SOURCE: Daghistany, Ann. “The Shaman, Light and Dark.” In Literature and Anthropology, edited by Philip Dennis and Wendell Aycock, pp. 193-208. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Daghistany examines the shaman archetype in Trambley's “The Burning” and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima.]

Anthropology, myth studies, and comparative literature all look for—and find—in their respective subject matters recurrent images of forms and aspects of human life and of its environing forces, factors that condition and shape it. The term archetype is used widely to signify such images. I assume here that such images are not simply made up by individual persons, but are given by society and have, moreover, the power of acting upon individuals in various ways. This assumption provides a basis for understanding how anthropologists, comparative mythologists, and students of literature can be regarded as having something important in common: if such images and their relationships to the persons whose lives they shape and whose experience they inform are in this sense objective, they are subject to descriptions that can be more-or-less accurate, penetrating, or comprehensive.

Let us consider the case of the shaman archetype. Anthropologists have described shamanism in many different cultures, and the shaman figure seems to be of more than local interest. Furthermore, a shaman archetype seems to occur in literary and mythic sources long before the modern descriptions of shamanism by anthropologists. This [essay] focuses on the shaman archetype in several stories that exhibit varying relationships to the three categories of anthropology, myth, and literature. The discussion of these stories offers some materials for reflection upon the relationships of these three disciplines and should thus serve to clarify what interdisciplinary might mean in this connection.

Let us see how the literary portraits of two women—Lela in Trambley's story “The Burning” and Ultima in Rudolfo Anaya's novel Bless Me, Ultima—and the earliest recorded medieval version of Faust show how the anthropological and mythic shaman images coalesce and diverge. In his book The Shaman: Patterns of Siberian and Ojibway Healing, anthropologist John Grim states:

Among tribal peoples the shaman is the person, male or female, who experiences, absorbs, and communicates a special mode of sustaining, healing power. For most tribal peoples the vital rhythms of the world are manifestations of a mysterious, all-pervasive power presence. This power presence is evoked by a shaman in ritual prayers and sacrifice to guide tribal hunts, perpetuate sacred crafts, and sustain human life in its confrontations with the destructive forces of the surrounding world.

(3)

The words of María Sabina, a Mazatec shaman born in 1894 and described by ethnomycologist Gordon Masson as “an artist in her mastery of the techniques of the vocation,” add concreteness to the anthropologist's definition:

There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there it is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says.

(Halifax 1979, 130)

The type of control exerted by the shaman image over the individual is rigorously demanding. This may be seen in the religious experience of initiation that utterly transforms the shaman and through which he acquires his powers. The initiation into the role separates itself into several stages: the summons, the solitary experience, suffering, death, and recreation. According to the comparative mythologist Mircea Eliade, the young person may receive his summons in the form of a call through dreams or visions, through hereditary transmission, or by personal quest. Alone, he is required to undergo a harrowing experience during which he is stripped of his mortal identity and recreated as a new being. This change of being gives the shaman access to the world of the spirit (Eliade 1979, 21). Eliade says:

To see into the very far distance, to ascend to heaven, to see spirit beings (souls of the dead, demons, gods), means, in the final analysis, that the medicine man is no longer confined to the universe of profane man, that he shares the condition of Superior Beings. He attains this condition thanks to an initiatory death. …

(25)

The meaning of the initiation is this: through his own crisis and suffering, which he must resolve in order to become a shaman, the individual acquires a power over death. Thus the shaman image, in drawing the individual into itself, bestows upon him the reflection of deity. It is because of his power over death that the shaman earns his status among his peers. (Drury 1982, 2) In their citation of the Siberian Yakut shaman's sacrifice of personal self, anthropologists Joan Halifax and Andreas Lommel illustrate the extraordinary degree of suffering that the shaman must undergo:

Here is another account of the shaman's sacrifice of self to the spiritual forces that will guide as they consume: “They cut off the head and place it on the uppermost plank of the yurta, from where it watches the chopping up of its body. They hook an iron hook into the body and tear up and distribute all the joints; they clean the bones, by scratching off the flesh and removing all the fluid. They take the two eyes out of the sockets and put them on one side. The flesh removed from the bones is scattered on all the paths of the underworld; they also say that it is distributed among the nine or three times nine generations of the spirits that cause sickness, whose road and paths the shaman will in future know. He will be able to help with ailments caused by them; but he will not be able to cure those maladies caused by spirits that did not eat of his flesh.

(Lommel 1967, 60)

The initiation pattern is so common that it can perhaps be regarded as universal (Eliade 1970, 2546). In her short story “The Burning,” Trambley portrays an old woman whose shamanic pattern includes the calling, the suffering death of the old self, the descent, and the sacrifice. The story opens upon a group of pueblo women who condemn the main character Lela, an old woman, to death by burning because her different beliefs have incensed them (despite her benevolent healings). Lela, ill inside her hut, remembers her youth and the sequence of events that brought her to the pueblo. She had inherited the sacred artistic occupation of creating clay figures of household rural gods from her mother. One day, in search of the larger self, she followed “the command of dreams” to the lake. She swam to the waterfall and then was led to leave the world of her childhood for the people outside. Her initiation begins on this journey. She feels great hunger and thirst in the cold night desert wind. Her fall into a crevice between two large boulders leaves her foot wounded, and she suffers from fever all night. Her departure from her people reflects the death of her old self, whereas the wound represents the suffering that accompanies shamanic initiation. The fall can be seen as a descent. In the new village, she is never accepted. Lela lives in isolation, giving up the comfort she would have enjoyed among her own people because of her dedication to her occupation:

The people in her new home needed her, and she loved them in silence and from a distance. She forgave them for not accepting her strangeness and learned to find adventure in the oneness of herself. … Many times she wanted to go back …, but too many people needed her here.

(Trambley 1986, 422-23)

During Lela's initiation, the power of the shaman image had so utterly transformed her into a new being that she willingly sacrificed the security and comfort of her old identity.

Lela's relationship to the community acquires a special meaning because of the particular setting identified in the story: she is named as a Tarahumara from Batopilas, in the northwest corner of Mexico. The plot of the story seems to reflect the historical pattern of the Tarahumaras in relation to Spanish intruders who, from the early seventeenth century, attempted to Christianize the Tarahumaras. The pattern shows the features of acceptance-disillusion-withdrawal on the part of the Indians and exploitation-brutality-murder on the part of the Spanish.¹ (Kennedy 1978, 17) Lela's gentle character, willingness to help, and withdrawal from contact into solitude and isolation, even her ultimate death at the hands of the pueblo women, show the traits of the Tarahumaras described by the anthropologist John Kennedy in his book Tarahumara of the Sierra Madre. He notes, “the present day Tarahumara traits of passivity, withdrawal from confrontation, avoidance of aggression, and introversion are at least partially institutionalized responses to their contact with the Spanish in the seventeenth century” (19).

After initiation, a second requirement of shamanism is a harmony with nature. “The experience of resonance with the natural world distinguishes the shaman as a religious type from the prophet, priest, yogi, and sage” (Grim 1983, 207). The novel Bless Me, Ultima develops this aspect of the shaman fully. Ultima is a wise old woman who guides the development of the young narrator, Tonio. When they walk together in the hills seeking herbs, Ultima seems to become more vital, reflecting the reciprocal bond: nature's strength flows through her, as she serves others with its powers. Her vitality comes from the fact that, like other authentic shamans, she “perceives the link between humans and earth processes, and it becomes the means for experiencing constellations of energy in the natural world and channeling those forces into the tribal community” (207).

The shaman's close connections with nature are effected at initiation, whereupon the novice may take upon him/herself the powers, attitude, and identity of an animal. “Often the shaman finds a new identity in an animal form, taking possession of the animal to acquire its natural strength and rhythms” (204). Ultima's animal spirit is the owl, which always accompanies her. It is identified with her closely as an ally and seeks to protect as well as to warn her. It blinds Tenorio, the enemy who tries to kill her. It also wounds his daughters, who haunt her dwelling as wolves, and it shares her spiritual strength. Although separated by continents and centuries, another tradition linking the owl and the modern female curer is described by the anthropologist Douglas Sharon in his study of a Peruvian Shaman entitled The Wizard of the Four Winds. In the early Peruvian Moche art period (100 B.C. to A.D. 700), “a shawl-clad female figure in a curing scenario … often has the features of an owl, the alter ego of modern female curers, a wise old woman associated with traditional wisdom and herbal lore” (42). The young Tonio hears the owl frequently in times of trouble.

Lorene Carpenter notes the anthropologist Benson Saler's comments on the guardian animal spirit, observations that illuminate Ultima's death when Tenorio kills her owl:

The animal is the individual human being's alter ego. Should the alter ego suffer harm, the individual whose destiny is linked to it is likely to suffer harm in the corresponding degree.

(1981, 48)

In addition to the harmony with nature and the identity with an animal, “the shaman experiences natural symbols as revelatory of cosmic power” (Grim 1983, 185). Lela, the main character of “The Burning,” does so: her shamanic call at the beginning of her story is accompanied by the insight into nature's message. The earthly phenomena speak to her and beckon her: “The soft breath of wind was the breath of little gods, and the crystal shine of rocks close to the lake was a winking language that spoke of peace and the wildness of all joy.” (Trambley 1986, 423).²

As the powerful image of the shaman draws the individual into itself, so too does it control the relationship between the individual shaman and others, notably deities, but the general community as well. That the shaman has a relationship with deities, and that this relationship is a controlled one, is and has been the subject of much scholarly inquiry. In this section we shall focus on what the relationship is, how it is effected with the deities, and why it is sought by the shaman. In the history of the scholarly study of shamanism, there are three stages. The early studies investigated the origin of religion and took shamanism to be a primordial religious experience, the source of religions (Grim 1983, 16). The second stage saw “anthropological efforts to collect ethnographic data from particular cultures,” while in the third stage, of hermeneutical studies, shamanism is interpreted in its multicultural context (15). During the first and second stages, it was common to regard the shaman as a psychopath because of the disturbed behavior that preceded and accompanied his/her initiation (Eliade 1970, 2547). Today, however, the attitude taken toward the reality of his encounter with deity, or supernatural forces, is elusive: the scholar will comment only on the content and implications of the shaman's role (Drury 1982, 18). Infrequently it will cautiously affirm the “reality” of the spiritual contact (Eliade 1960, 87-89). In either case, the distinction between the shaman and the psychopath is seen to be the control that the shaman has over his visions. That is, he can move at will between the upper, Earth-level, and lower cosmological zones. Important distinctions between the medium and the psychopath are drawn; for unlike the medium he can remember what he experiences (Drury 1982, 14), and unlike the psychopath, he makes contact with the spirits for specific purposes, which we will soon examine. Before we do, however, we need to understand something of what happens in the contact between the shaman and the spirit. First, the shaman becomes identified with the power during the contact itself. Second, he experiences a mystical illumination, an inner light “felt throughout the body but principally in the head and accompanied by the experience of ascension.” The spiritual contact

involves vision into the distance and clairvoyance at the same time: the shaman sees everywhere and very far, but he also sees invisible entities (souls of the sick, spirits) and also sees future events …, sees through the flesh, in the manner of x-rays.

(Eliade 1979, 23)

The method of attaining contact is through trance, which may be aided by drums and songs. During trance, Halifax maintains, “the soul of the ecstatic leaves the body and flies into the realm of spirits and gods” (1979, 18). There is danger for the shaman in these quests, for he can be killed while in the other worlds and never return. The specific purpose of the shaman in undertaking these journeys is to become one with the source of power, “to relay requests to his or her guardian spirits” (Grim 1983, 206), to retrieve a lost soul, to guide the soul of the dead to its resting place, (Eliade 1960, 206) and above all to heal.

Both Lela and Ultima use natural elements as instruments of healing. Lela discovers fine, crystalline sand at the bottom of the crevice where she falls during her symbolic “death.” She uses this sand in healing. Various cultures have believed that sand of crystalline quartz has supernatural powers: to produce clairvoyance, to fly, and to bestow upon its possessor the divine qualities of its sacred origin.³ Lela calls it the sand of the little gods and sees it assume their shapes. She uses it to cure skin diseases, sores, and open wounds.

The shaman's role within the community is governed by his mediating function between others and the gods, and by his healing powers. An actual shaman is often given respect and support by his or her group, who see him as a focus of sacrifice and a ritual contact figure with their gods. In these fictional representations, however, the healers Ultima and Lela experience tension between themselves and their communities because of the groups' dogmatic Christianity. The stories criticize indirectly the group's limited knowledge of Christianity, for the communities do not tolerate the competition with natural forces as a form of deity. Hence, unlike the actual shaman whose tribe worships the same gods, the stories represent the conflict arising from culture contact. This fact heightens the sacrifice made by the shaman. Lela's adopted people enjoy her healing powers, but do not tolerate her refusal to join their faith. Ultima, on the other hand, worked within the Christian faith as a member of the community. Yet the people, and particularly the young narrator, Tonio, experience the church as too dogmatic, conceptual, and abstract; the message of mercy is forgotten. In Tonio's mind, Ultima, with her powers of nature and her simple belief in goodness, is a stronger influence. She is understanding and kind, and intercedes in his behalf. Her blessing shows her synthesis of a shaman's natural powers and Christian beliefs:

Even my father knelt for the blessing. Huddled in the kitchen we bowed our heads. There was no sound.

“En el nombre del Padre, del Hijo, y del Espiritu Santo—”

I felt Ultima's hand on my head and at the same time I felt a great force, like a whirlwind, swirl about me. I looked up in fright, thinking the wind would knock me off my knees. Ultima's bright eyes held me still.

(Anaya 1983, 51)

Both Lela and Ultima are referred to as curanderas. In their book entitled Curanderismo, the anthropologists Robert T. Trotter and Juan Antonio Chavira (1981, 90-93) outline the types of problems cured by curanderos as fright, loss of soul, and various physical ailments. They show that in South Texas, curanderos are a specific form of shaman who practice mediumship, or the mediation between earth and spirit worlds. In the following passage, they make a distinction between the curandero and the brujo that Anaya also makes in Bless Me, Ultima:

Curanderos are viewed from many different social perspectives within their communities. Some people seek them out as their sole or major health resource, while others view them as quacks, fakes, or even the Devil's emissaries on earth. All of these people view the curandero as a person set apart from the rest of humanity, either by his gifts or his actions. The curandero is considered different from ordinary people, and this difference produces respect, distrust, and even fear. Sometimes it produces the accusation that the curandero is a brujo, a witch, doing antisocial magic, so not everyone feels drawn to this profession.

(Trotter and Chavera 1981, 110)

A useful contrast to the shaman image is provided by the sorcerer. The sorcerer seeks a power equal to the gods, not in order to benefit others, but for his own gain. Although he traffics with supernatural spirits, his dedication to his own selfish earthly aims places him frequently into close cooperative contact with “demons.” Such a sorcerer is the ancient medieval Faust from the oldest surviving manuscript of 1580. As we shall see, Faust possesses all of the anthropological shaman's powers, but pursues them in the context of defiant disobedience to orthodox, medieval Christianity. It is helpful to remind ourselves that only a small fraction of the medieval population—scarcely five percent—were literate; hence, the tales of the period concerned themselves with their aristocratic readers primarily. They were written against an assumed moral backdrop, “namely the concerns of the Christian living in an age in which the church was the arbiter of social practice and moral behavior. As a result, whether or not the Church as institution appears in medieval works, the moral theology of the Christian religion, which defines correct action, is present (Gentry 1983, xiv).

The anthropologist Michael Harner's (1973, xiv) definition of a shaman includes the following features:

• (1) makes contact with the spirit world through a trance state,
• (2) commands one or more spirits,
• (3) bewitches or heals people with the help of spirits,
• (4) influences the course of events,
• (5) identifies (unmasks) criminals,
• (6) communicates with spirits of the dead,
• (7) foretells the future.

These seven powers are possessed by the Faust in the medieval German tradition. Faust makes contact with the spirit world, however, through magic by describing certain circles with his staff, and by his pact with the devil. In his first contact, the difference between the shaman and the magician may be seen: the shaman seeks to make himself a vessel or mediator, whereas Faust

so admired having the devil subserviently to him that he took courage and did conjure the star once, twice, and a third time, whereupon a gush of fire from the sphere shot up as high as a man, settled again, and six little lights became visible upon it. Now one little light would leap upward, now a second downward, until the form of a burning man finally emerged.

(Gentry 1983, 151)

Faust's initiation differs in content as well as in tone from the typical shaman, for instead of acquiring a power over death through the suffering experience of his own death, Faust bargains with the spirit. He agrees to give his soul in afterlife to the devil in return for the powers. Other shamans do not pay this price, for instead they surrender their personal body and identity at the outset of their careers. In addition, this version of the Faust legend underlines the theme of the devil's duplicity, or the treachery of evil, by bringing Faust repeatedly to the door of repentance only to have Mephisto slam it shut with the lie that God would never, at this point in his transgressions, forgive him. That Faust believes him shows total loss of faith. Thus, he contrasts sharply with Ultima, whose belief was strong and who taught Tonio that the smallest particle of good can triumph over the largest evil:

“Are you afraid?” she asked … She put her bowl aside and stared into my eyes.

“No,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I will tell you why,” she smiled, “it is because good is always stronger than evil. Always remember that, Antonio. The smallest bit of good can stand against all the powers of evil in the world and it will emerge triumphant. There is no need to fear men like Tenorio.”

(Anaya 1983, 91)

The character strength of Ultima is emphasized frequently in Anaya's moral vision. Ultima's commitment to healing is based upon a sympathy for people: Tonio's father points out, “Ultima has sympathy for people, and it is so complete that with it she can touch their souls and cure them” (237).

Faust possesses the remaining features of the shaman also, but the chosen details seem to deflate rather than to enlarge the effect of the shaman's powers. The most impressive passages in the Faust manuscript have to do with the descent into hell and the ascent into heaven. These passages are illustrative of the basic shamanic motifs. In Faust's case, however, the descent and ascent illuminate his primary goal, the acquisition of immortal knowledge, whereas other shamans seek metaphysical knowledge to “pierce duality by embracing opposites” (Halifax 1979, 28). Faust is an intellectual, bored by the limits of human inquiry. We see the seeds of the issues that the later Faust versions will emphasize in Faust's request to see hell “so that he might see and mark the nature, fundament, quality and substance of hell” (Gentry 1983, 169). The concrete additions and details of the following passage give a Dantesque medieval sense of the infernal regions:

Well, just at that moment when he hurled himself head over heels and went tumbling down, such a frightful loud tumult and banging assailed his ears, and the mountain peak shook so furiously that he thought many big cannons must have been set off, but he had only come to the bottom of hell. Here were many worthy personages in a fire: emperors, Kings, princes, and lords, many thousand knights, and men-at-arms. A cool stream ran along at the edge of the fire, and here some were drinking, refreshing themselves, and bathing, but some were fleeing from its cold, back into the fire.

(171)

By the same token, Faust's search for knowledge separates him also from the evil sorcerer who seeks power to make himself equal to the gods, and power to satisfy his desire for money. A literary example of such a sorcerer is the character Kalimake, in Robert Louis Stevenson's short story “The Isle of Voices.” In this voodoo adventure story, the powers of Kalimake are great—he can prophesy the future, transform himself into a giant that can walk across oceans, make his enemies vanish without a trace—most of all, he can change seashells into silver dollars. Unlike Faust, Kalimake never uses his powers to rescue or heal others. Also unlike Faust, he maintains a cloak of secrecy so that he tries to kill his son-in-law for learning too much about his black arts. Kalimake is present as the servant of no one but himself, whereas Faust's relationship to Mephistopheles indicates clearly the deity-mortal distinction. Kalimake operates in the realm not of spiritualism but of magic, which is “concerned above all else with the acquisition and exercise of power. … Omnipotence unqualified, supreme power over all things, is the ultimate goal of magic” (Cavendish 1970, 1983).

We have seen thus far that anthropology describes the context of shamanism, illuminating its occurrence in the fictional world. It has enumerated the shaman's powers, crystallized the conflicts in the stories, and enriched the owl and sand motifs by providing their background. At the same time, the stories provide a sharper focus upon certain aspects of the shaman's experience. Archetypal myth also contributes understanding through myth scholarship, which has identified three shaman images: Asclepius, Orpheus, and Hermes. The different emphases to the myth images yield new insight. As the myth scholar, Joseph Campbell, states:

In every society in which they have been known, the shamans have been the particular guardians and reciters of the chants and traditions of their people. … The realm of myth, from which, according to primitive belief, the whole spectacle of the world proceeds, and the realm of shamanistic trance are one and the same.

(1969, 250)

The myth image of the healer, Asclepius, manifests a special kind of affinity with nature, the knowledge of herbs, and incarnation in “telling” dreams. Apollo gave his son, Asclepius, to be raised and taught by the centaur, Chiron, the horse-man who synthesized natural and rational powers. Asclepius, like Ultima, brings the human faculties of reason, memory, intuition, and dreams to effect cures through his capacity to gently extract nature's secrets: her physical remedies through herbs, her situational correctives through the visions of sleep. Just as Asclepius received his training from a unique teacher, so too does Ultima have an apprenticeship with a luminary curandero so powerful that his name makes Tenorio tremble. Ultima's reverence for nature, the special affirmation of the life force in each plant, makes her pray for its blessing before she picks it. After she places the herbs on Tonio's body, his wounds heal quickly, leaving only thin pink lines. (Anaya 1983, 113) The healings in the temples of Asclepius were sought in sleep: the patient would hope to dream that the god touched him and healed his affliction, or that Asclepius would speak through the dream to provide the correct therapy (Kerenyi 1959, 12, 26) Tonio, the narrator of Bless Me, Ultima, experiences Ultima's presence in his dreams as he seeks to unravel his destiny. In the following dream passage, indicating Tonio's subconscious understanding of his affinity with nature, Tonio hears Ultima reveal the meaning of cosmic unity behind the diverse manifestations of earthly water:

Stand, Antonio, she commanded, and I stood. You both know, she spoke to my father and my mother, that the sweet water of the moon which falls as rain is the same water that gathers into rivers and flows to fill the seas. Without the waters of the moon to replenish the oceans there would be no oceans. And the same salt waters of the oceans are drawn by the sun to the heavens, and in turn become again the waters of the moon. Without the sun there would be no waters formed to slake the dark earth's thirst.

(Anaya 1983, 113)

This passage shows Tonio's perception of Ultima's natural wisdom as the source of synthesis for his conflicting backgrounds.

Together with the Christ figure, whose miracles of healing acquired him the reputation that alarmed the authorities, Asclepius presents an archetypal pattern of healing that prevails among physicians in the literary traditions of the West. The literary shaman shares the major parts of the archetypal image cast by both Christ and Asclepius: these parts are compassion as a motive, challenge to authority as a model, and the sacrifice of one's human life as a price. These three elements are clearly visible in the anthropological shaman, as we have seen. Likewise, both Ultima and Lela offer a challenge to authority by practicing their healings without official sanction. This challenge leads finally to their deaths, the sacrifice of their own human lives; for those who kill them know that the authorities will look the other way. Whereas the Greeks perceived the source of sickness to be the ill will of the gods, the shaman—and Ultima—traces disease to the gods as well as to men. Because of her special affinity with nature, Ultima interprets evil as a disobedience to the laws of nature or an incongruence with its harmony. Thus, she deflects the evil death-wish back to the brujas, the daughters of Tenorio, who wanted to kill Tonio's Uncle Lucas because in the forest he stumbled upon their black mass. They use locks of his hair to poison him. Ultima's rescue of his soul, at the point of death, is the classic shamanistic rescue (Campbell 1969, 261) She uses herbal remedies, incantations, and clay dolls to heal him:

“Let the devil come out!” Ultima cried in his ear.

“!Dios mio!” were his first words, and with those words the evil was wrenched from his interior. Green bile poured from his mouth, and finally he vomited a huge ball of hair. It fell to the floor, hot and steaming and wiggling like snakes.

It was his hair with which they had worked the evil!

“Ay!” Ultima cried triumphantly and with clean linen she swept up the evil, living ball of hair. “This will be burned, by the tree where the witches dance—” she sang and swiftly put the evil load into the sack. She tied the sack securely and then came back to my uncle. He was holding the side of the bed, his thin fingers clutching the wood tightly as if he were afraid to slip back into the evil spell. He was very weak and sweating, but he was well. I could see in his eyes that he knew he was a man again, a man returned from a living hell.

(Anaya 1983, 95)

In this case, the raising of the living dead and the subsequent death of the bruja, Ultima resembles Asclepius once again. Both are killed for a perceived violation of the natural order when in fact they were working in harmony with it.

The mythic image of the artist-shaman Orpheus adds richness to the portrait of Lela. The pattern of the Orpheus image includes four parts: the healing art, the descent, the mission, and the sacrificial killing. The pattern first allows us to appreciate the quality of healing through art which links artists with priests and prophets. As the music of Orpheus enchanted all who heard it, and momentarily united his audience in a transport of delight, so the clay gods of Lela unite families in an affirmation of life's beauty:

These were painted in gay colors and the expression on the tiny faces measured the seasons of the heart. The little rural gods of river, sky, fire, seed, birds, all were chosen members of each family. Because they sanctified all human acts, they were the actions of the living, like an aura. They were a shrine to creation.

(Trambley 1986, 723)

In the work of both artists, Orpheus and Lela, we see the unique quality of art: to heighten life as experience and to make its meaning more clear.

As art forms, both songs and clay figures share a method of healing and a living quality. Both open the door to another, coexisting world of spirits revealed through art (Campbell 1969, 265). Both present images to be retained by the brain as aesthetic models of healing radiance. For the shaman,

the song word is powerful, it names a thing, it stands at the sacred center, drawing all toward it. The word exists and does not exist. It both awakens an image and is an awakened image. The word disappears, the poetry is gone, but the imaginal form persists within the mind and works on the soul. Poesis, then, an action and an interaction in its primary sense, is the process of creation.

(Halifax 1979, 33)

The figures of the songs, and of the clay gods, imitate the shaman's spiritual visions (Campbell 1969, 265). The shaman sings, without composing, when his illumination is achieved. He later sings to heal others, in a reenactment of the original event that he experienced (Halifax 1979, 31). The function of repetition adumbrates the power of both song and statue: each time either is consulted in a healing situation, its archetypal value is affirmed. Lela molds the clay figurines and also looks for them in the townspeople, seeking the identity between the particular individuals and their models in the universals. “In her mind, she had molded their smiles, their tears, their embraces, their just being. Her larger self told her that the miracle of the living act was supreme, the giving, the receiving, the stumbling, and the getting up” (Trambley 1986, 427). Both songs and statues are “personified comrades, … living as men are living and as the world of spirit is also living” (Halifax 1979, 31). Second, the Orpheus model is reflected in Lela's descent as she spends the cold desert night on the mountaintop after leaving her childhood village behind her and then falls or descends into the crevice. Eliade (1974, 391) comments that Orpheus is the archetype of the artist shaman: his descent into the underworld is most significant, though he also possesses healing art, love for animals, charms, and the power of divination. Orpheus's death at the hands of the crazed Maenads is also like Lela's sacrificial death at the hands of the fanatic pueblo women.

The Faust figure as shaman reflects the image of Hermes, whose mythic pattern adds tonal clarity to his unique combination of attributes. Joseph Campbell (1969, 274) identifies Hermes as a shaman figure, citing particularly his psychopomp function of guiding souls to the underworld in his book Primitive Mythology. The tone of whimsicality, which predominates in the Faust story, notwithstanding, the obvious attempt to warn Christians against sin, captures the Hermes spirit, which is

the chaos principle, the principle of disorder, the force careless of taboos and shattering bounds. But from the point of view of the deepest realms of being from which the energies of life ultimately spring, this principle is not to be despised.

(274)

We recall that although Hermes is a god, he has a somewhat questionable status among his Olympian kin, who often seem exasperated with him. We remember his theft of Apollo's cattle, yet learn with interest that Hermes also drove off a pestilence, carrying a ram on his shoulders around the city's walls (Kereneyi 1976, 83). We also see in Hermes the same mixture of opportunism and benevolence that the earliest Faust figure of the medieval manuscript manifests. For fun, Faust will conjure a flowering garden in the middle of winter to please his guests, he will become invisible at the Vatican and steal the Pope's silver after blowing in his face, and he will share the knowledge he acquired during his ascent into the heavens with other scholars; yet he will also transform himself into the spirit of Mahomet and lie with all of the wives of a Turkish harem owner. Faust as the Hermes-shaman never has any purpose beyond living fully in the moment. Faust, the fun-loving trickster, who had caused antlers to cleave to a knight's head and who had deposited a butler in a tree, was himself tricked by Mephisto: we recall that each time he wanted to repent, he believed the false news that God would not forgive. Yet his story, in this early version that shows him to be in possession of shamanic powers despite the dissociation of these powers from their proper belief structure, is perhaps the most entertaining of all the Faust legends.

Notes

1. According to Kennedy (1978, 15), “in the early seventeenth Century, the Tarahumara were at first very accepting of Spaniards in general, and particularly of the Jesuits.” When disillusionment and epidemics began to spread in 1648, “leaders arose who blamed the widespread death from epidemics on the Spanish God, and they, in turn, were branded ‘witches’ by the Fathers” (16). In 1650, the Tarahumaras revolted, but were crushed in 1652. “After 1673, Jesuit Fathers Tarda and Guadalajara led a movement to establish a line of eight new churches linking the Baja Tarahumara with the missions in Sonora among the Opatas and Chinipas, and the cycle of acceptance—exploitation—disaffection was again in motion” (17). In 1696, Spanish Captain Retana beheaded thirty Indians gathered on a cliff near a cache of maize and poisoned arrows, sparking a general rebellion (18). The Tarahumara attacked a church at Echogita, whereupon “Retana then beheaded thirty-three more men, placing their heads on poles near Sisoquichi. The suppression of the uprising of 1698 permanently ended effective Tarahumara resistance to Spanish rule. Their mode of resistance from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the present has been largely one of avoidance of contact and withdrawal further and further into canyons” (19).

2. The famous Lumholtz (1973) study of the Tarahumaras, done in the last century, and the recent Kennedy (1978) study of the tribe do not reveal in specific detail correlations between the fictional gods—of personified natural forces—worshipped by Lela in “The Burning” and the historical traditions of the people. However, an actual Tarahumara dream seems to evoke vague suggestions of Lela's little gods: “Rodrigo of Vararari recounted the following, which is a very commonly reported type of dream: ‘Last night I dreamed about the “ancient ones,” the first Tarahumaras who were here. They looked like us and were drinking Tesquino like us.’” (Kennedy, 130).

3. The Lumholtz (1973, 300) study points out certain features of the Tarahumaras' nineteenth-century beliefs that bear tangentially upon “The Burning.” The Indians believed that Tata Dios (Our Father) drew the deer first and then they came to life. They believed that rocks also grew because they have life inside them 287). Apparently the contemporary belief that ancestors were fashioned out of clay (Kennedy 1978, 130) was widely prevalent during Lumholtz's time (297).

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