What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital | Earth. We are one.

What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital | Earth. We are one.

“I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village.” What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.”

“Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos ensues,” he says. “The Dagara believe that, if such an imbalance exists, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors. If these ancestors are not healed, their sick energy will haunt the souls and psyches of those who are responsible for helping them.” The rituals focus on healing the relationship with our ancestors, both specific issues of an individual ancestor and the larger cultural issues contained in our past. Dr. Somé has seen extraordinary healing occur at these rituals.

I can’t help taking what the shaman guy is saying as metaphorical.  For instance, in my own situation, I feel that my ancestors had not done the necessary mourning they needed to do in relation to their losses, so they passed on a melancholic sense of loss to us, through the generations.  I also felt that Marechera himself was bashing heavily at my door, as a kind of spirit, saying he had died prematurely and what he wanted to say still hadn’t got through to people.

 

And, even though these feelings of the ancestors and spirits bashing in on me FELT visceral, I would still frame them as metaphorical in other ways, because of course I chose to feel things in that way and to make that sort of an interpretation. 

 

 I think what shamans emphasize are the psychical fault lines of the past that somehow meet at some point in the ancestral line and then when enough unresolved traumatic events are linked in one place, the person born into that family or ancestral or historical circumstances, has a nervous breakdown. 

 

But I have always felt, as well, that the shaman type is a fundamentally STRONG type.  You can see that trope and reverencing of strength in Nietzsche (but let us not misunderstand what it means).  It is also in Bataille, who was of hardy peasant stock (this robustness comes through in his writing.  And Marechera, who was of the lower peasant classes and lived closer to nature.  It is an irreducible necessity for the shamanic type to have some very strong features of strength, to anchor himself.  I think this if often a genetic predisposition to a certain level of mental or physical robustness.  This is indispensable because the shaman has to be SHATTERED, so a very weak person, upon being shattered would not have the strength to pull various parts of himself back together again.  The shattering of course makes for extreme weakness and vulnerability – much greater than the normal lot for human beings.  But is it bridged by the congenital strength of mind.  So all is not lost.

 

But there are some people who are just basically weak in all sorts of ways.  They are shattered but there is no basic congenital strength to redeem them.   So they cannot become shamans.  They remain madmen or women in the most abject sense.

 

This relates to the difference between shamanic doubling and remaining on one channel (enveloped) as we discussed yesterday.