Madness, Shapechanging, and Art (Continued)

by Niko Silvester

with art by Brian Froud

Shaman by Personal Quest

Neither Tomás nor Fox show the usual signs of solitariness, absentmindedness or violence. In fact, they are both quiet and well–grounded people throughout the novel. When we first meet Tomás, he is already apparent as a shaman:

When Tomás takes Maggie to Red Springs to see the white stag, he treats the fact of the stag leaving behind turquoise where its hoofs strike the ground as an everyday occurrence; this is a man used to interacting with the supernatural (124).

Tomás is so much the shaman that he is able to call Crow, the infamous trickster spirit who also appears as a coyote, and gain a copper bracelet by guessing the spirit's name:

Quiet, unassuming Tomás is better equipped than any other character in the novel to deal with the land spirits, though he remains in the background most of the time. He is also the one who taught both Fox and Davis Cooper to listen to the land (219, 279).

Fox, or Johnny Foxxe, is in the process of training himself, partly under Tomás's guidance, but he is not really a shaman yet. When we first encounter Fox, he is returning to his beloved mountains after a time away, and is camping outdoors to properly greet the place he loves. He prepares to attempt to hear the land speak as the scene ends:

But Fox cannot yet hear the spirits or the land. In a later scene, he builds a sweatlodge and tries to hear spirits while he is waiting for the stones to heat:

Even this late in the novel, it almost seems that Fox will never achieve his goal to hear the land. But when Maggie comes across the sweatlodge and Fox emerges, Maggie "could see pale figures crowding the doorway behind him." Fox has had his encounter at last, and we know that it is not just Maggie who sees the beings because Fox asks her "Did you see?" (226).

Shapechanging

One of the magical abilities possessed by shamans in many cultures is that of shapechanging. Jones mentions that both Eliade and Carlo Ginzburg saw "a connection between the practice of shamanism and the adoption of an animal guise on the part of the practitioner"(86). Cooper recognizes that Anna is changing shape. "Our Anna has become a different creature out here," he wrote in a letter. And later in the same letter he said, "She is a wonder to me, brown as the stones, fierce as a she–wolf, graceful as the deer. She is something other than woman in this place, she is earth and fire and sky as well" (50).

Other of our shamans and potential shamans are also connected to shapeshifting. Cooper "was a different man" after Anna left and he began to see the spirits (100). Juan becomes animal–like in his initiatory madness; he is described as howling with a "strange, feral, ferocious sound, neither quite human nor animal" (10). He sees in his reflection that he is not the same man, that "He had changed. Was changing. Shedding one snake skin and finding another skin beneath" (63). And he is associated early on with the spiral symbols that characterize the non–otherworldly shapechangers (11, 49). Though Fox is not directly associated with shapechanging, he does have two sisters who are coyote shapechangers, and they both have the spiral tattoos that mark their shifting ability (103). Tomás is only very tentatively connected to shapechanging, when Maggie thinks at first that Crow is Tomás. Otherwise, he is never directly or in any other way associated with shapechanging, and when Maggie asks him if he is a shapeshifter, he says, "I'm just a man. And I'm partial to this old shape I wear" (257). The tiny connection to Crow fits Tomás's later role as "Spiritmage," but it is his very contentment with his own shape that gives him stability and power as a shaman.

Maggie is closely associated with shapechanging through her connection with Crow, the trickster, who is the first spirit she meets and who ultimately teaches her to walk the spiral path (discussed below). Crow's "body was marked with spiral tattoos" (222), and the fact that he has many tattoos presumably indicates his greater shapechanging abilities compared to lesser shifters like Pepe, Fox's sisters, and Thumper, who each have only a single tattoo and a single other shape. Maggie also describes herself as a shapeshifter of sorts:

Maggie is a shapechanger both by association and by nature.

Not only is there a connection between shapechanging and shamanism, but in some Celtic stories there is a strong connection between madness, shapechanging and poetry. Suibhne, or Sweeney, is one example. He was a warrior–king who insulted a cleric. The cleric cursed Suibhne with madness so that he "levitated in a frantic cumbersome motion / like a bird of the air" (Heaney unnumbered pages). Suibhne leaps into the air — he is sometimes described as being feathered, but seems to be neither wholly bird, nor entirely human during his madness. He lives in the wilderness, eating only watercress and drinking only water. In addition to becoming wild and birdlike, Suibhne also becomes a poet and frequently speaks in poetry.

One shamanic method for changing shape is "undressing" down to the skeleton and "putting on" an animal form. This may be related to the dismemberment of the shaman initiate. Jones describes the dismemberment visions of the initiate shaman during his initiatory illness:

Jones compares the shamanic/shapechanging story of Lleu in Welsh mythology to this initiatory dismemberment. Lleu transformed into an eagle when he was wounded by his wife's lover. He was discovered by his uncle Gwydion high in a tree with his flesh rotting and dropping off from the wound. When restored to human form, Lleu is a gaunt figure, but one more powerful than before his ordeal (72).

Anna's thinness can also be compared to the ritual dismemberment vision. Cooper described her as "strong and brown, and so terribly thin" (33) and Anna said of herself, "I am thin and strong" (175). According to Eliade, "The ability to see oneself as a skeleton implies, evidently, the symbolism of death and resurrection" and the theme of being reduced to a skeleton "constitutes . . .a symbolico–ritual complex centered in the notion of life as perpetual renewal" (Myths 83). Bone is, is Eliade's opinion, "the ultimate root of animal Life, the matrix from which the flesh is continually renewed" and "[b]y contemplating himself as a skeleton, the shaman does away with time and stands in the presence of the eternal source of Life" (84). Thus in recognizing her own thinness, Anna steps out of time like a shaman. She even recognizes a connection between her thinness and her strength, perhaps an awareness of her shamanic nature?

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