influence, to impose a special vision, to create in others a state of
mind which is more than understanding or sympathetic ... He sees
song [ mythopoeic text] as an instrument by which some special
force in himself is directed at others and works his will on them ...
which aims at influencing supernatural powers (Bowra, 1962:255).Bowra’s statement distils the essence of the responses made to the research
questionnaires, sometimes metaphorically, for example, in emphasising the need to
pierce the mundane. I t certainly reiterates, for instance, David Malouf’s stated
intention to “ ... change the way people see things, to change their state of being
and feeling and perceiving” (in Kiernan, 1986: 28); and Thomas Keneally spoke
about a time when we were all poets. Colleen McCullough’s description of the
Connecticut countryside is a potent example of the expression of participation
mystique, almost an eruption of stream-of-consciousness writing as if she is
describing something that is taking place within her own soul.
(e) Piercing the Membrane of Place
I have argued that certain individuals, represented by the cohort of this
study; mythopoeic writers and their readers, and of course the two shamans, can
more readily access and experience more intensely than most, a mythopoeic
dimension identified as the I maginal Realm, which is an analogue of the same
dimension accessed by shamans throughout history and across cultures. That small
percentage of people develop the mythopoeic imperative, as was determined
through the questionnaire responses, by virtue of some trauma, illness or enforced
solitude in life which isolates them and produces an equivalent to shamanic
initiation or heightened imaginal capacity, an ability to pierce or see through the
surface of place to an elsewhere-place.
That imaginal capacity is played off against what I defined in Chapter 10;
place; the absolute self-referential reality in the phenomenal world that generates a
narrative of varying intensity. Everything in the egoic-life of the individual has to be
seen in the context of place, thus place is a generator of existential narrative, of
identity, the quintessence of egoic reality. However, since place is a continuum of
possibilities paralleling levels of consciousness, inner psychic content can be
projected onto place when it is otherwise preceived as a tabula rasa. I t is this
movement from imaginal elsewhere-place to physical place and back to imaginal
[ paralleling the movement from participation mystique to egoic consciousness and