Explore Articles Filed Under: Books and Art
While visiting one of my favorite websites, Bioregional Animism, and its accompanying blog, I saw some striking sculpture by Martin Bridge, an artist and teacher who lives in western Massachusetts. His website shows the range of his work — sculpture, installations, drawings, paintings, theater design, book illustration. He is a mask maker and a drummer, one of the founders of the Ritual Arts Collective, and he is a second-generation art teacher, head of the Visual Art Department at Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter High School, where he teaches Visual Art and Theater Design and Production.
In 1955, banker R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur connoisseur of mushrooms, was introduced by the Mazatec shaman María Sabina to the ancient teonanácatl — the Psilocybe mushroom, called ‘nti-ši-tho in Mazatec, Little-One-Who-Springs-Forth. María Sabina called them her saint children. Wasson was deeply impressed by his mushroom experience. He speaks of ecstasy, the flight of the soul from the body, entering other planes of existence, floating into the Divine Presence, awe and reverence, gentleness and love, the presence of the ineffable, the presence of the Ultimate, extinction in the divine radiance. He writes that the mushroom freed his soul to soar with the speed of thought through time and space. The mushroom, he says, allowed him to know God.
American novelist William S. Burroughs ended his first book, originally published as Junky under the pseudonym William Lee, with a brief meditation on yagé. “I read about a drug called yage, used by Indians in the headwaters of the Amazon,” he writes. “I decided to go down to Colombia and score for yage. . . . I am ready to move on south and look for the uncut kick that opens out instead of narrowing down like junk.” The last sentence in the book reads, “Yage may be the final fix.”
Just what we need. More bad press about psychotropic mushrooms. You see, not only do they make you trip out, so that you cannot defend yourself from slobbering, inbred, axe-wielding halfwits, but they also engender extreme rage and violence, communications with the dead, and awful visions of the future. At least that is the premise of the horror-slasher movie Shrooms.
Khadak — the term is a Mongolian loan word from Tibetan meaning ceremonial scarf — is a film directed by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth. Brosens had already made three documentaries about Mongolia when he and Woodworth filmed Khadak, which began as a documentary about commercial aviation, and then transformed itself into a piece of magical realism about Mongolian shamanism. “Motivating the film are not only the complex economic and political manifestations of change,” the directors say, “but also the more evasive and intangible spiritual ones.”
The ayahuasca ceremony can be a powerful auditory experience — the sounds of the jungle in the night; the hushed breathy whistling, the singing of the icaros, the magical songs of the ayahuasquero; the rhythmic shaking of the shacapa, the leaf-bundle rattle; the auditory hallucinations, the synesthesias induced by the ayahuasca drink itself. Musicians who have participated in these ceremonies have sometimes tried to capture this distinctive soundscape in their music, often with the idea of conveying, too, something of the psychospiritual effects of their experience. I thought I would share three examples.
Joe Rogan is a stand-up comic and comic actor. He appeared as a character in the sitcom NewsRadio, as a host on the reality show Fear Factor, and — with an apparently extensive martial arts background — as a color commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. His comedic style is iconoclastic and confrontational. He has frequently accused other comedians of plagiarism, and has publicly espoused a number of conspiracy theories regarding the Apollo moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, and the attack on the World Trade Center. He has challenged Wesley Snipes to a mixed martial arts combat. He has been an occasional guest on the Mancow Show and the Howard Stern show; he has a sensory deprivation tank in his basement. He has also — and this is probably no surprise by now — been deeply influenced by the theories of Terence McKenna and Rick Strassman about DMT.
Interestingly, two superhero comic characters have been, more or less, shamans — the Canadian superhero Shaman (Marvel Comics) and the Mexican superhero Chamán (Mambo Comics). Now you can read their exciting stories.
Painter Rick Harlow first came to Colombia in 1987 to live along the Caqueta River, near the town of La Pedrera. He spent half his time painting, the other half hunting and fishing with the men of the Yucuna people, “trying to be a productive member of society.” In 1988, toward the end of his stay, he participated in the yurupari, a five-day male initiation rite, involving fasting, drinking ayahuasca, and bathing in cold river water.
Even if you haven’t heard Marshall Arisman’s name, you have seen his work, if not in a gallery then in Time or Esquire or Rolling Stone. It is unmistakable — dark, disturbing, vaguely paranoid. “Hs work rivets the eye and the mind,” writes novelist Paul Theroux. “It is direct and seems unambiguous, but there is inevitably shadow behind it.” Arisman paints and draws … well, creatures, animals, vague hybrids of human and animal, humans as animals — what one reviewer has called “enthralling characters both dangerous and vulnerable, violent and sublime.”