Archive for the ‘Shapeshifting’ Category

Huichol Wolf Shamanism

Friday, September 9th, 2011

The Huichol people live in the Sierra Madre Occidental range in Mexico and many will know them for their annual pilgrimage to Wirikuta, a sacred desert where the first ancestors emerged. The purpose of the pilgrimage is to gather peyote cactus. Walking, or, more recently, riding on buses, pilgrims stop at numerous sacred places in order to prepare themselves for entering Wirikuta. Novices have their eyes covered and everyone must undergo confession and purification to rid themselves of their sins. Wirikuta is a sacred place, as this was where Elder Brother Deer, Kauyumári, once walked, enabling peyote cactus to grow wherever he trod. People do not gather peyote but hunt it, shooting arrows into the ground before giving thanks for Kauyumári’s sacrifice. The people then eat the small buttons of peyote in shamanic rituals, the psychoactive effects of the plant allowing them to break free from this world and access the realm of the gods. The Huichol believe that all wisdom originates from peyote.

There is another form of Huichol shamanism, however, that is far less well known and centres on people’s reverence for wolves.

The Huichol believe that, in the beginning, all humans were part wolf. These creatures lived in dark caves and had never learned how to hunt.  One day, feeling compassion for their plight, Kauyumári allowed Father Wolf to hunt him. After a long chase, Father Wolf caught the deer, who promptly turned into peyote cactus. All the wolves gathered to eat the peyote and, in so doing, they gained great wisdom. They left their dark haunts and came out into the light. Father Sun then gave the wolves a choice: they could either transform into full humans or remain as wolves. Most, including Father Wolf, chose to transform into humans.

Father Wolf, now a human, made a shrine to the remaining wolves, ensuring that people would always be able to communicate with their kind. This gave rise to the Huichol tradition of wolf shamanism.

Initiation into wolf shamanism takes five to ten years during which time the initiate must visit several wolf shrines and make offerings according to strict ceremonial procedure. The wolf shrines are colour coded and the initiate works up through the ranks until he (wolf shamanism appears to be open only to males) works with blue, grey, or multi-coloured wolves.

Towards the end of his apprenticeship, the initiate meets real wolves, who take him to their lair and begin to teach him how to shapeshift. The wolves introduce the initiate to the wolf-kiéri plant (Solandra guttata is its Latin name, a form of datura), which induces visions similar to peyote. This may account for the final part of the apprenticeship.

At the full moon, the initiate goes to a place shown to him by the wolves and performs five somersaults. Each acrobatic move effects a transformation from human to wolf until, by the fifth, the initiate has shapeshifted into a wolf. He will now remain in this form for five days and five nights, joining his wolf friends as they live and hunt together in the vicinity. After this time, the initiate returns to human form but retains his shapeshifting power. Indeed, one Huichol individual recounts that his grandfather had shapeshifted into a wolf regularly and, as a child, he heard the pack howling outside the house.

Wolf shamanism remains a hidden and little studied aspect of Huichol tradition but, if anyone wants to research it further, I have provided the main reference for the practice below. And, if you should ever feel inspired to perform five somersaults at the full moon…

Valdez, Susana Eger. 1996. Wolf power and interspecies communication in Huichol shamanism. In Schaefer, Stacy and Peter Furst (eds.). People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion and Survival. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press: 267-305.

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Dance of the Deer

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

This is the second of five edited extracts to be posted this week from my new book, Prehistoric Belief: Shamans, Trance and the Afterlife. After the Palaeolithic yesterday, we now move into the Mesolithic, when dense forests began to cover the land and people found a new way to hunt their prey.

We are guests at a performance, in the far north of what will, one day, be called England. The wind is fresh but not biting, as if it is finally losing its memory of the ice. We stand not far from a small lake, its surface reflecting the fire that forms the centre of the roughly assembled camp. There are about half a dozen of us, all tightly packed and tense. Some are staring intently, their eyes fixed on the darkness beyond the fire. All of a sudden, there is a slight movement, and then another, and I feel a chill down my spine. You must have noticed as your form huddles against my back, pressing in closer to the group. Then, the others drop into a crouch and move away from the fire in a slow deliberate stoop. We do the same, although our movements are nowhere near as fluid. With a bellow, a shape crashes out of the darkness and rears up at the people arrayed before it. It is a deer, its antlers slashing through the air with a murderous sound. There is another bellow and another deer, then another, and another. We are surrounded. It is then that we see the bodies of the deer, but these are human bodies. These are not animals but humans, wearing the skull and antlers of the deer as a mask. But their movements and their energy is beyond human; the dancers have left their bodies far behind and have shapeshifted into their prey. These people are now deer.

As the ice withdrew from northern Europe, a little after 10,000 bc, it left behind a bruised landscape that had been scraped clear of all vegetation. However, it was not long before the plants began to return. Blown north on the breeze, the underbrush came first, rapidly followed by trees. Initially, birch, pine, and hazel proliferated in the warm, dry climate, with oak, elm, and alder following after 6000 bc, when the weather turned wetter. The new conditions were hard for the large animals of the tundra and mammoths and woolly rhinos rapidly went extinct. Other animals, such as reindeer and elk moved north, where they remain today. However, the forests were ideal homes for other deer species, the red and roe, and also for wild boar, which surged out of their Ice Age refuges in southern Europe. People soon followed and the site of the deer dance, Star Carr in northern England, is one of the earliest Mesolithic sites that archaeologists have found.

As the deer-masked dancers career about the fire, those who are crouched around us slowly creep forward, stopping dead if one of the dancers looks towards them. When they are as close as they dare go, we see them lift a bow from where it was tied to their back. Setting an imaginary arrow, they fire at the deer and then follow up their kill with whoops and wails. The deer dancers take their final steps before crashing to the ground, their bodies writhing in the throws of death. One lands not far from where we remain crouched and we can see the dancer’s eyes, rolled back so that only the whites show. The hunters stop and let the dancers complete their homage to the spirits of the deer. Perhaps the dance will bring more prey to the lakeside tomorrow.

The days of hunting deer in their thousands, such as people did during the Palaeolithic, have gone. Deer became more solitary during the Mesolithic and, hidden in the trees, required a new technique to catch them: stalking. The hunters we joined at the deer dance played their part by stalking the dancing deer before drawing their bows and loosing an arrow.

At Star Carr, in addition to stalking the prey, there is also evidence that people burnt the reeds around the water’s edge, perhaps to encourage new shoots that would attract the deer and leave them vulnerable to ambush. The efficacy of such ambush was probably improved by the wearing of deer costumes, people becoming the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. When the site was first excavated in the late 1940s, several deer skulls, with antlers attached, were found in a ditch along with butchered bones and abandoned tools. Two eyeholes bored into the front of the skull suggested that they may have been worn as masks, perhaps with the pelt of the deer hanging down the back. Whether these were used as a hunting disguise or had a more ritualistic purpose, such as shapeshifting, is a subject still debated by archaeologists. However, in reality, there is no reason why the deer masks could not have been used for both functions. Dividing the sacred from the profane is a modern construct; it has no bearing in the past. This was a time where there was little division between this world and the otherworld, and spirits inhabited and influenced every aspect of people’s lives. Everyday life was ritual and ritual was everyday life.

This is demonstrated through the importance of reciprocity to early hunting communities. Anthropologist Peter Jordan, drawing from his time living and working among the Khanty of Siberia, shows that many northern communities of hunters believe that by showing proper respect to the animal that they have killed, the Master of the Animals will look kindly upon them and send more game to take its place. Moreover, the animals themselves are believed to give themselves willingly to the hunter, safe in the knowledge that their remains will be respected and treated with care. It is likely that such attitudes also prevailed in the Mesolithic. For example, among the remains at Star Carr were 191 barbed points (a hunting weapon resembling a small harpoon), all but two of which were made from deer antler. Although these points were made at Star Carr, they were then used elsewhere, before being brought back to the site to be deposited. Given that some of these points may have even been fashioned from the tines of the red deer masks, it appears that people were returning to the site what they believed belonged to the site, perhaps as a sign of respect to the spirits of the deer that they killed. Similarly, all the masks were also left behind, as if their use was proscribed to this single location. Hunting, like everything else in the Mesolithic, was a deeply spiritual activity.

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Bringing the Spirits to Life

Monday, August 9th, 2010

This is the first of five edited extracts to be posted this week from my new book, Prehistoric Belief: Shamans, Trance and the Afterlife. I really hope you enjoy them.

Nicholas Conard, an American archaeologist working in Germany, is usually very calm when he digs. He was excavating a cave called Hohle Fels during 2003 when something, in his own words, ‘got my heart pumping a bit’. Conard can be forgiven, for he had just lifted out of the ground a Palaeolithic ivory carving, dating to around 30,000 years ago. A wonderful find in itself but when he looked closely at the subject of the carving that his heart began to race: held in his hand was a figurine that was half-lion and half-human. He knew that, potentially, here was the proof that people in the Palaeolithic were shamanic and that they regularly shapeshifted into animals whilst in trance. For this was not the only half-human half-lion figurine that had been found. At Hohlenstein-Stadel, another cave in Germany, a similar figurine had been discovered in 1939. As Conard puts it, ‘If there are two, there must have been hundreds of these things; they must have been part of daily life’.

With the figurine, Conard also found the head of a horse and a water bird, both in ivory. The bird was stretched out, as if in flight, and it was not lost on Conard that, here, was another find with potentially shamanic roots. Water birds are equally at home on the water on the land, and in the air. Consequently, in crossing between these worlds, many shamanic people believe that they can also cross between this world and the otherworld. The birds were seen as messengers of the spirits.

Southern Germany is particularly rich in figurines carved out of ivory and most come from the earliest occupation of Europe by modern humans, around 32,000 years ago. Although many have finely carved bodies and heads, the limbs are often stumpy with no hooves or paws, as if the figurines are flying above the ground. However, if, like the water bird, these figurines represent the spirits of the otherworld, then perhaps an ability to fly was an integral element to their form. Moreover, as if to emphasise that these animals were indeed spirits, many of the figurines have geometric patterns engraved on their sides, which match the phosphenes that are sometimes seen in shamanic trance. These were not ordinary animals that were depicted but, like the paintings on the cave walls, these were animal spirits.

The figurines are often worn smooth by the hands that have carried them, or are stained red by being tied onto clothing (ochre was used as a preservative for animal hide and rubbed off with use). These images were clearly made to be seen and used in everyday life. Perhaps they were similar to Native American fetishes, carried for the power that is believed to emanate from them. If so, then the type of animals represented may give some indication as to what sort of power was being sought. Most of the animals represented are large land mammals and many are predators rather than prey. Moreover, many of the animals take aggressive or threatening stances, perhaps as a prelude to attack. A lion from Vogelherd in Germany has its ears cocked back in a threatening pose, and a bear from Geißenklösterle is in a similar pose. It seems that it was the strength and ferocity of these animals that people sought when they made and carried the figurines. However, a beautifully crafted stallion, also from Vogelherd, was not in an aggressive pose at all but, rather, was in a pose that seemed designed to impress the mares. Whoever carried this figurine had very different aims in mind; but then, since Conard also found an eight-inch, 28,000 year-old dildo in his cave at Hohle Fels, perhaps there were times when Palaeolithic man felt a little under pressure.

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