The Love of the Gods

The ecstatic encounters which shamanism, whether combined with spirit possession or not, always involves are described all over the world and in every period of history in remarkably similar terms.

The gods and their devotees may address each other in different countries in different languages, but they all employ the same terms of endearment. The language of spiritual intimacy is truly international, and ‘possession’ here has strong sexual undertones. In this tradition, St Teresa of Avila speaks of the ‘Wound of Love’, of ‘Rapture’, and of‘Union’, and Marie of the Incarnation records her experiences with her ‘Beloved’, ‘Dearest Spouse’. Less well-known shamanistic devotees in other cultural settings regularly use the same vocabulary, being ‘married’ to their celestial ‘spouses’, even in Haiti to the extent of holding marriage certificates! Amongst the Saora Indian tribesmen of Orissa a shaman is often chosen by the direct intervention of a Hindu spirit who proposes marriage. Here, as elsewhere, such spiritual unions compete with their mortal counterparts, frequently leading to most complex matrimonial arrangements. In the case of the arctic Chukchee, for instance, those shamans who happen to be homosexuals (as some are) may be wedded simultaneously to mortal and immortal husbands. More generally, as in the ancient world, these cosmic love-matches may be blessed with children—as in the case of the Virgin Mary. (The famous nineteenth-century English ecstatic, Joanna Southcott, who died of what has been described as a ‘hysterical pregnancy’, was less successful.) It is thus not surprising that those ecstatics who love the gods should also regularly describe themselves as their ‘children’. This filial idiom compounds the marital metaphor in Christianity where Christ’s mother’s union with God makes him God’s Son. The Tukano Indians of Colombia are even more explicitly oedipal.

With the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, Tukano shamans achieve beatific visions which they directly compare to incestuous intercourse. The supreme aim of their visionary quest is actually to be ‘suffocated’, as they describe it, in a mystic uterine union. The theme of a return to the womb (and of birth and re-birth) is, of course, frequently encountered in psychoanalytic treatment and in experiences with psychedelic drugs in medical and non-medical settings.

Closely connected with this uxorial and filial imagery is the more earthy language of the stables which plays an equally prominent role in the vocabulary of shamans and mystics. In this idiom, the gods regularly ‘ride’ their human ‘mounts’ as Apollo straddled the oracle at Delphi, and cult members are consequently widely described as the ‘horses’, or, as with women in the Hausafeon-cult, ‘mares’ of their familial spirits. The Manchu and Tungus, who also follow this imagery, go so far as placing real (as well as human) horses at the disposal of the spirits. These spirit-mounts are brought into the house and, with silk ribbons attached to their manes, made to stand in front of the ancestor spirit shrines. They may not be ridden by women or clansmen wearing mourning dress.

These equestrian and sexual descriptions of shamanistic relations with the gods raise interesting problems. Can the most sublime religious experience be reduced to erotic fantasy and dreaming? Is it all simply a matter of subEmation: or is it rather that the human sexual act offers the most readily available template for transcendent experience and hence the natural language with which to strive to capture the ineffable?

The Love of the Gods

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