The Solar Phallus Man was actually a patient named Emile Schwyzer, diagnosed with what was then called paranoid dementia, who had been committed to the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich in 1901 after an attempted suicide. Schwyzer had been in and out of other institutions for decades. As Jung told it, he had begun treating this patient in 1906. Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination in which the sun had an upright tail — “similar to an erect penis,” Jung adds parenthetically — which moved back and forth when Schwyzer moved his head with his eyes half shut, and this motion caused the wind to blow. This is how, Schwyzer explained, he could control the weather.

Carl Gustav Jung in 1906

This hallucination, Jung says, remained unintelligible for a long time, until he became aware of remarkably similar symbolism in a Mithraic liturgy, part of the Greek Magical Papyri, that had not been published until 1910. Here the ministering wind was said to originate from an αυλός — a pipe or tube — hanging from the disc of the sun, which could be seen by looking from east to west. Schwyzer was a store clerk with no higher education, unlikely to have read or heard about such an esoteric symbol. Even more, he had described it to Jung before it had even been published. Where could it have come from if not from a collective unconscious?

Now this is a hell of a story, and we can understand why Jung enjoyed telling it. But the story has a number of problems.

Let’s start with the dates. Schwyzer’s vision had in fact been conveyed not to Jung but rather to Jung’s twenty-four-year-old student Johann Honegger, who had interviewed Schwyzer over two months in 1910, while Jung was in the United States, and three years after Jung had stopped treating the patient. Honegger presented the vision of the solar tail or penis — along with a great number of other apparently mythic visions and beliefs he had been told by Schwyzer — at the second International Psychoanalytic Congress in Nuremberg in March 1910. Apparently Schwyzer had told none of this material to Jung. Honegger unexpectedly committed suicide with a morphine overdose in March 1911.

Jung published the solar penis story in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido in 1911. In that text, Jung credited the discovery of the hallucination to Honegger, and he cited two sources for the Mithraic liturgy it purportedly matched — a 1907 English translation and a 1910 German translation. In fact, as Jung subsequently discovered, the 1910 German translation was the second edition of a work that had first been published in 1903, and upon which the English translation had been based. After the original citation, Jung stopped referring to the 1907 English translation, and he never referred to the 1903 edition of the German translation at all.

In Jung’s 1952 English-language revision of Wandlungen, now entitled Symbols of Transformation, Honegger disappears altogether. Here it is Jung who “once came across the following hallucination in a sczhizophrenic patient.” As late as 1959, in an interview with John Freeman on the television program Face to Face, Jung insisted that he had heard the solar penis vision in 1906 and that the Mithraic liturgy was first published four years later in 1910. In this version, Schwyzer had grabbed Jung by the lapels and pointed at the sun, saying it had a penis. If Jung moved his head from side to side, he would see. It was this penis that caused the wind.

Klinik Burghölzli

It is true that, if Schwyzer was committed to Burghölzli in 1901, then he clearly would have had limited access even to the German translation of 1903. On the other hand, as Richard Noll has pointed out, the image of a solar penis had already been discussed in Friedrich Creuzer’s massive compendium of ancient symbolism and mythology, the third edition of which was published in 1841, and in Johann Bachofen’s 1861 text on matriarchy. Both of these books had a profound and enduring effect on German popular culture. And there is no way of telling what Schwyzer may have heard from other Burghölzli patients, many of whom were in fact well educated, and at least some of whom had interests, not uncommon among educated German speakers at the time, in ancient religions and symbolism.

But the disappearance of Honegger masks a more serious methodological issue. Shamdasani has recovered the text of Honegger’s 1910 presentation of the Schwyzer material, along with another unpublished article on the same case. Since Jung had by that time ceased his clinical practice at Burghölzli to pursue his mythological research, he had given Honegger the task of retrieving mythic material from psychotic patients at the clinic.

Honegger seems to have pursued this task with a vengeance. Schwyzer, Shamdasani notes, turned out to be “a veritable textbook of mythology.” He told Honegger that the deity was originally feminine, that the dead became stars in heaven, that the earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas, and that the sun had a penis — or perhaps a tail — that caused the wind. Honegger could not have been more pleased.

And there is good reason to believe that these were far from spontaneous utterances. They were, rather, the result of Honegger’s probing. How do you know that the seed body was always feminine? Honegger asked. Can you also make wind? How do you do it, when you want to make rain? Schwyzer, undoubtedly bored and lonely, would have been only too happy to oblige this interested and sympathetic listener. Indeed, given Jung’s admiration for the work of Creuzer, it is not unlikely that his student Honegger had himself read the book and its section on the solar penis.

Chains, straitjacket, cell belt, and covered bath tub formerly used to restrain patients at Burghölzli Clinic

Carl Meier, a psychiatrist who had known Schwyzer personally and had reviewed his entire medical file, said that he had never succeeded in finding out the function of the solar penis in Schwyzer’s hallucinations. In fact, he said, by the time he knew him, Schwyzer no longer even remembered it.

Putting all of this aside, the problem is that Schwyzer’s hallucination in fact provides no evidence at all for Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious.

The most important thing about the unconscious is that it is… well, not conscious. How then do we become conscious of — forgive the spatial metaphor — its contents? For Freud, there is no such thing as nonverbal thinking; the unconscious is accessed through words. For Jung, on the other hand, the unconscious is accessed through images. These images appear to us in dreams, fantasy, visions, imagination, and hallucinations. These images are how the unconscious communicates with us.

Again contrary to Freudian psychoanalysis, Jung maintained that, underneath this unconscious, there lay another unconscious, which he called first the phylogenetic and then the collective unconscious. As Shamdasani has demonstrated, the idea of such a phylogenetic or racial unconscious was congruent with so many elements of late-nineteenth-century European thought that it could, he says, almost have been regarded as a commonplace.

For Jung, this collective unconscious is not filled with images. It is filled with archetypes. Jung likened these archetypes to Kantian categories — that is, to a priori conditions for possible experiences. Jung proposed extending the Kantian idea of the logical categories of reason to the production of fantasy; the archetypes, Jung says, are “categories of the imagination.”

Archetypes thus are form without content; they are possibilities of images. Although they are themselves without content, they are often, on the basis of the images whose form they provide, named after mythological figures — the Hera archetype, for example, or the Wise Old Man archetype; or they may be named for some abstract theme, such as the archetype of engulfment or the archetype of rebirth.

We can distinguish archetypal images from ordinary images because archetypal images appear to us on a wave of emotion; they possess salience and depth; they are numinous and mysterious. It is these same archetypal images that appear as motifs in myths, legends, fairy tales, literature, and art around the world, arising out of the same set of archetypes in the shared collective unconscious. As Joseph Campbell famously put it, dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams.

Jung in 1910, standing outside Burghölzli Clinic

There is thus a distinction between an archetype and an archetypal image, a distinction that Jungians — and even Jung himself — have often failed to maintain consistently. There is no access to the archetypes of the collective unconscious; they are transcendental and unrepresentable. All we have are archetypal images, which conform to the a priori conditions imposed by their archetypes. The collective unconscious is a negative borderline concept, just as unknowable as the Kantian thing in itself. We know of the archetypes only through a form of transcendental deduction from numinous images.

Here is an example of how this works out in practice. In psychoanalysis, a dream narrative is analyzed. The patient tells the story of the dream, free associates from that material, relates the dream content to events in childhood. In Jungian analysis, dream images are amplified. The patient — often with active input from the therapist — explores the meaning of the images, not only personally but also historically and transculturally in myths, fairy tales, art, and literature. Amplification is thus a hermeneutic process — a quest for meaning that leads the patient beyond the personal to the wider human and cultural context of the dream material.

So important has this process been that it has had an institutional effect — the development of analytical psychology clubs in urban centers, which are essentially libraries of scholarly resources on myth and religion, where analysts and selected patients can jointly pursue amplification of the patient’s dream and fantasy images.

But it is when such amplifications are used — like the hallucination of Solar Phallus Man — to argue for the existence and nature of the collective unconscious that serious methodological and conceptual issues arise.

Methodologically, it is virtually impossible to find uncontaminated material. The clients of Jungian therapists, including those of Jung himself, have been largely self-selected. They enter Jungian analysis because they have read about its interest in myth and dream, and because this reflects their own often long-standing interests. Jungian analysts, too, actively participate in image amplification. That is why Jung considered the Solar Phallus Man so important. It was, he thought, a hallucination that could not conceivably be accounted for by cryptomnesia or forgotten outside sources.

And the idea that numinous images are somehow shaped by transcendental a priori archetypes raises a whole series of troubling conceptual issues.

The claim that the same image has arisen in people far separated in space and time — a Burghölzli patient in 1910, say, and a Mithraic writer fifteen centuries earlier — is meaningless without criteria for deciding when two images are the same and when they are not. Schwyzer’s sun is variously described as having either a tail or a penis pointing up; the Mithraic liturgy speaks of the sun as having a pipe or tube hanging down. There is no way to know whether this matters.

Jung in 1959, on Face to Face, telling the story of the Solar Phallus Man

Moreover, there is clearly no one-to-one relationship between archetype and image. A single archetype can give rise to any number of archetypal images; and a single archetypal image may — or perhaps may not — be of two different archetypes at the same time. If the relationship between archetype and image is many-to-many, then the relationship between an image and any particular archetype becomes indeterminate. In the same way, we have no criteria by which to rule out the possibility that the widely separated solar penis images were coincidentally similar images from two different archetypes.

Just how many archetypes are there? There appears to be no constraint on their number or nature. Steven Walker, a scholar of comparative literature sympathetic to Jung, says that “the list of archetypes is nearly endless.” There can be an archetype for just about any possible human situation, it seems; and conversely each archetype can produce an indefinite number of archetypal images. And apparently we can make up archetypes at will. Is there a solar penis archetype? That seems surprisingly narrow for a fundamental a priori category of the imagination. A few minutes thought can yield a dozen archetypal possibilities, from masculine generativity to magical control of the weather. In the endless list of archetypes, how do we decide?

And if the person who has produced the numinous image gets to decide with which mythic motif or fairy tale situation it most clearly resonates, then it is not clear why we need to postulate transcendental archetypes of the collective unconscious at all.

Psychologist James Hillman faced this issue squarely, and he chose to eliminate the noun archetype altogether, while preserving the adjective archetypal. The problem, he says, is that Jung moved “from a valuation adjective to a thing and invented substantialities called archetypes… Then we are forced to gather literal evidence from cultures the world over and make empirical claims about what is defined to be unspeakable and irrepresentable.”

But we do not need to take the idea of the archetypal in this reified sense. Any image can be archetypal, Hillman says; it need only be given value — archetypalized or capitalized — by the person experiencing it. “By attaching archetypal to an image,” he says, “we ennoble or empower the image with the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance.”

James Hillman

This view informs Hillman’s approach to dreams, which is not hermeneutic, as it is for Jung, but rather phenomenological or, in Hillman’s term, imagistic, image-centered. “To see the archetypal in an image,” he says, “is not a hermeneutic move.” He thus sees little value in traditional amplification. “Hermeneutic amplifications in search of meaning take us elsewhere, across cultures, looking for resemblances which neglect the specifics of the actual image.” Instead of asking how an image is related to an archetype, the patient begins with and concentrates on images in all their multiple implications — a process psychologist Stephen Aizenstat calls animation, “entering the realm of the living dream.” The idea is to personify the image, ask it questions, interrogate its purposes, engage it as a teacher — even identify with it and question its meaning as one’s own. Hermeneutics is replaced by imagination.

Still, if what we are looking for is the meaning of images — in dreams, visions, imagination, fantasy — then it is worthwhile, I think, to pursue that meaning wherever we can. We do not need to postulate a collective unconscious or the existence of archetypes to pursue that meaning across cultures and through history, or to place our own images in the vast context of human suffering and transformation. The purpose is to give our dreams and visions life-giving depth, overflowing with meaning and power — what Hillman calls “unfathomable analogical richness.”

Nor do we need to limit this pursuit to images from the unconscious. In a dream I see a smiling child, I stumble over a rock, I stand in the rain; and I seek out what these images mean, I engage them and seek their counsel. A smiling child, a rock, the falling rain deserve no less inquiry, no less depth, just because we have classified them as real.

Filmmaker Keith Aronowitz

The ceremonies proved to be profound. “It was an incredible experience,” Aronowitz says, “and forever changed my life.” He also happened to have brought his camcorder and, just for something to do, he recorded some of the ceremonies and interviewed some of the people who had also journeyed to drink ayahuasca. When he shared his footage, the response was enthusiastic. So he thought: Why not make a documentary?

The film Aronowitz envisioned was deeply personal, so he wanted it to be completely self-funded and under his own control. He spent months teaching himself about documentary filmmaking, and he used the money he had been saving for Vietnam to purchase video equipment. Shooting the film was a challenge, especially because he was working by himself. He used a camera with night vision in order to film the ceremonies without compromising their integrity. But most of all, he says, the challenge was to translate the essentially internal ayahuasca experience into film.

After months of filming in the jungle, additional trips for supplementary footage, and about fifteen rough cuts, Aronowitz felt confident that he had captured the story he wanted to tell. The film, cut down to ninety-five minutes, was titled Metamorphosis.

Don Alberto Torres Davila

Then came more challenges — distributing the film. Once again, despite having a distribution deal, Aronowitz decided he wanted to do it himself. He began with small private screenings while he submitted his work to film festivals. At the 2009 Breckenridge Film Festival in Colorado, Metamorphosis won the award for Best Cinematography. He has shown the film at the Wild Project in New York, and at the Fifth International Conference on Amazonian Shamanism in Iquitos, Peru. He sells the DVD of the film online here.

Metamorphosis follows five westerners — ayahuasca tourists — on a nine-day retreat at the jungle lodge maintained by Blue Morpho Tours, where they participate in five ayahuasca ceremonies. The lodge is run by Hamilton Souther, who has been practicing shamanism for about seven years. “The spirits came along,” Souther says in the film, “and they said to me: You have to go into the jungle and drink ayahuasca.” Souther apprenticed under don Alberto Torres Davila and don Julio Gerena Pinedo, and they now all work together leading ceremonies at the lodge. The film tells Souther’s story, incorporates his explanations of the ceremonies, and portrays the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes through which he guides his guests.

Hamilton Souther

The film does not flinch from depicting the sometimes overpowering physical and psychological effects of the drink. “Everybody who comes here suffers,” says Souther. Aronowitz puts this into his own context. “Fear is not the only thing that takes place,” he says. “You experience divinity. Universal knowledge through visions. Oneness. Love. Your heart opens. You feel connected to everyone and everything. I feel like I had to go to hell in order to get to heaven.”

Blue Morpho Tours specializes in what it calls all-inclusive shamanic workshops. The lodge is relatively comfortable, at least compared to the amenities available in local villages, and has hosted not only tourists but also journalists who have described their ayahuasca experiences in such widely read publications as the Houston Chronicle and National Geographic magazine.

Perhaps because of its success, Blue Morpho Tours has attracted both criticism and defense, largely concerning the commercialization of indigenous spirituality and the effect of ayahuasca tourism on local communities. “Blue Morpho is a unique place,” Aronowitz says, “because one of the shamans is a westerner. He left his life in America in order to learn this healing tradition in the middle of the Amazon. So he’s a conduit to helping other people heal through this tradition.”

Here is a trailer for the film. Additional clips are available here.

Cheryl Lynne Bradley has posted a lengthy interview with Aronowitz, and Adam Elenbaas has an interview on Reality Sandwich. The film has a Facebook page, and Aronowitz recounts his story here. There is an audio interview by Nick Zart on Radiohuasca which you can listen to here:

]]> http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/09/metamorphosis/feed/ 4 http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/heidegger-the-shaman/ http://www.singingtotheplants.com/2009/08/heidegger-the-shaman/#comments Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:43:51 +0000 Steve Beyer http://www.singingtotheplants.com/?p=3586 Philosopher Martin Heidegger articulated the strikingly shamanic idea of das Geviert — the fourfold gathering of earth, sky, gods, and mortals. We place ourselves in relation to the earth and sky, and search and await the essence of the divinities revealing themselves to us through their presencing in the world — in water, in a flower, in a jug. And what if we were able to recognize this gathering of the fourfold everywhere — a world where earth and sky, mortals and gods, all reflect each other? That would be, he says, the worlding of the world.
]]> Heidegger dressed as a Tyrolean peasant

Martin Heidegger, says philosopher Richard Rorty, was a resentful, ungenerous, disloyal, and deceitful man. He was also an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party from 1933 until it was disbanded by the Allies in 1945. Immediately after the war, because of his Nazi involvement, he was stripped of his professorial rights, which were not restored until 1951. To the end of his life, for the thirty-one years that he continued to live and write, he was unrepentant, silent, and evasive about his relation with the Nazi state.

Heidegger published Being and Time, arguably the single most influential philosophical text of the twentieth century, in 1927. After the war, in his forced retirement, he lived in a small house in the rural town of Todtnauberg and became — I can think of no other way of putting it — something of a crank, railing against technology, and claiming, perhaps even believing, that he was accepted and beloved by the sturdy völkisch peasants among whom he chose to live.

It was during this period that Heidegger articulated the strikingly shamanic idea of das Geviert — the fourfold gathering of earth, sky, gods, and mortals.

Heidegger (marked with an X) at a Nazi rally

Heidegger asks: What is a thing? The technological worldview ignores things, he says, or takes them for granted, or views them simply as raw materials — anything other than letting things be just what they are. But in actuality a thing things, and can bething us. “If we let the thing be present in its thinging from out of the worlding world,” he says, “then we are thinking of the thing as a thing… Thinking in this way, we are called by the thing as the thing. In the strict sense of the German word bedingt, we are the bethinged.” For something to call on us as a thing is for it already to be there as itself, open to our response. For us to be in the world is for us to be “called by the thing as a thing.”

It is in thinging that the thing gathers the fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals, thereby tying together the world in which we dwell. It is things, and not our categories for conceptualizing them, that gather together the world.

Consider a flower. It can be thought of as an object that is grown, harvested, stored, purchased, sold. But this way of looking at the flower does not present its authentic being, Heidegger says. The flower can be understood as it truly is only in relation to the fourfold — as the earth in which it grew, the sky that gave it sun and rain, the gods in whose honor it can be placed on an altar, and the mortals to whom it brings joy. Thus, it is the unity of the fourfold that constitutes the being of a flower. This unity of the earth, the sky, human beings, and the sacred is precisely what Heidegger calls the thinging of the thing.

Heidegger’s house at Todtnauberg

The same holds true for human artifacts. A jug holds liquid that has been put in it. But the truth of the jug, Heidegger says, is revealed only when the liquid is poured out of it. “In the outpouring, the holding is authentically how it is.” The outpouring gives water or wine. The spring from which the water came stays in the water, the rock from which the spring came stays in the spring, and “the dark slumber of the earth, which receives the rain and dew of the sky,” stays in the rock. In the same way, the wine holds the grape, “the fruit in which the earth’s nourishment and the sky’s sun are betrothed to each other.” Thus, both sky and earth dwell in the jugness of the jug.

The gift of the outpouring is a drink for mortals, and also a libation for the immortal gods. Mortals stay, in their own way, in the gift of the outpouring that is drink; the divinities stay, in their own way, in the gift of the outpouring that is a libation. “In the gift of the outpouring,” Heidegger says, “earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together all at once.” The four belong together because of what they themselves are. “Preceding everything that is present,” Heidegger says, “they are enfolded into a single fourfold.”

Each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others. Heidegger calls this enfolding or gathering of the fourfold into a thing Spiegelspiel, mirror-play. Out of this mirror-play the thinging of the thing takes place.

And what if we were able to recognize this gathering of the fourfold everywhere — a world full of mirror-play, where earth and sky, mortals and gods, are everywhere, reflecting each other? The fouring in the mirror-play, Heidegger says, is the worlding of the world. And this is also the world of the shaman, where earth and sky, spirits and humans, all join together in what Heidegger calls a ring dance that “lightens the four into the radiance of their simple oneness” — a luminous and magical world where all things are full of earth and sky, depth and sacred meaning.

Heidegger at the well

Heidegger becomes uncharacteristically eloquent and poetic when describing each component of the fourfold. The earth includes all that grows, lives, or contributes to life, such as plants, animals, water, or soil. Earth is “the serving bearer blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up in plant and animal.”

The sky is related to the light of the sun, the passage of time, and the weather. The sky is “the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons andd their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the aether.” The sky is something which we accept into our lives. The passage of time, the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and the conditions brought upon us by the weather are a part of our lives and, in accepting them, we “receive the sky as sky.”

There is, as you might expect, dispute about just what Heidegger means by gods or divinities. He uses the two terms — die Götter and die Göttlichen — more or less interchangeably. He says that the divinities are “the beckoning messages of the godhead.” As in the world of the ancient Greeks — and as in the world of the shaman — Heidegger’s divinities are unseen beings inherent in the world around us; they are the eternal entities as presenced in the world through our way of dwelling in the world.

Heidegger in an official portrait

And what about us, the mortals, human beings? We are mortal because we are uniquely aware of death, “capable of death as death.” But elsewhere Heidegger says that to be a human being — to exist in a human manner — means to dwell. The human essence, he says, is to be in the world as a homeland, a dwelling-place. To dwell is “to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace,” to be geschont, taken-care-of, and, at the same time, the dweller schont, cares-for “each thing in its own nature,” as the guardian who “lets beings be.”

This taking-care-of, Heidegger says, “is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature,” when we “set something free into its own presencing.” And what is to be cared-for? Heidegger here comes full circle. What the dweller cares-for is the fourfold — the earth and sky, the spirits and our fellow humans.

We as mortals place ourselves in relation to the earth and sky, and search and await the essence of the divinities revealing themselves to us through their presencing in the world — in water, in a flower, in a jug.

Heidegger was an arrogant, self-deluded, misanthropic fascist. Yet he articulated what seems to me to be a compellingly shamanic vision of human being-in-the-world. What trickster spirit came up with that?

pressed Meru’s back, guiding and leading out the tooth – Meru’s face in a grin of tranced passion, her back quivering rapidly. Suddenly Meru raised her arm, stretched it in liberation, and I saw with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back. It was a large gray blob about six inches across, opaque and something between solid and smoke: I was amazed, delighted. I still laugh with glee at the realization of having seen it, the ihamba, and so big! Everyone was hooting, and we were all jumping with triumph. The gray thing was actually out there, visible, and you could see Singleton’s hands working and scrabbling on the back. And then it was there no more. Singleton had whatever it was in his pouch, pressing it in with his other hand.

Turner gives substantially the same account in another article, except the spirit stuff is there described as “a deep gray opaque thing emerging as a sphere.”

Now there is a lot happening at once here. There is the “bellow of the drums.” Turner herself is crying, there are tears in her eyes, her eyes are “stabbed with pain.” Turner is clapping and jumping along with the crowd — clapping hard, she says. The patient is quivering, stretching out her arm; people are shouting and jumping up and down; the healer is touching the patient’s back, his hands pressing, guiding, leading, working, and scrabbling. Suddenly something is in his pouch; he has caught the ihamba.

There is more to the story. Singleton quickly transferred the contents of the pouch to a receiving can, which had a castor oil leaf and mukosu bark lid, and which contained a nest of root fragments, water, and blood from a rooster’s claw. He carried the can into a hut, set it down on the floor, held up his hands and said, “See, I have nothing in them.” Then he squatted down and dredged a long time in the bloody mixture. At length he drew out “an old tooth, a molar, natural size, ordinary and concrete, with a dark root and one side sheared off as if by an ax.” It was the ihamba. Retrieving and displaying the tooth from the receiving can is apparently an important part of the ritual.

Anthropologist Edith Turner

Of course, Turner has no way of knowing when the tooth was actually put into the bloody mixture. She assumes it was when Singleton extracted the tooth from the patient, because that is when she thought she saw him do it. But it could have been when Singleton, unsupervised, carried the can into the hut; it could have been when he was poking around inside the can. Indeed, the tooth could have been put inside the bloody mixture — which Turner never examined — before the ritual even began. There is no way to know. But why in the world would Singleton specifically deny that he was performing any sleight-of-hand before pulling the tooth out of the can?

That evening, Singleton said, “The thing we saw, we were five.” Singleton was counting the five doctors, of which Turner was one. Turner took this as a statement that the doctors too had seen a “thing,” meaning something like her gray blob; she does not consider that he is talking about the tooth he pulled from the can. Indeed, when Turner described to Singleton what she had seen — the gray blob of “spirit matter” — the healer made no comment. He did not “describe what he had seen” or “give any details about what he actually saw.“ Turner herself “was in no mood to become analytical so did not push the matter further.” So there is nothing to indicate whether Turner’s apprehension of a gray blob is consistent or inconsistent with Ndembu cultural notions of what an extracted ihamba tooth is supposed to look like, although one may guess, since it is a tooth that is pulled from the receiving can, that it is supposed to look like a tooth.

Turner considers, and rejects, the idea that some sort of sleight-of-hand might be involved in all this. She says that there was nothing in her audio tapes that hinted of duplicity, yet it is unclear how an audio tape would reveal conjuring. She does not discuss the possibility that, in the intense excitement of the ritual, out of Singleton’s skill as a performer, while she was moved emotionally, clapping hard with tear-filled eyes, she saw something out of her own cultural tradition, something smoky and ectoplasmic, that had symbolic significance to her, rather than to her hosts.

Ndembu boys prepared for an initiation ceremony

There is a methodological point to be made here. Turner insists that, because she saw spirit stuff and believed in its reality, she was uniquely able to experience Ndembu culture “from within.” Yet she has no idea whether or not Ndembu culture considers an ihamba tooth to look like a gray blob when it is extracted from the body. Speaking of the other participants in the ritual, she says, “I could not ascertain if what they saw looked exactly like what I saw.” She made no inquiry about what they did see, and did not pursue why, once she told them what she saw, they — perhaps, one thinks, out of politeness — did not want to tell her.

Turner cites, with approval, Michael Harner’s distinction between the spiritual essence of an illness, which may appear, in the “shamanic state of consciousness,” to be, say, a spider, and its manifestation, in the physical plane, as, say, a “plant power object” — some twigs, say, which the shaman may hide in the mouth and then display to the patient and audience, who are in the “ordinary state of consciousness,” as evidence of the extraction. But the quote from Harner misses the point. Harner — and many others, such as anthropologist Marvin Harris — would agree that the tooth pulled from the can had symbolic significance as a warrant of the shaman’s skill, of the mystery underlying the healing process, and may easily have been produced by sleight-of-hand. But Turner is not talking about the tooth. She is talking about her own joyous and transformative vision of the gray spirit stuff.

This is the paradox of participant observation — how to participate and observe at the same time. We certainly cannot be invisible. As Dennis Tedlock puts it, “the more a fieldworker knows and is known, the less that fieldworker can avoid joining the action.” At the same time, the host culture is not a unity. The idea that an anthropologist can come — somehow — to see the world through the eyes of the host culture assumes that cultural insiders are a single collective entity, that all insiders see the same thing, and that all participants feel, experience, and assign an identical, singular meaning to a particular event.

Thus, the term participant observation has something of the oxymoronic about it. Pierre Bourdieu comes right out and calls it a contradiction in terms — “as anyone who has tried to do it will have confirmed in practice.” Bourdieu believes that it leads to the worst of two possible worlds: “One cannot live the belief associated with profoundly different conditions of existence,… still less give others the means of reliving it by the sheer power of discourse.” And he concludes: “Those who want to believe with the beliefs of others grasp neither the objective truth nor the subjective experience of belief.”

And if we sincerely seek to understand the spiritual realities of another culture, where does that leave us? When does our experience become their experience?

Lucid dreams provide a unique opportunity to find out more about the experience of dreaming — and, by extension, perhaps more about the experiences of shamans, and about other visionary experiences, including those related to ayahuasca.

It is clear, however, that dream reports, given after the dreamer awakens, have a number of methodological problems — problems with recall, conflation, censoring, exaggeration, and confabulation. Dream states are notoriously slippery and prone to being forgotten. Significant details are easily either lost or filled in; coherence is imposed on narrative; connections drawn later are understood as part of the dream itself; memory of the dream is subject to constant revision. People may fail to report the contents of dreams that they perceive to be too revealing, embarrassing, or in conflict with the dreamer’s waking persona.

Here is a simple example. Can a lucid dreamer perform mathematical calculations during a dream? If a lucid dreamer is instructed beforehand to calculate, say, the factors of sixteen while in a lucid dream, will the dreamer be able to do it? And — here is the methodological question — how would we know? The dreamer may misreport or misremember the dream content; the dreamer may dream that he or she had calculated the factors of sixteen without actually having done so.

What we would like, of course, is for the dreamer to answer the question during the dream, and somehow communicate that answer to the investigator.

Similarly, some lucid dreamers report being able to control events in their dreams. There is some reason to believe there are limits to this control — for example, that major changes in dream setting, or even sudden changes in ambient light, such as turning on or off a light switch, are beyond the power of a lucid dreamer. Interestingly, lucid dreamers almost universally are unable to read material of any complexity, being able to read only a few words, with longer sequences deteriorating quickly into gibberish. Again, we would like to have the dreamer both carry out and report the results of reading experiments while still dreaming.

So: Is there any way for a lucid dreamer to communicate with us while dreaming? The problem is that, during REM sleep, when lucid dreams seem most likely to occur, there is physical paralysis — known as REM atonia — and difficulty of arousal. However, we can take a look at several interesting possibilities.

Here we can distinguish between passive communication from the dreamer to the investigator, using such tools as electroencephalography, and active communication, in which the dreamer voluntarily initiates and controls the communication.

It is possible to use instrumentation to attempt to confirm at least some claims of experiences in lucid dreams. In one case, a female lucid dreamer claimed to be able voluntarily to initiate sexual activity in her lucid dreams, leading to orgasms of “profound” intensity. She was fitted with EEG, EOG, and chin-EMG measuring devices, as well as devices to measure respiration, heart rate, vaginal EMG, and vaginal pulse amplitude. She was able to signal, with eye movements, when she was initiating dream sexual activity, and reported upon awakening that she had had an orgasm while dreaming.

The instrumentation revealed that, at that time, her heart rate showed a moderate increase, and her respiration, vaginal blood flow, and vaginal muscle activity reached their highest point of the night. As a methodological issue, it is not clear whether — or by what criteria — those results count as a confirmation of an orgasm. It is reported that “comparable results were obtained with a male subject,” although presumably, in that instance, such elaborate instrumentation would be unnecessary, as would also concern over definitions.

This example raises important issues. To the extent that we are dealing with physiological correlates of internal states, when can it be said that instrumental verification of a physiological correlate confirms the reported state? Presumably what we would want to know about the female subject in the preceding paragraph is the state of her vaginal blood flow and muscle activity during a waking orgasm. Similar examples might include fear, excitement, sorrow, exaltation; to what extent can we claim to have confirmed such reports through physiological correlation? Can we legitimately generalize from physiological correlation of heart rate and fear, say, in waking life to a similar correlation in the course of a lucid dream?

The male volunteer raises similar questions. Since erections are regular concomitants of REM dream states in any event, to what extent does an erection confirm a report of voluntarily initiated sexual activity in a lucid dream? The question is generalizable, and once again raises the issue of baseline for particular dreamers.

But there are also ways in which the dreamer can voluntarily communicate while in the dream state. The most frequently used mechanism for voluntary communication from a dreamer is by eye movement. It appears that, when a lucid dreamer looks left or right in the dream, the physical eyes in fact make the corresponding motions, which can be picked up and measured by electrodes near the eye muscles. A number of ingenious experiments have been performed using these eye movements. Using such signals, experimenters can determine at what part of the sleep cycle lucid dreaming takes place, how long lucidity lasts, and the correlation of lucid dreams with REM and NREM sleep. Moreover, it has been possible to show that lucid dreamers can in fact remember tasks set for them before going to sleep and can carry out those tasks during the dream state.

For example, one lucid dreamer was instructed to draw triangles during the dream and follow the movement of his hands visually while doing so; and, indeed, the physical motions of his eyes while asleep corresponded to those that would have appeared had he been drawing a triangle while awake. Finally, eye movement has been used to show that a lucid dreamer’s sense of time is similar to his or her waking sense of time; instructed to signal with eye movements every ten seconds, lucid dreamers were about as accurate as their waking counterparts.

But eye signaling raises methodological issues of its own. While eye movement can signal that the dreamer is, in fact, lucid, it is difficult to use for more sophisticated communication. Moving the eyes apparently changes what the dreamer sees, and such changes in visual imagery apparently can on occasion be sufficiently disruptive to wake the dreamer. Further, there is a limit to the complexity of eye movement that can either be controlled by the dreamer or picked up by a polygraph, and, therefore, there seems to be a limit to the amount of information that can be transmitted by eye movement. Eye movement signaling is an information channel of very narrow bandwidth, usually confined, in experiments so far, to providing yes-no information.

In addition to eye movements, it is at least on occasion possible that nerve impulses generated by voluntarily walking during a lucid dream can be detected by electrodes placed at the feet. Apparently a lucid dreamer, when moving his or her legs in a dream, can actually cause nerve impulses to travel down the legs; although the legs do not actually move, these impulses can be detected. It is not clear that this can be done consistently, or to what extent this ability is found among lucid dreamers generally. It has also been reported that a lucid dreamer can affect the rate of breathing in the physical body by changing the rate of breathing during the dream.

The possibilities of such communication can be multiplied by the utilization of various current heads-up and virtual reality devices. For example, it is possible to detect, with relatively accessible technology, not only the movement but the position of the eyes; there are digital cameras available that use this technology to focus on what the viewer is looking at. Data-glove technology, used in virtual reality simulations, can similarly detect minute changes in the positions of the fingers. It should be possible, with proper training, to develop more elaborate codes than the simple yes-no eye-movement codes previously used in lucid dreaming experiments.

Such studies apparently remain to be performed.

My plant teacher doña María Tuesta had such an initiatory dream when she was eighteen, in which the Virgin Mary confirmed doña María’s destiny as a healer. The dream, as she told it to me on several occasions, was long and complex, and sometimes changed in the telling. But it always began with a beautiful young woman coming and sitting by her side. “Today we are going to go upward,” the woman says, “and see everything that is happening on earth.”

María and the woman go into María’s mosquito net, which carries them up into the clouds to a beautiful green meadow. This is paradise, filled with angels — men and women, adults, children, and babies — wearing brilliant white robes and crowns of sweet-smelling flowers. All the angels start to pray the Ave María and the Pater Noster, holding hands and dancing in a circle around her. As María marvels at the sight, the young woman tells her that she is in paraíso terrenal, the earthly paradise. There are thousands of angels, holding beautiful brightly lit candles, holding up their hands and saying amén in a single voice.

In the dream, doña María sees many more miraculous things and is dressed by spiritual doctors in the white robes of a healer. But that is a story for another time.

A small detail in the dream is of great interest. The fact that doña María is carried to heaven in her mosquitero, mosquito net, has significant symbolic resonance in the Upper Amazon. In crowded households, the impenetrable cotton mosquito net is a refuge of privacy. Even more, shamans of the highest order work secretly within their woven mosquiteros — as pioneering ethnographer Robert H. Lowie says, “in complete darkness under a mosquito net.”

Pablo Amaringo, Spirits Descending on a Banco (detail)

The ability to enter a mosquito net and disappear, or to converse under the mosquito net with the most powerful spirits, is one of the things that distinguishes the Shipibo meraya shaman from the lesser onanya. The mosquito net within which the meraya retreats after drinking ayahuasca is called a bachi, an egg.

Don Francisco Montes Shuña says that the banco — the highest rank of shaman — enters a mosquito net in the middle of the house, lying face down, while all the disciples remain outside. Then the spirits come to the banco from below to talk to him, and to speak through him. Pablo Amaringo has painted a picture of a banco lying beneath his mosquito net while three spiritual beings — a wise old king and two princes — descend and sit on his body. The shaman is here the banco, the bench, for the sprits descending into the mosquitero. Others wait outside the mosquito net to hear these spirits speak through the shaman’s mouth.

A mestizo who heard doña María’s dream would understand, from the mosquito net reference, that she was experiencing an initiation of a very high order.

April 1—5 The Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness and the Association for Transpersonal Psychology jointly present a conference on Bridging Nature and Human Nature at the Edgefield Resort in Portland, Oregon. The conference is intended to create an “interdisciplinary coalition to help reassess science and culture and the interface between technology and nature” — that is, to call for a more systemic, process-oriented, intimate, and sensual understanding of the universe in which we live. There will be presentations by Marlene Dobkin de Ríos, Stanley Krippner, David Lukoff, Ralph Metzner, and many others. Two panels are of particular interest to students of shamanism — Sacred Brews: Ayahuasca Controversies and a Clash of Cultures, Indigenous and Postmodern, chaired by Evgenia Fotiou; and Bateson, Postmodernism and Shamanism, chaired by Constantine Hriskos and Sarah Williams. The complete schedule is here.<

Luis Eduardo Luna

April 7—11 The Association pour la Recherche Transdisciplinaire sur les Hallucinations et autres États Modifiés de Conscience presents its second annual Spring Symposium on Hallucinations in Philosophy and Cognitive Science in Paris, France. While the main focus of the conference is the phenomenon of hallucination, this year invited experts will speak on a wide range of related topics — REM sleep, out of body experiences, meditation, cognitive and affective mechanisms of altered states of consciousness, the phenomenology of conscious states, the ontology of hallucinations, psychoactive plants, traditional rituals, and shamanism. Among the speakers will be ayahuasca experts Luis Eduardo Luna and Benny Shanon, as well as neurologists, neuroscientists, neuropsychopharmacologists, and artists. A preliminary program is here.

June 7—10 The Takiwasi Centre holds the first International Conference on Traditional Medicines, Interculturality and Mental Health in Tarapoto, Peru. This conference brings together practitioners of traditional medicine, indigenous representatives, participants in projects that integrate traditional medicine with conventional medicine, academics, government representatives, and international organizations, in order to demonstrate and promote the contribution of traditional medicine in providing solutions to contemporary problems in mental health. A list of proposed presentations is here.

Augustine Kandemwa

June 18—21 The Society for Shamanic Practitioners holds its Fifth Annual Conference on Shamanism and Shamanic Practice at Menla Mountain, Catskills, New York. Although the program has not yet been set, the conference will feature Mandaza Augustine Kandemwa, an nganga or Bantu medicine man in the Shona and Ndebele traditions of Zimbabwe. Also featured will be healing practitioners Pamela Albee, Jane Burns, Leontine Hartzell, Sharynne MacLeod NicMhacha, Mark Perkins, Linda Secord, and others. A continuous drumming prayer ceremony will take place twenty-four hours a day during the conference. The Society of Shamanic Practitioners was formed to support the re-emergence of shamanism into modern western culture, and to document the ways in which shamanism is changing and being used in the twenty-first century world.

Stanley Krippner

June 26—30 The International Association for the Study of Dreams presents its Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference at Wyndham O’Hare Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, with the theme Earth Dreaming: Twenty-five Years of Carrying the Dream Forward. Keynote speeches will be given by psychologist Stanley Krippner, Everyone Who Dreams Partakes of Shamanism, and cognitive anthropologist Barbara Tedlock, The Shamanic Power and Spirituality of Dreaming. Invited presenter Robert Moss will speak on The Secret History of Dreaming. There will be five days of seminars, workshops, papers and events focusing on clinical, theoretical, research, cross-cultural, artistic, and spiritual approaches to understanding dreams and nightmares from over 150 international presenters.

Dennis McKenna

July 11—18 Soga del Alma hosts the Fifth International Amazonian Shamanism Conference with the theme The Art and the Heart of Healing. Local curanderos will hold evening healing ceremonies, and there will be a special showing of the movie Heaven Earth, along with discussion with the filmmakers Rudolf Amaral and Harald Scherz. The schedule is still being compiled, but expect to see a number of local healers, including huasero Marie Louisa Garcia, as well as psychopharmacologist Dennis McKenna, journalist Peter Gorman, painter Pablo Amaringo, sound healer Richard Grossman, and many others.

Pablo Amaringo

July 25—August 5 Eagle’s Wing Centre for Contemporary Shamanism offers The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo, a visionary art workshop to be held in the Alpahuayo Mishana Nature Reserve with famed painter Pablo Amaringo, who will give daily hands-on art workshops. There will be ceremonies in the evening with Shipibo shamans Enrique Lopez and either Benjamín Ochavano or Leoncio Garcia.

September 5—7 The Society for the Study of Shamanism, Healing and Transformation holds its Annual International Conference on the Study of Shamanism and Alternative Modes of Healing at the Santa Sabina Center, San Rafael, California. This year the theme is Shamans of the Twenty-First Century. The schedule is not yet set, but the conference will feature Bantu medicine man Mandaza Augustine Kandemwa, as well as presentations by practitioners and independent scholars of shamanism and alternative healing.

Danashin Tamang

November 29—December 8 Psychoactivity presents its sixth annual conference at the Dhulikhel Mountain Resort, Kathmandu, Nepal, on the theme The Tiger Meets The Jaguar. Nepalese shamans Maile Lama, Parvati Rai, Danashin Tamang, and Dawa Sherpa will meet with anthropologist-turned-shaman Kajuyali Tsamani, head of the Fundación de Investigaciones Chamanistas in Colombia, and with noted scholars Christian Rätsch, Arno Adelaars, and Claudia Mueller-Ebeling to share their life stories, ceremonies, and shamanic knowledge. Psychoactivity was founded in 1997 in Amsterdam to organize conferences on new visionary plant research, shamanism, and altered states of consciousness.

Norval Morrisseau, Shaking Tent

The picture at right, by famed Ojibwa painter Norval Morrisseau, depicts a shaking tent ceremony — the healer and patient seated within the lodge, which is being shaken, at its top, by the immense powers of the spirit world invoked by the healer.

Among the Lakota, the shaking tent ceremony is called a yuwipi. As elsewhere, the healer is tied up with ropes or leather thongs and a special blanket — wicahpi šina, star quilt — while praying for the healing of a specific person or persons. The term yuwipi is usually derived from the Lakota verb form they wrap him up. The healer is called yuwipi wicaša, yuwipi man, who gives away a piece of his life every time he performs the exhausting ceremony, in order to serve the people.

The yuwipi man mediates between the people and the spirit world. He is a wicaša wakan, a sacred person, who is not only a healer, but whose counsel is sought for family and business matters. He understands the languages of all creatures and can communicate directly with the spirits, who tell him how a patient’s sickness may be cured. The Lakota distinguish between white sickness, which can be cured by biomedical intervention, and Indian sickness, which is the result of disharmony between humans and the spirit world. The yuwipi man is the sole healer of Indian sickness.

During the ceremony, a helper holds the sacred pipe, and people around the perimeter of the room also pray for the healing. While the spirits are present, people other than the patient may also make their requests known to the spirits, addressed as tunkašila, grandfather, through the medium of the yuwipi man, who acts as the ieska, interpreter. A detailed description of a yuwipi ceremony is here.

Gary Holy Bull, yuwipi man

Ringing Rocks Foundation in Sedona, Arizona, is dedicated to conserving indigenous healing practices and cultural traditions. The foundation supports ethnographic fieldwork, public education, and the active promotion of indigenous cultures. The foundation’s seminal work is a book series, Profiles of Healing, which collects first-person narratives from some of the world’s most respected indigenous shamans, healers, and medicine keepers. The project was founded by the remarkable Bradford Keeney, author of more than thirty books in the fields of psychotherapy, cybernetics, and indigenous healing traditions, many of them considered to be classics. The first volume in the series is a profile of the life and teachings of Gary Holy Bull, a widely respected Lakota yuwipi man.

Cultural Survival is the leading US-based organization defending the rights of indigenous peoples around the world. It was founded in response to the opening up of remote Amazonian and South American areas during the 1960s, and the drastic effects this had on indigenous inhabitants. It has since worked with indigenous communities in Asia, Africa, South America, North America, and Australia, guided by a board of directors that includes not only anthropologists, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs but also prominent indigenous leaders.

Gary Holy Bull gathering sage

One Cultural Survival program is the Guatemala Radio Project, a five-year partnership with five Guatemalan organizations designed to strengthen a network of 140 community radio stations across the country, many of which broadcast in one or more of the country’s 23 indigenous languages. The stations provide news, educational programming, health information, and traditional music, all reinforcing pride in Mayan heritage.

As part of this project, Cultural Survival joined with the Ringing Rocks Foundation to produce a series of programs in which indigenous spiritual leaders from around the world talk about their practices and traditions. The talks are part of a lecture series sponsored by Ringing Rocks, and the audio portion of the talks is then translated into the four principal Mayan languages and broadcast on the Guatemalan radio stations. The video clips below, by yuwipi man Gary Holy Bull, are from the first of these programs.

The Cultural Survival website — brief registration required — provides Holy Bull’s fascinating first-person account, transcribed from the talk he gave at the Ringing Rocks Foundation, of how he became a healer. Here is a brief excerpt:

I want to tell you how I became a healer. I was a little boy, 10 years old, running around Rocks Side. It was mid-July, a hot summer day, no cloud in the sky. I got tired, so I went inside the house to take a nap. To this day, I’m not sure if I fell asleep and these things happened or if I really did see them. We lived in a log house, a one-room log house, and there was one big log right down the middle, all the way across, which held all the rafters. I sat down on the bed, looking out, and I think I laid down. I saw this lightning come in on both ends of this one log. And that lightning came through, met in the middle, and went down. When it hit the floor I heard this big crack, and when I looked at it, there was a man standing there with a sacred pipe. He stuck the pipe right through the floor into the ground.

Cultural Survival has also made available two video excerpts from that talk, one containing Holy Bull’s advice to young indigenous men, and the other talking about change.

It is common to say that myths and dreams are interpreted or analyzed. But this way of speaking contains a small but important inaccuracy. It is not myths or dreams that are interpreted; it is tellings of myths or dreams. These tellings may be oral or written, in a wickiup or in a dreamwork group, or communicated in writing to the privacy of a dream journal. But they are all tellings; and there may be different tellings of the same myth or dream — different because they are recited or written at different times, or told by different tellers, or told in different circumstances. Although it seems that a dream is peculiarly ours, access to a dream, like access to a myth, is only through its telling, private or public.

But all this raises an important question. Is there, in fact, a myth or a dream apart from its telling, its disclosure, its revealing? Dreams offer an interesting instance of Wittgenstein’s argument against private language. The argument goes — with some obscurity — something like this. Suppose I have a purely private language, in which I use the word snark to refer to a certain sensation I feel at the time. At a later time, upon feeling a sensation, I say, “There is another snark.” But how can I determine whether I have used the word correctly on this second occasion? Maybe I misremember the first sensation; maybe I mistakenly think that the second sensation is similar to the first, when it is really not similar at all. But that means that the application of the term snark is undetermined; a term whose application is undetermined is meaningless; therefore there cannot be a private language.

By the same reasoning, dreams — in the sense of a sequence of moving pictures in the mind — cannot be meaningful. Dreams gain meaning only in their telling, even when I am telling the story of the dream to myself, as I review it or puzzle over it. Suppose there is a figure in my dream. Upon awakening, I cannot identify that figure except as a companion. Later in the day, I see my friend John, and I realize — or come to believe — that the figure in my dream was in fact John. But how can I determine whether I have identified the figure correctly on this second occasion? Suppose that I am mistaken; suppose that the figure in my dream was not John at all. Perhaps the figure was another friend, or my father, or no one in particular.

But here, for a dream, it does not matter. What matters is the telling. The telling of the dream is where the analysis, the interpretation, the understanding, all the meaning-making activity can begin to take place. A dream is undetermined until it is told.

There can be many tellings of a dream; a dream, of course, is a construct out of its tellings. These tellings are tokens for which the dream is the type. Now which of these — type or token — is meaningful? Suppose I misremember my dream as containing John rather than Mary. Does that mean that any interpretations I make of my dream will be wrong?

Once again, Wittgenstein provides an analytical model. He says,

The fact is that whenever you are preoccupied with something, with some trouble or with some problem which is a big thing in your life – as sex is, for instance – then no matter what you start from, the association will lead finally and inevitably back to that same theme. Freud remarks on how, after the analysis of it, the dream appears so very logical. And of course it does.

So, it does not matter whether it was John or Mary in my dream. I could make up a story on the spot; indeed, I could invent a dream. What matters is the story, and the telling of the story.

That is why it is possible to work with any fragment of a dream, like a fractured piece of a hologram. Jeremy Taylor writes of a hesitant dreamer in one of his dream workshops who simply could not remember his dreams. Finally, Taylor suggested to him that he make up a dream: “What would your dream have been like this morning if you had been able to remember it?” Taylor adds — and note the use of words of telling — that “a conscious fantasy narrative could have been explored as readily as the regular nighttime dreams shared by the other members of the class.” It is the telling that counts.

The same thing is true for any experience. Life is a hologram. Every little piece carries the meaning of it all.

El realismo magical, lo real maravilloso americano, is deeply associated with the resurgent literature of South America, and is characterized by a detailed realism into which there erupts — in a way often experienced as unremarkable — the magical world of the spirits. Critics David Mikics, Derek Walcott, and Alejo Carpentier say that magical realism “projects a mesmerizing uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the scene of the extraordinary.”

This idea is often expressed, as one commentator puts it, as “exploring — and transgressing — boundaries.” In a 1969 interview, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez said, of his own magical realist writings, ”My most important problem was to destroy the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic. Because in the world that I was trying to evoke, that barrier didn’t exist.”

Gabriel García Márquez

Yet García Marquez describes himself as a realist writer, “because I believe that in Latin America everything is possible, everything is real.” Thus, in the fictional town of Macondo, Remedios the Beauty rises to heaven with her sister-in-law’s sheets. No reason is given, and her sister-in-law Fernanda does not wonder how this could happen. She accepts it without surprise, and only regrets that she has lost her sheets. My own plant teacher doña María Tuesta similarly was lifted to heaven inside her mosquito net to be initiated by the Virgin Mary. For her, too, this was wonderful and unsurprising.

Thus the visionary world does what literary critic Theo L. D’Haen calls “decentering privileged centers.” Magical realist texts — and thus the visionary world itself — are ontologically subversive. The magically realist world subverts the privileged ontological center that dichotomously divides experience into the real and the unreal.

William S. Burroughs

Magical realism is often said to occur in places that postmodernist literary critics have called the zone. “The propensity of magical realist texts to admit a plurality of worlds,” write critics Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris, “means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory between or among those worlds — in phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformation, metamorphosis, dissolution are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism.” William S. Burroughs put it this way in a letter to Allen Ginsberg in 1955: “The meaning of Interzone, its space time location is at a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world.”

This zone is the world of the shaman — the vision, the apparition, the lucid dream, seeing through the ordinary to the miraculous luminescence of the spirits, perceiving the omnipresent pure sound of the singing plants.