Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences
256
Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences
256eBook
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Overview
“And suddenly the understanding of my own vision washed over me like a mighty wave . . . For life or for death, I was committed to that mighty realm of which I was shown a brief reminder, the world where all was forever motion and emergence, that realm where the spirits ride the wind.” —from the Prologue
Anthropologist and spiritual explorer Felicitas Goodman reexamines our notions of the nature of reality by studying the ritual postures of native art assumed by her subjects during trance states. For readers desiring to discover this world of ancient myths, she has included a practical guide on how to achieve such ecstatic experiences.
“The book is clearly written for the general reader and includes many descriptions of trance experiences. It may serve as a good introduction to the nature and appeal of the shamanic revival in modern Western cultures.” —Theological Book Review
“A case study in experiential anthropology that offers a unique mix of autobiography, mythology, experiential research, and archaeological data to support a challenging thesis—that certain body postures may help induce specific trance states.” —Shaman’s Drum
“This is a spellbinding and exceptionally readable book by an extraordinary woman.” —Yoga Journal
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253014641 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Where the Spirits Ride the Wind
Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences
By Felicitas D. Goodman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1990 Felicitas D. GoodmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-32764-2
CHAPTER 1
The Call of the Old People
On the eve of my twelfth birthday I had a severe headache, and it startled me, for I had never had that kind of a headache before. The next morning, I bled for the first time. I went to my mother, and she showed me what to do. There was great trust between us, and because she was not upset, I was not either. When the shock came, it was in a different guise. My mother took a piece of chalk and drew a little cross on the bedroom door. "This means," she said, "that we now have an adult daughter in our house." I puzzled over what that might mean—sex education had not been invented yet—but did not ask her. I always kept the most disquieting questions to myself.
Very soon I discovered all on my own what being an adult apparently meant, and confided it to my diary: "The magic time is over." For all of a sudden and without the slightest warning, I realized that I could no longer effortlessly call up what in my terms was magic: that change in me that was so deliciously exciting and as if I were opening a door, imparting a special hue to whatever I chose. I noticed the curious impediment first with the fresh, crunchy snow which fell right after my birthday. It was nice, but I could not make it glow. Bewildered, I began paying more attention to my seeming disability. The orange glow of dawn streaming through the bedroom window was the same as before; so was the smell of the horses on the market. But I had changed.
I believe today that a large part of initiation in the wiser societies, those small ones that, together with so much else that is worthwhile and beautiful, are disappearing at an alarming rate in our century, has to do with helping the adolescent to reconstitute the waning capacity for ecstasy. The harsh stimulation of the nervous system incorporated in many of those rituals, the pain, the fatigue, the fasting, are designed, I think, to substitute a different, an adult, form for the spontaneous ability to call up that very special trance, the one leading to ecstasy, the passing of which I mourned so deeply as I entered puberty.
Obviously I was living at the wrong place. How gladly I would have submitted to whatever trial if only someone could have told me what it was I was losing, and if there would have been a promise of reconstitution. Actually, I was coming up for confirmation, which was modeled after ancient initiation rituals, but it was cruelly vacuous. I was confirmed in the simple Lutheran church of Nagyvárad, in the Hungarian region of western Rumania, and for some reason I hoped vaguely that it might provide the help I wanted. But after the ritual, the details of which we had had to learn by heart and dutifully performed, there was only a festive meal in the Kispipa, my father's favorite restaurant, and then nothing, absolutely nothing happened. I did not even know what I had expected, but it was very clear to me that I had not received it.
I experienced that frightening emptiness once again when in the convent school I sang in the choir during the induction of a novice into the order. We talked among ourselves about Philomela's hair being cut, and about how she would be given a wedding band that from then on would mark her as Christ's bride. "Then what will happen?" I wanted to know. "Oh, she can't leave the convent anymore." I knew that already, and it was not what I was after. I wanted to find out what sweet miracle would engulf her once she went back to be alone in her cell. But no one had an answer. I imagined Philomela in her lonely, empty room, and the vicarious anguish nearly tore me apart.
The question is, why did I even hope for "something" unimaginably wonderful to happen in conjunction with a ritual? After all, I was brought up in a Western-type society where such expectations were certainly not taught, in school or out. Neither did I have any source of information about other types of tradition—no radio, no television, not even a public library; only a few books borrowed from friends here and there. But that was perhaps how it happened. Everyone had books of Hungarian tales, legends, and myths, which I began reading even before starting grade school. Stealthily, those stories insinuated a knowledge and a yearning into my childish world that were to shape me for the rest of my life.
Because what to me was so precious was inexorably slipping further and further away, I finally came to the conclusion that I had to do something to save what was still left of it. Its fading had clearly been associated with entering adulthood, so I decided that I simply would refuse to become an adult. Wisely, I kept that decision a secret. To everyone around me, I was a normal teenager. I developed strong physically. I was at the head of my class in school. I enjoyed swimming and ice-skating, and I fell in love with a boy whom I had known in grade school and for whom I embroidered a fancy handkerchief. But I had a secret chamber deep within; I could retire to that hidden place, and working with desperate concentration, I could cheat adulthood out of a victim and stay a child and have the familiar trance wash over me once more.
As the years went by, though, the occulted ecstasy became less and less accessible. There was college, professional work, love, and marriage. I bore and suckled three children. The Second World War burned over Europe, and when it was over, I went to America with my family.
I arrived in this country as countless immigrants before me, starving, beggarly, all my belongings in one cardboard box, and deeply scarred by the blood, gore, and death of the war. For years, I woke up at night barely able to suppress the urge to scream. The floor of reality was a thin crust of slag; I had to walk over it ever so gingerly in order not to break through and fall into the merciless darkness of the void below. Caring for my children and my professional work were my only safety, my escape. Do not look left, do not look right, and especially never look up at the sky, for it too was endless and void.
Seven years after my arrival in this country, I had a new baby, the world around me became less threatening, and I began feeling safer. I even started writing again, poetry, and then a novel. Yet I could not escape a feeling of pervasive despondency. This world was entirely different from that of my childhood, where I could always feel the comfort of invisible presences around. All was deserted, empty around here. No matter how wide I opened the gates of my inner being, there was nothing asking to enter.
My new daughter was still quite small when it happened that we took a trip to a national park in neighboring Kentucky. Lying in the grass, I rediscovered the sky. It was dotted with fluffy cirrus clouds, and as I watched, an endless procession of white bundles came drifting across the blue, like Indian warriors laid out for burial, the feathers of their war bonnets trailing behind them in the wind. We later stopped at a historical marker, which spoke of Kentucky as "the dark and bloody grounds," home of the frontiersmen who, I recalled, notched their rifle butts to keep count of the Indians they murdered. Perhaps those cloud biers were of the Indians' spirits, forever reenacting their sorrowful exit after the white men had killed their people and had raped the land. Were the spirits dead now too? There seemed to be no answer, and I felt even more disconsolate than before.
Then in 1960 friends from Ohio State University invited me to spend my vacation with them in their new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had never before been to the Southwest, with its vast spaces and sepia and magenta flattop mountains, dotted with patches of green junipers and pinyon trees, and alive with a thousand lacy rock carvings created by wind and sand and shimmering golden in the sunlight. Most of the time the madonna-blue sky above the land was brittle and clean. But sometimes, ample cloud breasts would drip the blessing of rain from their nipples on the thirsty earth, and the misty Feathered Serpent humped over the ridges in the morning, celebrating fertility.
There were still other impressions. After walking over the Indian arts-and-crafts markets with their celebration of beauty, so appealing to the senses, I came away with the feeling of having been touched by an almost palpable presence, a special, undefinable quality. Was this the land to which the spirits had fled from the dark and bloody grounds? Nowhere in Europe had I ever experienced being overwhelmed by such a magical quality except when I was very young and still knew ecstasy, and it filled me from the start with an intense yearning. For what I did not know, perhaps for that secret recess of childhood, a world that used to be sweet, holy, and inviolate.
It was the month of August, and my hosts took me to see the Corn Dance that took place every year at Santo Domingo, the largest of the Rio Grande pueblos. The dance is an ancient Indian prayer ritual asking for an ample harvest for all people. Well over a thousand Indian men, women, and children in colorful native attire danced this prayer from the forenoon until sundown to the songs of the men's choir and the rhythm of the large drum, the tone of which resounded in the desert like the heartbeat of the earth. I was totally overwhelmed by the bewildering beauty of this new and strange world.
The night after the dance I had a dream, or more likely a vision. I saw three old Indians in front of the window. They were dressed in the colorful shirts and slit pants of the choir, and one of them carried the big drum. With his drumstick, he knocked on the window, and when I looked up, he waved for me to come along. The experience made me unaccountably happy. I did not know the ethnographic literature about the Pueblos at the time, but it seemed to me that what I had seen was the spirits of the "Old People" of the pueblo I had heard about, and who had come to invite me to this, their land. And so I decided, like a sleepwalker choosing the right corner to turn, that no matter what, I was going to acquire some small piece of land here. Then I would be able to say to those kindly old spirits, "You see, here I am."
The search took nearly three years; land was—and still is—very scarce in the Southwest. Finally, in 1963, my real-estate agent found not the modest five acres that I thought I could afford, but a large spread, nearly three hundred acres, which the Forest Service had rid itself of some years ago, and which its present owner wanted to sell off at a suitable profit. My lawyer counseled adamantly against it: "Don't waste your money on that," he wrote. "We call it the Pojoaque Badlands." But after all, I was not intending to grow alfalfa, and I knew the beauty of the Pojoaque Valley from my previous visit. I was not going to be disappointed.
This "badland" was on all sides surrounded by Indian pueblos, which in part had retained their old Tewa names—Tesuque, Pojoaque, Nambe—and by Santa Clara and San Ildefonso. In the east, the Sangre de Cristo range turned wine-red at sundown. To the west, the property was protected by the fortress wall of the Jemez Mountains, where, according to Indian legend, humans emerged from the crowded and dark third world to this, their fourth one under the arc of the rainbow. Its loose sandy terrain was crisscrossed by arroyos, deep cuts caused by water erosion, but each one a picturesque world of its own. A million years ago, the volcanoes of the Valle Grande, thirty miles away, spewed glinting, many-colored pebbles on its softly rounded hills. Yellow rabbit brush bloomed near a juniper by the fence, and on some barren hillsides Indian paintbrush flamed red among the rocks. At night, the coyotes laughed from across the ancient river bed of the Cañada Ancha, and the spirits haunting the pueblo ruins by the river whispered in my dreams. Of course, I could not make the despoiling of the earth go away that rolled on greedily on the highway down in the valley day and night, or the threat of the final holocaust that glowed in the steely lights of Los Alamos, the "Atomic City" toward the west. But at least here among these gentle hills, the world was still at peace. I signed the contract for the land, and never regretted that the decision committed me to much sacrifice and many years of hard labor.
In the summer of 1965, after days of hiking, we—that is, a helpful relative, my young daughter, and I—located a spot suitable for building. It was like a tongue stretching outward from among the hills, affording a view of the Sangre de Cristo toward the east but surrounded on all other sides by protective ridges. I had a well drilled, and men on horseback brought in electricity from the region's electric co-op. We knew next to nothing about how to build a house from the local sun-dried bricks, the adobes. But if we got stuck, we went to our Hispanic or Indian neighbors for advice, or to the ever-useful builders' supply store. People would make expansive fun of us. "Look at that, here they come again from the Rancho Grande," they would say. But actually, everyone was friendly and helpful, and also curious about what a woman was doing there, homesteading pretty much on her own.
It was hard. We could not use our tent, because scorpions and six-inch orange centipedes with dragon heads made it their home. Besides, it kept collapsing in the violent storms that were our frequent visitors. In the cruel heat of midday we crawled instead into the sparse shade of the junipers. During the cloudbursts of the summer's rainy season, our only safe haven was the cabin of the pickup truck. Our camp stove gave up in the persistent wind, so I had to cook on an open fire. It rained, our firewood got wet, and we had to eat sandwiches. There was no money to hire a backhoe, so armed only with pick and shovel, we dug all the ditches for the foundation. We laid the heavy cast-iron pipes for the rough-in of the plumbing and finally built the walls for our first room.
The summer was nearly over when we finally nailed the tarpaper on the roof and hung the door. I had registered for graduate school at Ohio State University, and two weeks before school was to start, we were finally ready to leave. We loaded everything we had borrowed on our pickup truck, the wheelbarrow and the sawhorses, the scaffolding, and Baba, our faithful goat, to take back to the neighbors in the valley. As we rolled out, I turned back for a last glance. Our flat little house was shrinking into insignificance in the glare of the noonday sun, its adobe walls becoming one with the sand and the clay. Had the Old Ones, the spirits of this land, even noticed that I had come? Did some of them live in these hills or did they have to be invited? I had no idea of how to invite spirits, and after all the big problems and small triumphs and successes of homesteading, it seemed to me that I had left the most important task undone. Perhaps next summer, I thought hopefully. After all, I was now on the right path. I did not realize then how long and arduous that path would turn out to be.
CHAPTER 2Getting in Touch with the Spirits: The First Discoveries
In the Protestant Christian tradition in which I was raised, it was held that the only way in which a human could communicate with the beings inhabiting the alternate reality was by prayer. But in the view of the vast majority of other traditions, speech, as the mode of communication of ordinary reality, is singularly unsuited for this purpose. It is but a hardly audible knock on the very thick wall separating humans from the spirit realm. In fact, humans have to make a truly heroic effort to be noticed on the other side. Merely talking, falling into a worshipful mood, feeling "transcendent," "numinous," or "oceanic," or whatever other pompous words are listed in the dictionary, simply will not do. Instead humans, if they have the urgent necessity or desire to squeeze through the chinks in that wall, need to change the very functioning of their bodies in the most radical way. The term summarizing these changes is religious trance, one of a large group of altered states of consciousness of which humans are capable. It is termed religious because observation shows that it is the one occurring in religious context, that is, when contact is made with the alternate, the sacred, reality. (For the problem of defining "religion," see Goodman 1988.)
Before the worship service on the particular evening in the Apostolic church in Mexico City which I want to describe here, I had only read about this kind of trance; I had never actually seen a person experiencing it. I had come to Mexico City in hopes of finally observing this nonordinary behavior, the presence of which, I was fervently wishing, would clinch a scholarly argument I had advanced in a paper for a seminar in graduate school.
It was the summer of 1968. Around me in the crowded bus there were brown-skinned passengers going home from laboring in offices and factories, girls in fashionable dresses, men in bedraggled work clothes. Women boarded with baskets or shopping bags filled with vegetables and fruit from the market, a mother with her sleeping infant slung across her back in a scarf. My destination was the Colónia Pro-Hogar, a rather poor section of the city, and I had wrapped my tape recorder in newspaper so it would not tempt any would-be assailant. As the bus rumbled and lurched over the narrow back streets of the vast metropolis, burping Diesel fumes, I thought about the circuitous search that had brought me here to Latin America from the classrooms of Ohio State University.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Where the Spirits Ride the Wind by Felicitas D. Goodman. Copyright © 1990 Felicitas D. Goodman. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Prologue
I. The Search for the Spirits
One: The Call of the Old People
Two: Getting in Touch with the Spirits: The First Discoveries
Three: The Old Ones Remember
Four: A New Path Opens
Five: The Way of the Spirits
II. The Postures and What They Have to Offer
Six: Going on a Spirit Journey
Seven: The Many Faces of Divination
Eight: The Gift of Healing
Nine: Female Powers of Healing
Ten: Changing Shape-The Shimmering Game
Eleven: Celebrations
Twelve: The Pit of Death and the Psychopomp
Thirteen: Life Everlasting
III. Myths of the Eternal Present
Introduction
The Emergence Story
Coyote Comes Calling
The Man of Cuautla
A Maya Whistle
The Story of Kats and His Bear Wife
The Spirits and the Wounded Tree of Life
In the Land of Centaurs and Mermaids
Conclusion: THe Twlight of the Spirits
Appendix: Some Practical Points
Notes
Bibliography
Index