The Metafiction of Shamanism The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities by Daniel C.

Noel Review by: Thomas Willard The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Summer 1999), pp. 35-39 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jung.1.1999.18.1.35 . Accessed: 29/11/2013 20:24
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The Metafiction of Shamanism

Daniel C. Noel. The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities. New York, Continuum, 1997. Reviewed by Thomas Willard The death of Carlos Castaneda, announced in June, 1998, set off a new round of commentary on this controversial anthropologist. The announcement came only days before the University of California Press was scheduled to release the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Castanedas first book, Conversations with Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. (Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1968) Castaneda earned a masters degree from U.C.L.A. for the 1968 book, which explored the folkways of peyote use by Yaqui initiates. He signed with Simon & Schuster soon after, and his doctoral dissertation, A Journey to Ixtlan (New York, 1972) came at the peak of his cult success. Young people enthusiastically consumed the books, as Castaneda consumed various mind-altering substances, in search of what the Yaqui mentor Don Juan called a separate reality. This became the title of Castanedas first strictly commercial book. (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1971) Over the next quarter-century, Castaneda produced a steady stream of books. The teachings of the Yaqui elder turned into tales in Tales of Power (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1974), and the sorcerer turned into a shaman in The Art of Dreaming. (New York, Harper Collins, 1993) Assuming the mantle of Don Juan, Castaneda created his own shamanic school (Transegrity) and his own nonprofit foundation, Eidolana, which has published his posthumous book, The Wheel of Time: Thoughts about Life, Death and

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the Universe. (Los Angeles, Eidolana, 1998) Despite this success (or perhaps because of it) Castanedas eulogists have been at something of a loss for words to describe the man and his work. Was he just the most famous instance of academic opportunism in the psychedelic sixties, as the subtitle of one critics book maintains (Jay Courtney. Carlos Castaneda. Victoria, Millennia, 1993), or did he manage to bring life and conviction into academic prose, adding the New Journalisms participatory style of narrative and dialogue? There is need, then, for a new perspective on the Castaneda controversies, as Cecil B. De Milles son, Richard, has called them in a skeptical study. (The Don Juan Papers, Further Castaneda Controversies. Belmont, CA, Wadsworth, 1990) Castaneda showed the way for a flock of popular writers, like Lynn Andrews, and for semi-literary characters, like her medicine women from various cultures. Surely, their popularity says something about the premillennial soulsomething that Daniel Noel has addressed in this book that appeared in the year before Castanedas death. In The Soul of Shamanism, Noel returns to familiar territory. He studied comparative religion at the University of Chicago, where Mircea Eliade was a world-famous authority on shamanism. Noel went on to teach courses in religion himself and began reading Castaneda at his students urging. He signed a contract to write what would have become the first book-length study of Castaneda, but had to abandon the project when Simon & Schuster, Castanedas publisher, refused to grant the usual permission to reprint passages for his analysis. Noel then collected a series of reactions to Castaneda, which he edited as Seeing Castaneda. (New York, Putnam, 1976) In the process, Noel became ever more interested in Jung and, in an interesting synchronicity, visited Jungs house in Ksnacht while Jungs daughterinlaw Lily was reading a book by Castaneda. Back in the U.S., Noel closely followed developments in the Mens Movement, where he saw a parallel between Blys Wild Man and the shaman. En route to a particular workshop, he picked up a book by Lynn Andrews and realized that he was reading the same hybrid of fact and fiction that he had first encountered in Castaneda.

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Noel then coined a neologism for Castaneda and the other story tellers who have followed him in this vein of prose: shamanovelists. Drawing from speculative essays by others occupied with the theory of metafiction and the postmodern novel, Noel suggests that shamanovelists blur literary genres very much as New Journalists and nonfiction novelists have done. He suggests that the new shamanism is not a transplant from exotic cultures but has roots in Western modes of storytelling. He also offers a neologism for Eliade and the field researchers who seem more than a little affected by the paranormal phenomena they describe: shaman-thropologists. (Noel insists he intends here no pun on sham.) In the books second half, he suggests that post-Jungian psychology could use its power to put soul back into society and explicitly links Jungian analysis to the shamanic work of healing the body by restoring the lost soul. The descent into the underworld, the animal dreams, and the altered states of consciousness that characterize a Jungian psychotherapy, all have shamanic parallels. The books two halvesfour chapters eachare held together by the authors personal voicing of what Jung called le cri de Merlin. This shamanic voice sounds the theme of Noels book, which is structured, musically, in sonata form. Noels search for the Western shaman begins in England, where he visits sites associated with King Arthur and Arthurs druidic mentor, Merlin; it ends with the post-Jungian emphasis on discovering the Wild Man within. Noel connects his two scholarly sections, on shamanism and the soul, as a composer would connect the two digressions or departures in a sonata by returning to the main theme. As he walks through Jungs garden at Ksnacht, and looks at the stones Jung carved, he seems actually to hear the cri de coeur that put them there, rather as Amphion raised the walls of Thebesto music. As in the performance of a piano sonata, to bring off such effects the timing is everything: the whole book has the satisfying rhythm of a master recital. Perhaps because the book has such a personal emphasis, it is by no means exhaustive, and there are obvious gaps in the scholarship. Readers of this journal may be surprised to find no reference to Joseph Henderson, who was even described as the shaman from Elko at the time of his

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seventy-fifth birthday. Henderson was one of the first widelyread Jungian authors to discuss the shaman as a primitive master of initiation in his contribution to the widely read Man and His Symbols (Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1964, p. 151), a theme he elaborated in his classic Thresholds of Initiation. (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1967) Similarly, Jungian readers will find no mention of Donald L. Williamss pioneering attempt to connect Castaneda and Jung in Border Crossings. (Toronto, Inner City Books, 1981) Social scientists will find no reference to David Silverman, the British sociologist who wrote the first book about Castaneda. ( Reading Castaneda. London, Routledge, 1975) (Silverman circumvented Noels problem of permissions by quoting only from the academic press version of Conversations with Don Juan, and just as neatly circumvented the question whether the events in that book ever took place by asserting that any text is a social construction and by arguing that the Conversations challenge readers, as Don Juan challenges Castaneda, to make sense of socially organized practices. (p. xi)) There will be no shortage of books on these now mainstream subjects, however: Noels book has been followed by a collection of essays on shamanism and analytical psychology (Donald F. Sandner and Steven F. Wong, Eds. The Sacred Heritage. London, Routledge, 1997) as well as a book on Jung and shamanism (C. Michael Smith. Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue. New York, Paulist Press, 1997). Noels study has the virtues of the one-teacher workshop with breaks at all the right places rather than the academic congress. His solution to the puzzle is no less useful for missing a piece here or there. As a literary critic, I have to wonder whether his snappy term shamanovel refers only to works that are doomed to be second-rate literary novelsgenre fiction, at best. Or should we call H. Rider Haggards strange and enchanting twin romances She (1887) and Ayesha (1905) shamanovels? (In the latter, Haggards characters encounter teachings we would recognize today as shamanistic and respond by telling stories about The Monastery called the World.) Could we possibly apply the word shamanovel to that non-fiction novel, Jungs Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as edited by Aniela Jaffe? That book, after all, includes

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elders from traditional societies as well as those at Jungs own seminal monastery in Zurich, the Burghlzli.) Perhaps there was a more helpful differentiation in the opening sentence of the introduction to Conversations with Don Juan, where U.C.L.A. anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt writes, This book is both ethnography and allegory. By ethnography, Goldschmidt was of course intending scientific description of the races of men (Concise Oxford Dictionary), and by allegory, he presumably meant narrative description of a subject under [the] guise of another suggestively similar [one] (Ibid.), implying in this case a presentation of New Age ideas under the guise of anthropology. The word ethnography, which replaced anthropography in the nineteenth century, is of course much more recent than allegory, which St. Paul used in his epistle to the Galatians, but the last generation has seen significant rethinking of both words. Postmodernism has taught us to regard ethnography as means of writing culture (James Clifford, ed. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986) and allegory as a way of reading anything (Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989). We should now realize that there has been a good deal of ethnography and allegory produced by Jungian writers, much of it fresh and interesting. The better we understand the approach they have taken, the more we can appreciate the achievement of Castaneda and of those he has inspired. Toward this end, Dan Noels personal survey of neo-shamanism as a postmodern genre is a most welcome contribution.

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