readers have suffered from this condition or at least displayed its symptoms or that
of a similar condition. For example, the New Zealand writer Janet Frame received
treatment in a mental hospital and suffered hallucinations (King, 2000:72-90).
Thomas Keneally has written under the pseudonyms Bernard Coyle (Pierce, 1995:7)
and as William Coyle he wrote Act of Grace (1988); Coyle being his mother's maiden
name, used ostensibly to protect Keneally's identity (Pierce, 1995:134). However, I
believe that Keneally very closely identifies with certain of his protagonists: The
young priest Maitland in Three Cheers for the Paraclete, the sentient foetus in
Passenger, are also possibly members of the Keneally Club, one of the many other
personalities of Thomas Keneally (Pierce, 1995:68–78). This is relevant to
shamanism in the sense that the shaman sometimes assumes a different persona or
channels a personality or spirit but also accords with general depth psychology
where it is accepted that each individual has a primary personality and several sub-
personalities. So the author John Fowles can write of the John Fowles Club,
alluding to his multiplicity of personalities (Fowles, 1998:67). My research
questionnaires identified a number of instances where the mythopoeic storyteller
and reader have been seized by an image or presence during their reverie and have
literally been under the control of that entity, much as was the case with Carl Jung
and his Philemon, who according to Carl Jung, virtually dictated the cryptic,
beautiful and Gnostic VI I Sermones ad Mortuos (Edinger, 1992:17).
6.5 The Anima-Animus Entelechy
An important characteristic, which has to be given consideration because of
its frequent appearance and significance, is that of shamanic inversion, sometimes
manifested as homoeroticism, expressed alone and at other times together with
transvesticism or gender transformation. Of course, I am not suggesting that
homosexuality or transvesticism is or was a prerequisite or necessary characteristic
of the shaman or of the mythopoeic writer and reader. Rather there is evidence
that there is a close, indeed dynamic, connection between shamanism and the
worship of Gaia, the Earth Goddess, Mother Earth and that particular ecstatic state
of consciousness associated with shamanism. Carl Jung took this notion of original
bisexuality and applied it to his own model of the contra-sexual nature of the self.
I n the Jungian model of the psyche, the male has an internalised female
counterpart, the anima, while the female has an internalised masculine counterpart,