away and said he was never going to die because he never sleeps.  Everywhere I look, I'm seeing death right now. 
    We've talked about a lot of deep issues in class this semester and luckily without reaching any answers.  Gerrit has a good argument on accepting any one true religion.  If you were so sure about a religion and have all the answers, then what's the point of living and picking up new knowledge-he says it better than I plagarize.
     What I've taken the most from this class is to just do it and make heat, don't put off anything for tomorrow, and its not what you do, but what you read.  I'll stick to reading what I like.

Zach Stenberg

Tracings

Conchis; A Generous Shaman on The Dancing Ground

            If a reader chooses to read The Magus on the surface and not read into the text, then the reader will more than likely judge Conchis as a cruel-sadist-torturous self-serving bastard.  And who could blame the reader initially?  However, if the reader doesn’t judge Conchis but looked at the initiation that he was offering Nicholas, then the reader could see how generous Conchis was.

            At some point in Conchis’s life he had a call, he experienced separation and an initiation that he answered.  Conchis died and was reborn in that initiation.  He refers to Nicholas as the “elect,” and that is our first clue of a shamanic figure. 

            Shamanism is suggested to have origins all the way back to the Paleolithic period, or somewhere around 40,000 years ago.  Shamans can be women in some societies, but for the most part they’re men.  Shamans can be magicians, healers or doctors, priests, storytellers, and even evil Shamans.  Mircea Elieade defines shamanism as the following: “First definition of this complex phenomenon, and perhaps the least hazardous, will be Shamanism= technique of ecstasy (Eliade, 4).  The technique of ecstasy is the ability to get into a trance and communicate with spirits when someone is sick, dying, missing, funeral rites, or other rituals of the community that the Shaman performs.  For the Shaman, “the Shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld” (Eliade, 5).

            Dudley Young offers his definition of what a Shaman is:

a)    Shaman’s job is to incarnate pneuma on the dancing ground. 

b)    Such incarnation tends to arouse in us the intolerably orgiastic energy, for we fear and desire it even more than we do the discarnate thunderstorm.

c)     Alpha is already the object of our ambivalent love-hatred, because he is the most real (the world means royal).  This means that, dancing aside, we already dream about eating him.

d)    Alpha, the most real, is therefore the worst candidate for shaman: the best would be his antithesis, the most unreal.

e)     How do you make a man really unreal? You kill him and then bring him back to life.

f)     If shaman can have already been dismembered and magically reconstituted by gods, he can conduct the dismembering pneuma  into our midst without being torn apart by it; nor shall our teeth be tempted, for his flesh doubtless tastes of something else.

g)     The paradox is perfect: at his most lively he is most dead-a lightning rod, in fact,” (Young,119).

            The Shaman can also be a psychopomp, a guide to escort the souls to the afterlife like Hermes; they also can serve as guides through the various transitions of life.  Shamans are separated from the community; they are chosen either hereditary, a call from the spirits, or an election (Eliade, 13).  Shamans are of the “elect” and as such they have access to a region of the sacred inaccessible to other members of the community (Eliade, 8).  In some societies, they are not just a priest, but also an actual messenger to the spirit world.

            Before the elect becomes a shaman, he/she has to have a call or a sign, and then must have an initiation.  “Before he comes a Shaman and begins his new and true life by a “separation” that is, as we shall presently see, by a spiritual crisis that is not lacking in a tragic greatness and in beauty”(Eliade, 13).  Physical signs at first are epileptic fits; an actual epileptic attack initiation of the candidate is equivalent to a cure (Eliade, 27).

            Among the Tungus of the Tranbaikal region, he who wishes to become a Shaman announces that the spirit of a dead Shaman has appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to succeed him.   For this public declaration to be regarded as true, it must include a considerable degree of mental derangement, such as epileptic fits and a sickness on the brink of death (Eliade, 16). 

            For the Yakut, the perfect Shaman, “must be serious, possess tact, be able to convince his neighbors; above all, he must not be presumptuous, proud, ill-tempered.  One must feel an inner force in him that does not offend yet in conscious of its power”(Eliade, 290).  Nicholas possesses all the characteristics of what a Shaman should not have, and yet that makes him a perfect candidate for the initiation.  In order for Nicholas to become a shaman, he must die.  “For the elect to return to the chaos and that a new personality is about to be born, “All the tortures, trances or initiatory rites that accompany and prolong this “return to chaos” represent, as we have seen, stages in a mystical death and resurrection-in the last analysis, the birth of a new personality” (Eliade, 81).

            So all of the productions that Conchis puts on for Nicholas were for Nicholas’s benefit.  The benefit was that Nicholas could see death for what it was and then know freedom.  Conchis was of the highest Shaman and wanted to spare Nicholas from consciously being dismembered and torn to pieces.  If Conchis would not have turned Nicholas into a righteous and pious candidate, Conchis then risked the chance of Nicholas turning into an Alpha-Shaman and corrupt.

            Thus on Conchis’s part of the island he created a Dancing Ground.  By Conchis invoking a real life theatre, “the dominant form the dram actually took place was the dismembering of alpha on the dancing ground”(Young, 112).

            When the Shaman is in his truly high ecstatic state, his audience becomes spared from being dismembered as in G of Young’s outline.  Saul Salomon could do this as a storyteller in the deep jungles in Amazon in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller.  Dudley Young could not describe this in prose, nor shall I.  Young left it Coleridge:

                                   

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes in holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

                                                                        “Kubla Khan”

            Conchis told Nicholas four stories as the role of the storyteller.  The Norwegian Wood story was an attempt to offer the divine to Nicholas in a direct manner.  Before Conchis tells Nicholas the Norwegian Wood story, he and Nicholas begin to talk about religion and if god exists.  Conchis had already prearranged the setting and script for the dancing ground, and the dance of the night.  With Conchis being a shaman, his role brings out the intolerably orgiastic energy as Young laid out, the mere presence of Julie is enough to drive Nicholas to the brink.  The reader of The Magus may very well view this as Conchis torturing Nicholas, but Conchis only has Nicholas’s best interests in mind.  By bringing Nicholas into an ecstatic trance, Conchis is sparing Nicholas of physical pain and sparagmosos or dismemberment. 

            Conchis pauses and turns away to allow Julie to give Nicholas a message about a rendezvous and then says, “Just then she paid us the compliment of making god male.  But I think she knows, as all true women do, that all profound definitions of god are essentially definitions of the mother.  Of giving things.  Sometimes the strangest gifts.  Because the religious instinct is really the instinct to define whatever gives each situation”(Fowles, 302).

            Conchis describes the Norwegian farm as a paradise or a utopia free from distraction of the secular world, a place “where nature was triumphant over man” and “man was nothing in it.”  A perfect setting for a separation from humanity has presented itself to the elect.  To many in the active practicing world of religion, this is what its all about according to Eliade.   “Christianity is ruled by the longing for Paradise. “Praying towards the East re-connects us with the paradisiac themes…To turn towards the East appears to be an expression of the nostalgia for Paradise” (Eliade 67).  In the present day, repenting from the world and possessing the want to go back to in illo tempore is the desire for the truly pious.

            Conchis on the third day discovered the family’s secret that Gustav’s brother was living on the farm.  Gustav acknowledged this fact and said, “I think we are all crazy here.”  Gustav brought out Stone Age articles and said he had found them at Seidevarre, which meant “hill of the holy stone,” the dolmen.

            Henrik, the insane brother, had married Ragna, which is an interesting name in such a rich environment of paganism.  Ragnarok is a Norse Myth where many of the gods will die, natural disaster occurs, and the Earth will be drowned in water.  When the world comes back from the great drowning, the remaining gods will meet and two humans will begin the world anew.

            Conchis is depicting a rich mythic-state for Nicholas here.  The Norwegian wood now develops into a mystic place, an origin of that great place (Golden Age) that great time for which many have nostalgia to be at that divine place, freedom.  Conchis, the alpha-shaman is constructing the dancing ground to come alive to Nicholas if his ears are open to it.

            Gustav describes Henrik as a Jansenist, which according to the dictionary is, “The theological principles of Cornelis Jansen, which emphasize predestination, deny free will, and maintain that human nature is incapable of good.”  However, Gustav or Conchis says that Henrik believed that he was of the elect in his system, and that he did not come to Seidevarre to meditate, but to hate, as Nicholas Urfe was doing at Greece.  Nicholas was not letting be be, but rather immersing himself in the pursuit of more sexual conquests, instead of paying attention to Conchis and the gift of life that he is offering.

            Henrik turned away from everything so that one day he might see god.  Gustav said, “He wanted to be blind.  It made it more likely that one day he would see”(312).  Henrik accepted his call.  He wrote two biblical texts in his blood ten years before and then waited for god. 

            Exodus and Esdras both contain the pillar of fire.  In Exodus, god gave the Israelites fire at night so they could travel and flee from the Pharaoh.   Pillar of Fire is the idea where people are in the presence of god.  god shows that he is in their presence by the heat and light of a pillar of fire.  Henrik did not need to see god because he would feel his presence.

            When Henrik did see god and felt his presence, Conchis said that he would have given ten years of his life to see what was going through Henrik’s mind.  Conchis was giving a glimpse of what he could offer to Nicholas.  In this sublime story of the Norwegian Wood, Conchis gives Nicholas and Julie the meaning, “All that is past possesses our present.  Seidevarre possesses Bourani.  Whatever happens here now, whatever governs what happens, is partly, no, is essentially what happened thirty years ago in that Norwegian forest”(Fowles, 317).

            Since the past possesses the present, perhaps that is why Conchis had Montaigne in mind when he saw the texts inscribed to Henrik’s beams.  Conchis said that the texts in Henrik’s cabin reminded him of Montaigne because he had forty-two proverbs and quotations etched on beams in his study.  Montaigne is an interesting example for Conchis to use.  Montaigne had some biblical verses on his beams, but he had many more sayings from classical-skeptic philosophers at that.  Montaigne had four quotes from Lucretius on his beams: “O wretched minds of men! O blind hearts! In what darkness of life and in how great dangers is passed this term of life whatever its duration. (II.14)  All things, together with heaven and earth and sea, are nothing to the sum of the universal sum. (VI.678-9)  No new delight may be forged by living on. (III.1081) The whole race of man has overgreedy ears.”  (IV.598)

            Why was Conchis throwing this into the story? Nicholas more than likely knew of Montaigne and perhaps knew that Montaigne’s essays had been on the Church’s ban list for over 100 years.  Perhaps Conchis in a subtle way was trying to allude to Nicholas that the only thing certain is that we are going to die, and if we embrace that fact, only then can we be reborn and experience life and freedom.  Montaigne came to terms with his sadness of death by writing an essay “To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die.” 

            Montaigne quotes Cicero in his first sentence: “Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die.  That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death,” (Montaigne, 89).  He is describing ecstasy in its purest form.  Instead of fearing death, we should embrace death in order that we can live life knowing freedom.  With respect to the different schools of philosophy in Montaigne’s day, he said, “Let us skip through those most frivolous trivialities” (Montaigne, 90).  Conchis used the term lilas for what the Buddhists used for trivial matters.  It doesn’t matter how we put death into words; death is simply going to happen.  Or as Wallace Stevens writes in “The only Emperor is The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Let be be finale of seem.” And more convincingly Montaigne uses Horace: “All of our lots are shaken about in the urn, destined sooner or later to be cast forth, placing us in everlasting exile via Charon’s boat,” (Horace, Odes).  We all are only destined for one thing, death.  The Romans were so conflicted with death that they didn’t say, “He is dead,” but rather, “He has ceased to live,” or, “He has lived.”  Fear the only thing that is certain in life.  By choosing to live a life by this credo, the Romans imprisoned their lives by possessing a constant fear as many people do so today.  If life is a play and only lasts for two hours, then we must act.  Montaigne states, “I deal myself the best hand I can, and then accept it” (Montaigne, 95).

            If we come to terms with death and get to know it, converse about it and realize that in fact it is a gift, then we begin to rob death of its terror.  Montaigne suggests, “To practice death is to practice freedom.  A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.  Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint” (Montaigne, 96).  In knowing death, we are liberated and the new found freedom allows the free to act.

            Montaigne proposes another idea to deal with.  Instead of conforming to a certain dogma and religion where the follower must go under a mythic death and then be reborn, Montaigne suggests to accept and embrace death.  Steal the terror behind death and realize that fearing death is a mere trifle of life.  With death the only thin one-hundred percent certain in life, to say, “I’m going to die and fear not,” can be a liberating moment in our lives.  Alas, some initiates are hard learners and need to be physically restrained and stripped of all their dignity.

            Alas, Nicholas had to be restrained and drugged before he could have freedom while making a conscious decision.  The trial was probably coming regardless if Nicholas would have embraced the initiation.  By choosing distractions and mere trivialities for simple answers, we miss out on life and life’s waning days.  In the grand scheme of our stories, the end is fast approaching to reclaim our anima or soul.  Montaigne said it best in quoting Lucretius, “The present will soon be the past, never to be recalled.”

Bibliography

Eliade, Mircea.  Shamanism.  First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Printing, 1972

Young, Dudley. Origins of The Sacred.  ST. Martin’s Press New York, 1991.

Llosa, Mario Vargas. The Storyteller. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.

Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Dreams, And Mysteries. Harper Torchbooks,1975.

Montaigne, Michel De. The Complete Essays. Penguin Books,1987.

Fowles, John. The Magus. Random House, 1975.