shamanism

I take the typical shamanistic notion of “the taming of the spirits” in both metaphorical and metonymic senses – since an encounter with psychological forces is in fact an encounter with the “spirits” of others, only made manifest at a deeper level of self-knowledge. One encounters the good will and the bad will of others in an analysis of one’s own unconscious and its relationship to salient ideological forces. The natural evolution of a shaman is to first become acquainted with the nature of the disturbing psychological forces or “spirits” (in other words, the effect of others’ ‘ideological high spirits’) within him. Only later are these originally unruly forces tamed by self-knowledge, to the point where mastering the spirits of one’s time becomes, finally, a necessary and associated feature of developing one’s own self-mastery. Evidence of the former – for instance in the skill of social observation made manifest in Marechera’s art – is evidence also of the latter. Despite this, the shaman’s self-mastery is always tenuous, for he does battle with forces often much greater and more socially powerful than he; and for all the skill of management of alien forces, he nonetheless remains, at bottom, a very small unit of social power: a mere individual.)