like perception of ghosts and the Connecticut countryside, to epitomise the bardic
storyteller.
Together with the evidence I presented in Chapter 2 for the existence of a
narrative psyche and the transcendental conversation, that habitually unconscious
dialogue that takes place between the individual and Mind at Large, it is clear that
the mythopoeic writer is, in many ways, the heir of the archaic shaman-storyteller.
6.2 Neo-shamanism and the West
I n the mid and latter part of the twentieth century there was a burgeoning
interest in literature dealing with neo-shamanism. That interest may have gained its
impetus, albeit indirectly, in the early work of Colin Wilson, notably The Outsider
(1956), a study of alienation, creativity and the modern mind followed by his Poetry
and Mysticism (1969), perhaps reinforced by the work of Gaston Bachelard, The
Poetics of Space (1958) and The Poetics of Reverie (1960) and from others such as
James Hillman, Thomas Moore and Mircea Eliade. Eliade provides the bridge
between the subtle expression of transcendence and neo-shamanism explicitly
through his post war shamanic literature such as: Maitreyi (1933), Two Tales of the
Occult (1940), and The Forbidden Forest (1954). Daniel Noel calls these works
‘shamanovels’, a term that intimates “ ...the shamanic powers at play in the reading
of a work of fiction” (Noel, 1999:32). The more overt expressions of neo-
shamanism come from Michael Harner and Brian Bates but especially, in literature,
through the works of Carlos Castaneda, in particular, The Teachings of Don Juan: A
Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). I am more interested, however, in a much longer
tradition and its relationship with literature.
During the early to mid-twentieth century, C. G. Jung, perhaps along with
the poet W.B. Yeats, may well have been the closest exemplar of a Western shaman
that the modern age had seen. Yeats in his search for supernatural wisdom, his
involvement with Aleister Crowley and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, his
continual pursuit of supernatural truths through occult experimentation, much of it
expressed in his memoirs, polemics and certainly his poetry, has been admirably
documented in the two volume biography by Foster (1997, 2003). I t is, however,
Carl Gustav Jung who seems unsurpassed in this regard. I t was reported, for
example, that Jung wrote his Answer to Job (1952) during a period of illness during
which a figure sat on his bedpost and dictated it to him (Edinger, 1992:17). The