Books that were life rings: Stones, bones and skin

In the late 1980s, when I moved to a farm in the upper Hudson Valley of New York, I entered a time of psychic storms, transtemporal dramas and shamanic ordeals and initiations comparable to what Jung called his "confrontation with the unconscious." I was possibly not quite as crazy as Jung is now revealed to have been through the pages of his Red Book, but I was out there, and down there, talking to spirits, fighting dead (and living) sorcerers, communing with angels, caught up in the dramas of lives lived centuries before me, and no end of mythic trouble.
    The difference between the mystic and the madman, it's been said, is that the mystic can swim in waters where the madman drowns. As I learned to swim in deep waters, and to come back without getting the bends, there were books that served as life rings, by helping me to construct models of understanding for what was happening to me and in me. I am going to write about three of them. 

1. Stones, bones and skin

One of the first of these was a beautifully illustrated collection of essays titled, Stones, bones and skin: Ritual and Shamanic Art, edited by anthropologist Peter T. Furst and published by the Society for Art Publications in Toronto. I learned about the defining characteristics of the shaman, the price of his power and his essential mode of being. I read that the shaman is one who dies and comes back. He knows the roads between the worlds because he has traveled them. He is at home in a multi-layered cosmos and has a ladder between the worlds. I was stirred by Mircea Eliade's classic definition of the shaman as a wounded healer: "the shaman is, above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in healing himself.”  
    Stones, bones and skin led me to read widely in the literature of shamanism. Again and again, I found  resonance. The shaman has the strong eye. He is “one who sees”, a seer, one who can see through the veils between the worlds. The Copper Eskimos call the shaman elik, one who has eyes. An Inuit goes to a shaman and tells him, “I come to you because I wish to see.”
     As a writer and speaker who loves the play of words, I was excited to learn that, cross-culturally, the shaman is a word doctor, a master of goodly speech who can change the body and the world by telling better stories about them. I read about a Yakut (Siberian) shaman who has a vocabulary of 12,000 words, compared with 1,500 for the average West European or North American high school leaver. I remembered Rimbaud insisting that “metaphor can change the world.”
      I looked at pictures of primal shamans. Of the bird shaman of Lascaux, with his erect penis, in front of a skewered bison. Of a Lapland shaman lying under his drum in ecstatic trance, signaling, “I’m out of the office.” Were these my kin? For these “savages,” according to early anthropologists, the mystical experience is not otherworldly. It means direct, immediate contact with other realities that are invisible to others but not to the shaman – realities that can be seen only by “the one who has eyes.”

The Jesuit Relations, in my personal library

      I read on and on. On an evening of strange patterns in the sky, an area book dealer came bumping up my drive in a pickup truck with something he wanted to sell me. In many cardboard boxes, he had brought me the original first printing, in 73 volumes, of the Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, a bilingual edition of the reports of the blackrobe missionaries in New France and colonial New York and New England of the customs and shamanic practices of the First Peoples before the American Revolution. The price was steep, but I had to have these. For many nights, they were my preferred reading. Here I found detailed confirmation that shamans are called through dreams and visions and that the heart of their practice is the ability to dream strong, to travel between the worlds at will. The indigenous peoples of the Northeast did not use hallucinogens, and I have never done this either, not needing chemical assistance to travel across time and dimensions.  “All their cabins they have filled with dreams," reported a Jesuit missionary, living among the people of an ancient shaman who had called me in night visions.
    I was first shown Stone, bones and skin by an artist who owned a magical store called Wonderful Things in Malden Bridge, NY, a short drive from my farm. Filled with unusual antiques and tribal artifacts, the store lived up to its name. The owner invited me to dinner to meet Peter Furst and his wife Jill, who had published some extraordinary books of her own on soul in ancient Mexico. When she heard some of my experiences, she cautioned. "Going into this is like hooking yourself up to 100,000 volts." I told her, "I know. But it's already done. The trick now is to ground it." Books and study have always been part of my grounding. Many times, since 1987, I tried to procure my own copy of Stones, bones and skin, only to find it was not available or available only at a prohibitive price. I am glad to report that I found a copy online in the holiday season, and it was waiting for me when I came home at midnight from a trip to the West Coast last night.