Journeys Outside Time: Shamanic Ballads, Shamanic Stories

Journeys Outside Time:

Shamanic Ballads,

Shamanic Stories

By Michael Berman

First Edition Copyright 2010

SmashWords Edition 2012

By Pendraig Publishing

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except brief quotation in a review.

Cover Design & Interior Images, Typeset & Layout by: Jo-Ann Byers-Mierzwicki

Pendraig Publishing

Los Angeles, CA 91040

www.PendraigPublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1-936922-21-5

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Why We Need Shamanic Stories and Shamanic Ballads

Bibliography

The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry:

Shape-Shifter & Diviner

113: The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry

Bibliography

The Shamanic Story of Tam Lin

Bibliography

The Well of the World’s End

Bibliography

The Unquiet Grave and The Land of the Dead

78A: The Unquiet Grave

Daughter of Darkness

Bibliography

Lady Isabel and The Elf Knight

4A: Lady Isabel and The Elf Knight

4E: Lady Isabel and The Elf Knight

Bibliography

The Unhappy Body and the Great Mystery

The Unhappy Body

Great Mystery

The Daemon Lover and the Number Seven

243E: James Harris, (The Daemon Lover)

Bibliography

The Two Magicians:

Just Another Tale of Seduction or Something Else?

The Two Magicians

Bibliography

The Three Heads of the Well

Bibliography

The Wife of Usher’s Well and the Number Three

79A: The Wife of Usher’s Well

79[C]: The Wife of Usher’s Well

Bibliography

Annan Water and Crossing Over

Bibliography

The Wonderful Window and This Gift of Life

The Wonderful Window

This Gift of Life

Riddles Wisely Expounded

1C: Riddles Wisely Expounded

1[E]: Riddles Wisely Expounded

Bibliography

Why We Journey

In This Reality, Into Other Realities, and Into Ballads Too

The Temptation of Author (Anonymous)

I Was Stroking a Cat at the Time

To Nimue by Wildfrid Scawen Blunt

Bibliography

Fairyland

Appendix:

What is Shamanism?

Bibliography

About the Author

Fiction Novels from Pendraig Publishing

More Magickal Works from Pendraig Publishing

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Introduction

Why We Need Shamanic Stories

and Shamanic Ballads

SEE, your companions have gone;

Will you not too make a start?

If you desire to take wing as a bird,

Then leave to the vultures this carrion world

Forsake your relations,

For your real Friend must be sought ...

The lines above are taken from The Secret Rose Garden of Sa’d Ud Din Mahmud Shabistari, rendered from the Persian with an Introduction by Florence Lederer. London: J. Murray [1920], scanned, proofed and formatted at sacred-texts.com, September 2005, by John Bruno Hare. This text is in the public domain in the United States because it was published prior to 1923.

Sa’d ud Din Mahmud Shabistari was born in Persia, in Shabistar, near Tabriz, about 1250 CE. His best known work, The Secret Rose Garden is a set of verses that uses the rich Sufi allegorical language to explore the path back to God, the path back to what we originated from, the only real journey we ever take. And it is this journey outside time as we know it, which entails the search for the real Friend, this book is really all about.

Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough, first published in 1922, suggested that folk-tales are a faithful reflection of the world as it appeared to the primitive mind; and that we may be sure that any idea which commonly occurs in them, however absurd it may seem to us, must once have been an ordinary article of belief (Frazer, 1993, p.668). In reality, however, there is no way we can be certain that any idea that appears in such tales must once have been an ordinary article of belief as, not being able to get inside other people’s minds, we cannot possibly know what was actually the case.

Other assumptions that have been made about our so-called primitive ancestors are also highly questionable. Consider, for example, the following quote:

"The primitivist thesis is that our ancestors were as cerebrally capable as we are: what distinguishes us is our wealth of information, our education-not our power to think. And presumably, also, not our power to experience, our capacity to confront the world around us and be moved by it, and to find in it the reflection of something other, something numinous" (Winterbourne, 2007, p.27).

Such a thesis however, cannot possibly be based on anything more than speculation once again, for the fact of the matter is we have no way of knowing if our current wealth of information exceeds that of our primitive ancestors. What about the wealth of information and extensive knowledge they must have had about herbal remedies and where particular plants or sources of food could be found, for example? Neither do we have any way of knowing whether our education is greater than the education they would have received. All we can say for sure is that it is different.

On the other hand, as Emily Lyle (2007) points out in the abstract to her paper Narrative Form and the Structure of Myth, what we can be reasonably sure of is that At each stage in transmission of a tale from generation to generation, modifications take place but something remains. Thus there is a potential for material to be retained from a time in the distant past when the narrative was embedded in a total oral worldview or cosmology. In view of the fact that in the past shamanism was widely practised in the region where the tale presented here originates from, it should therefore come as no surprise that a shamanic worldview and shamanic cosmology is to be found embedded in it.

Stories have traditionally been classified as epics, myths, sagas, legends, folk tales, fairy tales, parables or fables. However, the definitions of the terms have a tendency to overlap (see Berman, 2006, p.150-152) making it difficult to classify and categorize material. Another problem with the traditional terminology is that the genre system formed on the basis of European folklore cannot be fully applied universally.

To compound matters further, a number of the definitions of what a myth is are so general in nature that they tend to be of little value. For example, the suggestion that a myth is a story about something significant [that] … can take place in the past … or in the present, or in the future (Segal, 2004, p.5) really does not help us at all as this could be applied to more or less every type of tale.

Mary Beard, considering the significance of distinctions between such categories as myth, legend, and folk-tale, concludes that in fact no technical definition distinguishing these is wholly plausible, since matters of technical definition are not really the issue. For these are value judgments masquerading as professional jargon; they are justifications of neglect – the dustbin categories for all kinds of mythic thinking that we would rather not treat as ‘myth’ (see Winterbourne, 2007, p.15). Be this as it may, it is surely indisputable that we need some form of labelling for the categories in order to be able to refer to them, and the argument being presented here is that the time has come to revise these categories.

For this reason a case was argued in Berman (2006) for the introduction of a new genre, termed the shamanic story. This can be defined as a story that has either been based on or inspired by a shamanic journey, or one that contains a number of the elements typical of such a journey. It should perhaps be noted at this point, however, that there are both emic and etic ways of regarding narrative (see Turner, 1982, p.65) and the term shamanic story clearly presents an outside view. It should also be pointed out that what is being offered here is a polytheistic definition of what the shamanic story is, in which a pool of characteristics can apply, but need not.

Characteristics typical of the genre include the way in which the stories all tend to contain embedded texts (often the account of the shamanic journey itself), how the number of actors is clearly limited as one would expect in subjective accounts of what can be regarded as inner journeys, and how the stories tend to be used for healing purposes.

In his Foreword to Tales of the Sacred and the Supernatural, Eliade admits to repeatedly taking up the themes of sortie du temps, or temporal dislocation, and of the alteration or the transmutation of space (Eliade, 1981, p.10), and these are themes that appear over and over again in shamanic stories too.

They are also frequently examples of what Jürgen Kremer, transpersonal psychologist and spiritual practitioner, called tales of power after one of Carlos Castaneda’s novels. He defines such texts as ‘conscious verbal constructions based on numinous experiences in non-ordinary reality, which guide individuals and help them to integrate the spiritual, mythical, or archetypal aspects of their internal and external experience in unique, meaningful, and fulfilling ways (Kremer, 1988, p.192).

The style of storytelling most frequently employed in both shamanic stories and in fairy tales is that of magic realism, in which although the point of departure is ‘realistic’ (recognizable events in chronological succession, everyday atmosphere, verisimilitude, characters with more or less predictable psychological reactions), … soon strange discontinuities or gaps appear in the ‘normal,’ true-to-life texture of the narrative (Calinescu, 1978, p.386). In other words, what happens is that our expectations based on our intuitive knowledge of physics are ultimately breached and knocked out.

Magical realism is a narrative mode that offers a way to discuss alternative approaches to reality to that of Western philosophy, ‘a mode suited to exploring … and transgressing … boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic’ (Zamora & Faris, 1995, p.5). The person most likely to have coined the term was the German art critic Franz Roh (1890-1965), who used it to refer to a new form of post-expressionist painting during the Weimar Republic, exemplified by the work of artists such as Otto Dix and Max Ernst.

One of the unique features of the narrative form is its reliance upon the reader to follow the example of the narrator [and/or characters in the text] in accepting both realistic and magical perspectives of reality on the same level. It relies upon the full acceptance of the veracity of the fiction during the reading experience, no matter how different this perspective may be to the reader’s non-reading opinions and judgements (Bowers, 2004, p.4).

As such, it is distinct from both surrealist and fantastic narrative. The extraordinary in magical realism is rarely presented in the form of a dream or a psychological experience, as it is in the case of surrealism, and it does not disconcert the reader as it does in a fantastic narrative.

In addition to there being shamanic stories, shamanic ballads can be identified too, and it is these ballads that this collection mainly focuses on.

Encounter-narratives presented by cunning folk and witches, and recorded in early modern European witch trials, provide evidence to suggest that popular shamanistic visionary traditions, of pre-Christian origin, survived in many parts of Britain during the early modern period (Wilby, 2005, p.7). And these traditions can be found reflected in both our folktales and our ballads.

"Although healing, finding lost goods and identifying criminals were central concerns for a large proportion of cunning folk, they also …possessed a range of other skills. Many were believed capable of divining the future and it was not uncommon for them to be asked to make predictions, and give subsequent advice, on a wide variety of matters" (Wilby, 2005, p.39).

They were also valued for their role as mediators between the living and the dead. And, like witches, cunning folk claimed to perform magic with the help of familiar spirits , who can be regarded as the equivalent of the spirit helpers that shamans work with. According to information collected in trial records, the initial meetings between cunning folk and their familiars would often be spontaneous, sudden and unexpected, though sometimes the familiar would be received as a gift from another magical practitioner. These familiars were used by cunning folk in various ways - in healing, to help discover the whereabouts of lost goods, to identify criminals, to divine the future, and / or to converse with the dead. And the long-term and usually intimate working relationships established were characterized by journeys to other worlds, such as fairyland, where it was possible for the journeyer to enjoy feasting, drinking, dancing, music, flight experiences, animal metamorphosis and the learning and performing of magic (Wilby, 2005, pp.92-93).

It has been suggested that even though they are given different cultural expression at particular times and