caves of Les Trois Freres in Southern France, thought to date from around 12,000
BCE. This pictograph represents a therianthropic-being dancing and re-establishes
the link between god and humankind after the passing of the pre-conscious
Dreaming (Tolstoy, 1985:299-230). (The concept of a Dreaming or Dreamtime is
common to most preliterate peoples and is briefly examined in Chapter 7.)
I ndeed, shamanism (and neo-shamanism) is not a geographically and
historically limited cultural expression but rather a universal cultural genre
pertaining to religious leaders and teachers, healers and those who profess to
mediate with a supernatural dimension under altered states of consciousness. I n
shamanism a universal grammar of symbols and archetypal themes emerges that
must be regarded as being more basic and essential than any locally conditioned
cultural styles and can be explained only as reaching back to humankind’s deepest
psychological and even biological foundations. Shamanism is locally conditioned
only in a secondary sense (Ryan, 1999:4).
The psyche contains many archetypal patterns that are essentially
unrecognised in contemporary society but which shamans have employed for over
30,000 years to gain access to the spiritual-imaginal world. Thus, the shaman is the
mediator between the individual human mind and the archetypal, transpersonal
realm beyond it and which I suspect is coterminous with Corbin’s I maginal Realm of
dream, vision and trance, Jung’s Collective Unconscious, the Celtic Web of Wyrd, de
Chardin’s noosphere and even Bachelard’s states of reverie. I n short, there is
nothing arbitrary about the evolution of shamanism; everything in it obeys the
rubrics of a system, an ontological prior reality that seems to manifest out of a
single point, the cave pictographs, and expands into more complex forms which
later become embedded within the imaginal context of primitive song, language,
religion and narrative, all of which help explain and define the tradition.
What may be identified now is a continuation of SC as a subtle tradition, one
that manifests, perhaps with more intensity, in particular religions, cultures and
languages, yet it also transcends them. There are also many individuals who
experience its manifestation as a sudden expansion, intensity or delimitation of
consciousness, or as a sudden awareness of the primal source of all being when all
existence is experienced simultaneously. C. S. Lewis provides an example of this
awareness; experienced as he was reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin:
... in what I can only describe as the idea of Autumn. I t sounds
fantastic that one can be enamoured of a season, but that is
something like what happened; and, as before, the experience
ron
(Ron)
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