The naïve
universe is two-sided. On the one side there are heroic monuments of renown. On
the other human-as-animal frequenting ale-houses and meandering quadrants
pungent in all senses of the word.
Red Sonja #7
Mel Gibson’s Apokalypto
gets the balance quite well, with the clueless peasants meandering around the
jungle until they find themselves, by some cosmic jest, the sacrificial pawns
of the great urban monument to Aztec power. The film ends with the arrival of a
Spanish galleon bringing with it, of course, the Christianity which was to
exert an equally bloody conquest/conversion. The great monuments of Mexican and
Andean civilization could be described as “an enigma wrapped in a mystery,”
which was actually what Time said about Carlos Castaneda (of Don Juan)
in 1973.
Of himself,
Castaneda said,
To ask me to
verify my life by giving you my statistics.. is like using science to verify
sorcery.
Such deliberate
mystification could be justifiable if science is itself sorcery; in this case a
sorcery of convincing illusions (sun, reflection, perspective) that relate to
the head (not the body).
Castaneda’s
quote reminds one of Grace Slick’s remark on the compulsions (of the factual head)
for numerical verification in Hyborian Bridge 62/1 . By being more
relaxed and less obsessively verifiable, the picture painted by Castaneda (of
Don Juan) is more like an animal-shaman dance, and less like a strictly factual
field study.
Again, as fellow
anthropologist David Silverman says,
Field
research.. views the culture through a lens.
The lens in this
case is the human head that deals in verifiable fact. But peyote (the plant
used by Don Juan for animal trips) is a psychoactive compound that changes
perceptions.
In a dance, a
Nagual can mimic and psychically “become” an animal form. To what extent are
the psyche and physical linked? He may perceive himself to be an animal in his
altered state of perception.
You could say
that is a state of fantasy; another way to put it is a world of fact is another
type of illusion, an illusion of perspective, one that convinces the head.
The Nagual who
psychically becomes an animal physically identifies with the animal. The
universe they are in is not part of the head but of the physique. This universe
is the naive one of physical proportions. Moon, sun; Earth, stars (constellations,
figures in the sky.)
Yes, but
physical proportions are just what we see; facts are the lens that is applied to a culture such as the Yaqui
Indians (of Don Juan, who was a descendent of Toltecs, the pre-Columbian
civilization.) What is missing is the dance, the primeval rhythms that are
actually what we see (on Earth or in the heavens, constellations).
The primal or
naïve reality is what the modern world through its facts and its Siri phones
can no longer apprehend. The one where physical proportions are observed and
have identity in the natural forms that used to surround Man’s habitations (Tros
of Samothrace)
The dancing and
winding ways of woods figure largely in folklore and fairy tales. I’ve just
been reading The White People by Arthur Machen which is just full of
that type of Celtic notion.
..the ring of wild hills all around was
still dark, and the hanging woods looked dark and dreadful, and the strange
rocks were as grey as ever; and when I looked down on them from the great
mound, sitting on the stone, I saw all their amazing circles and rounds within
rounds, and I had to sit quite still and watch them as they began to turn about
me, and each stone danced in its place, and they seemed to go round and round
in a great whirl, as if one were in the middle of all the stars and heard them
rushing through the air. (The Great God Pan, Penguin,
page 157)
The White
People is told through
the eyes of a girl writing in A Green Book of things seen in woods and of tales
told by an old lady and the old lady’s great grandmother. Machen was Welsh, and
it seems likely the same type of sombre and sultry folklore was told to Howard
by his Irish mother.
The secret ways
of Earth that connect Man to animals.
..I could see
that all the different shapes of the earth were arranged in patterns, something
like the grey rocks, only the pattern was different. It was getting late, and
the air was indistinct, but it looked from where I was standing something like
two great figures of people lying on the grass. (page 138)
This sort of
physical identification is very like “figures in a landscape” (Weird 11 “The
Enchantment”). The physique of Man and animals that invest a landscape with
meaning. The worms that twist and turn in the ground. All of this is outside of
our factual reality, but it is part of the great strength of the winding ways
of the physical, proportionate reality.
All this makes
one think we are no longer in the physical world, and that the more “material”
it gets the more immaterial in actual fact! This again makes one think that
science is a sorcery, an illusion of perspective, of the head, that does
without the bodily sense of physical reality, as well as psychic perception.
One is also
reminded of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, where the psyche emanates from the
naïve physical universe of planets. Because science is imprisoned by precision
and perspective vision, it neither has the physical nor the psychic sense of
things.
Howard wrote of
Conan (Hyborian Bridge 58)
He had
entered the part of the city reserved for the temples. On all sides of him they
glittered white in the starlight—snowy marble pillars and golden domes and
silver arches, shrines of Zamora's myriad strange gods. He did not trouble his
head about them; he knew that Zamora's religion, like all things of a
civilized, long-settled people, was intricate and complex, and had lost most of
the pristine essence in a maze of formulas and rituals. He had squatted for
hours in the courtyard of the philosophers, listening to the arguments of
theologians and teachers, and come away in a haze of bewilderment, sure of only
one thing, and that, that they were all touched in the head. (The Tower of the Elephant)
Why is it that
we, in our vastly more dominated future, are so credulous of the sorcery in our
midst? It hurts my head to think of it, so here’s another Bolivian performer.