The Metafiction of Shamanism

The Metafiction of ShamanismThe Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities by Daniel C. NoelReview by: Thomas WillardThe San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Summer 1999), pp. 35-39Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of The C.G. Jung Institute of San FranciscoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jung.1.1999.18.1.35 .Accessed: 29/11/2013 20:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 200.26.133.57 on Fri, 29 Nov 2013 20:24:54 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Metafiction of Shamanism

Daniel C. Noel. The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fan-tasies, Imaginal Realities. New York, Continuum, 1997.

Reviewed by Thomas Willard

The death of Carlos Castaneda, announced in June,1998, set off a new round of commentary on this controver-sial anthropologist. The announcement came only daysbefore the University of California Press was scheduled torelease the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Castanedas firstbook, Conversations with Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowl-edge. (Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of CaliforniaPress, 1968) Castaneda earned a masters degree fromU.C.L.A. for the 1968 book, which explored the folkways ofpeyote use by Yaqui initiates. He signed with Simon &Schuster soon after, and his doctoral dissertation, A Journeyto Ixtlan (New York, 1972) came at the peak of his cultsuccess. Young people enthusiastically consumed thebooks, as Castaneda consumed various mind-altering sub-stances, in search of what the Yaqui mentor Don Juan calleda separate reality. This became the title of Castanedas firststrictly commercial book. (New York, Simon & Schuster,1971)

Over the next quarter-century, Castaneda produced asteady stream of books. The teachings of the Yaqui elderturned into tales in Tales of Power (New York, Simon &Schuster, 1974), and the sorcerer turned into a shamanin The Art of Dreaming. (New York, Harper Collins, 1993)Assuming the mantle of Don Juan, Castaneda created hisown shamanic school (Transegrity) and his own nonprofitfoundation, Eidolana, which has published his posthumousbook, The Wheel of Time: Thoughts about Life, Death and


the Universe. (Los Angeles, Eidolana, 1998) Despite thissuccess (or perhaps because of it) Castanedas eulogistshave been at something of a loss for words to describe theman and his work. Was he just the most famous instance ofacademic opportunism in the psychedelic sixties, as thesubtitle of one critics book maintains (Jay Courtney. CarlosCastaneda. Victoria, Millennia, 1993), or did he manage tobring life and conviction into academic prose, adding the NewJournalisms participatory style of narrative and dialogue?

There is need, then, for a new perspective on theCastaneda controversies, as Cecil B. De Milles son, Rich-ard, has called them in a skeptical study. (The Don JuanPapers, Further Castaneda Controversies. Belmont, CA,Wadsworth, 1990) Castaneda showed the way for a flock ofpopular writers, like Lynn Andrews, and for semi-literarycharacters, like her medicine women from various cultures.Surely, their popularity says something about the pre-millennial soulsomething that Daniel Noel has addressedin this book that appeared in the year before Castanedasdeath.

In The Soul of Shamanism, Noel returns to familiarterritory. He studied comparative religion at the University ofChicago, where Mircea Eliade was a world-famous authorityon shamanism. Noel went on to teach courses in religionhimself and began reading Castaneda at his students urg-ing. He signed a contract to write what would have becomethe first book-length study of Castaneda, but had to abandonthe project when Simon & Schuster, Castanedas publisher,refused to grant the usual permission to reprint passages forhis analysis. Noel then collected a series of reactions toCastaneda, which he edited as Seeing Castaneda. (NewYork, Putnam, 1976) In the process, Noel became ever moreinterested in Jung and, in an interesting synchronicity, visitedJungs house in Ksnacht while Jungs daughterinlaw Lilywas reading a book by Castaneda. Back in the U.S., Noelclosely followed developments in the Mens Movement,where he saw a parallel between Blys Wild Man and theshaman. En route to a particular workshop, he picked up abook by Lynn Andrews and realized that he was reading thesame hybrid of fact and fiction that he had first encounteredin Castaneda.


Noel then coined a neologism for Castaneda and theother story tellers who have followed him in this vein ofprose: shamanovelists. Drawing from speculative essaysby others occupied with the theory of metafiction and thepostmodern novel, Noel suggests that shamanovelists blurliterary genres very much as New Journalists and nonfictionnovelists have done. He suggests that the new shamanismis not a transplant from exotic cultures but has roots inWestern modes of storytelling. He also offers a neologismfor Eliade and the field researchers who seem more than alittle affected by the paranormal phenomena they describe:shaman-thropologists. (Noel insists he intends here no punon sham.) In the books second half, he suggests thatpost-Jungian psychology could use its power to put soulback into society and explicitly links Jungian analysis to theshamanic work of healing the body by restoring the lost soul.The descent into the underworld, the animal dreams, and thealtered states of consciousness that characterize a Jungianpsychotherapy, all have shamanic parallels. The books twohalvesfour chapters eachare held together by theauthors personal voicing of what Jung called le cri de Merlin.This shamanic voice sounds the theme of Noels book, whichis structured, musically, in sonata form.

Noels search for the Western shaman begins in En-gland, where he visits sites associated with King Arthur andArthurs druidic mentor, Merlin; it ends with the post-Jungianemphasis on discovering the Wild Man within. Noel connectshis two scholarly sections, on shamanism and the soul, asa composer would connect the two digressions or departuresin a sonata by returning to the main theme. As he walksthrough Jungs garden at Ksnacht, and looks at the stonesJung carved, he seems actually to hear the cri de coeur thatput them there, rather as Amphion raised the walls ofThebesto music. As in the performance of a piano sonata,to bring off such effects the timing is everything: the wholebook has the satisfying rhythm of a master recital.

Perhaps because the book has such a personal empha-sis, it is by no means exhaustive, and there are obvious gapsin the scholarship. Readers of this journal may be surprisedto find no reference to Joseph Henderson, who was evendescribed as the shaman from Elko at the time of his


seventy-fifth birthday. Henderson was one of the first widely-read Jungian authors to discuss the shaman as a primitivemaster of initiation in his contribution to the widely read Manand His Symbols (Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1964, p.151), a theme he elaborated in his classic Thresholds ofInitiation. (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press,1967) Similarly, Jungian readers will find no mention ofDonald L. Will iamss pioneering attempt to connectCastaneda and Jung in Border Crossings. (Toronto, InnerCity Books, 1981) Social scientists will find no reference toDavid Silverman, the British sociologist who wrote the firstbook about Castaneda. (Reading Castaneda. London,Routledge, 1975) (Silverman circumvented Noels problem ofpermissions by quoting only from the academic press versionof Conversations with Don Juan, and just as neatly circum-vented the question whether the events in that book evertook place by asserting that any text is a social constructionand by arguing that the Conversations challenge readers, asDon Juan challenges Castaneda, to make sense of sociallyorganized practices. (p. xi)) There will be no shortage ofbooks on these now mainstream subjects, however: Noelsbook has been followed by a collection of essays on shaman-ism and analytical psychology (Donald F. Sandner andSteven F. Wong, Eds. The Sacred Heritage. London,Routledge, 1997) as well as a book on Jung and shamanism(C. Michael Smith. Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue. NewYork, Paulist Press, 1997). Noels study has the virtues ofthe one-teacher workshop with breaks at all the right placesrather than the academic congress. His solution to the puzzleis no less useful for missing a piece here or there.

As a literary critic, I have to wonder whether his snappyterm shamanovel refers only to works that are doomed tobe second-rate literary novelsgenre fiction, at best. Orshould we call H. Rider Haggards strange and enchantingtwin romances She (1887) and Ayesha (1905)shamanovels? (In the latter, Haggards characters encoun-ter teachings we would recognize today as shamanistic andrespond by telling stories about The Monastery called theWorld.) Could we possibly apply the word shamanovel tothat non-fiction novel, Jungs Memories, Dreams, Reflec-tions, as edited by Aniela Jaffe? That book, after all, includes


elders from traditional societies as well as those at Jungsown seminal monastery in Zurich, the Burghlzli.) Perhapsthere was a more helpful differentiation in the opening sen-tence of the introduction to Conversations with Don Juan,where U.C.L.A. anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt writes,This book is both ethnography and allegory.

By ethnography, Goldschmidt was of course intendingscientific description of the races of men (Concise OxfordDictionary), and by allegory, he presumably meant narra-tive description of a subject under [the] guise of anothersuggestively similar [one] (Ibid.), implying in this case apresentation of New Age ideas under the guise of anthro-pology. The word ethnography, which replaced anthropog-raphy in the nineteenth century, is of course much morerecent than allegory, which St. Paul used in his epistle tothe Galatians, but the last generation has seen significantrethinking of both words. Postmodernism has taught us toregard ethnography as means of writing culture (JamesClifford, ed. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics ofEthnography. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986)and allegory as a way of reading anything (Paul de Man.Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, Yale UniversityPress, 1989). We should now realize that there has been agood deal of ethnography and allegory produced by Jungianwriters, much of it fresh and interesting. The better weunderstand the approach they have taken, the more we canappreciate the achievement of Castaneda and of those hehas inspired. Toward this end, Dan Noels personal surveyof neo-shamanism as a postmodern genre is a most wel-come contribution.


The Metafiction of Shamanism

Documents

Transcript of The Metafiction of Shamanism