CHAPTER 6
THE MYTHOPOEI C WRITER
6.1 I ntroduction: The Mythopoeic Writer as Shaman
The work of Jung, Hillman, Tolstoy and Guggenbuhl-Craig has shown that
shamans have been identified as prototypic psychologists, as well as artists,
storytellers, healers and priests. They produce and manipulate altered states of
consciousness, work with belief systems, interpret dreams, even create and transmit
mythologies, very much in the way the mythopoeic writers, Malouf, Keneally and
McCullough, have demonstrated in their literature and affirmed in their
questionnaire responses.
Shamanic ecstasy comes to the shaman in a trance condition and central to
it are its supposed mysteries of flight, levitation, gender transformation, bilocation,
and animal and bird incarnations (Bloom, 1996:141). I f we define shamanism in
the most widely used sense as a practice involving an altered state of consciousness
which facilitates entry into supernatural realms to gain information beyond normal
perception and cognition, then shamanic potentiality would have to be attributed to
a large portion of most populations, throughout history and across cultures.
The neo-shamans and the mythopoeic writers and readers, may be seen
from their responses to the research questionnaire, to experience, possess, exhibit,
aver or be familiar with these mysterious elements, identified by Bloom. For
instance, in both the Keneally and Malouf corpora there are many instances of
flight-cum-levitation; Oskar Schindler is given an elevated almost omnipotent
overview of Cracow (Keneally, 1982:139). Malouf’s Ovid and the Child often
experience flight-levitation, “ ...He is walking on the water’s light. And as I watch,
he takes the first step off it, moving slowly away now into the deepest distance,
above the earth, above the water, on air” (Malouf, 1978:152). Malouf’s Harland is
“lifted up, heaved violently aloft” and is observed by spirits, “watchers, stately
figures, also black who looked on but did not move” (Malouf, 1984:47-48).
The interview with Thomas Keneally presented very strong evidence that as
a writer he feels a definite connection with the role of the storyteller of the hunter-
gatherer epoch; David Malouf stated that he wanted, through his stories and
poems, to change the way his readers perceived things and even Colleen
McCullough, the avowed pragmatist has shown herself, in her literature and seer-