Is There a Shaman in Sylvia? Sylvia's Redemptive Imagination

159 Is there a shaman in Sylvia? Sylvia’s redemptive Imagination Ananya Ghoshal “Cold glass how you insert yourself Between myself and myself I scratch like a cat The blood that runs is a dark fruit- An effect, a cosmetic. You smile No, it is not fatal.” (Sylvia Plath, “The Other”) 1 Sylvia Plath, diagnosed with an acute manic depressive behavior and bipolar disorder, is often reduced to and recognized as a morbid and suicidal poet rather than a mystic. It is impossible to deny that the feminist and suicidal trajectories of Plath's mental picture take us deeply into her poetry but also often prove too reductive a preoccupation with Plath as a 1 Personal typed pages of poet & author Sylvia Plath's work coupled with imagery of the artist Rebecca Star Butler. See- http://www.flickr.com/photos/rococo/224585635/ Plath Profiles 160 victim. There exists something hidden at the substructure of her writing which is inadequately described even by the poems themselves. She confronted death and "otherness," but what were the ultimate terms of the confrontation? To achieve a philosophical context of her vision, I have turned to Ted Hughes who once remarked that Sylvia possessed the qualities of a shaman, “In her poetry . she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and Holy men.” The Jungian notion of the shaman is of “a primitive medicine man who gains access to the underworld of the psyche and the realm of his tribe's mythos through an initiation which usually involves a ritual dismemberment and rebirth.” The shaman does not undergo an actual dismemberment but it is rather a psychotic episode. 2 This paper attempts an analysis of Plath’s poetry from this perception of a transformative ritual – like a shaman's dismemberment and resurrection through the ritual death of the psyche and its eventual recovery. 3 The word shaman, according to the Hungarian anthropologist Mihály Hoppál is the Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and spirit guide found in Turkic-Mongol areas of Northern Asia such as Siberia and Mongolia, and translates as ‘he or she who knows’ (from the Tungusic root “sa” – “to know” as in the French word savoir and the Spanish saber to designate a Wise One or One Who Sees .) The word has passed from Sanskrit ( śramana – ascetic) through Pali ( śamana), Chinese (sha men), Tungusic (s ămán), Turkik-Tungusic (shaman), Russian and German into English. The origins of shamanism may well go back 4,500 years or more and involves a path or paths to knowledge, gained through rituals, ceremonies, prayers, meditation, trials and tests. The shaman is a visionary, prophet, healer, 2 Robert S. Robbins’s essay on Sylvia Plath was the first inspiration for me to deal at length with the concept of the shaman –poet in Sylvia. See- http://www.geocities.com/rrobbins.geo/plath.htm 3 Judith Kroll's book Chapters In A Mythology: The Poetry Of Sylvia Plath discusses in detail the way Plath developed her own kind of mythology to explain her bouts of depression and euphoria. Kroll, argues that Sylvia viewed her nervous breakdown as a shaman's dismemberment and rebirth through ritual death of the psyche and recovery, "The dispersed 'stones' of the speaker's shattered self are gathered together and reconstructed, reenacting the myths of Dionysus (who is alluded to in 'Maenad'), Osiris, and other gods who undergo dismemberment and resurrection." Kroll points out how Sylvia Plath made frequent enquiries regarding the archetypal shamanic/author figure of Orpheus in her poems to uncover the psychic depth of the human unconscious and its constant making/remaking. 161 ceremonialist and a psychotherapist. “The Shaman ”, writes the religious historian Mercia Eliade, is “a medicine man, priest, and psycho pomp. He cures illness. He directs the communal sacrifices and he escorts the souls of the dead to the outer world” and is “above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself,” through a process of initiation, “the schema [of which] is suffering, death and resurrection.”4 A religious expert in the art of psychic healing, both for individual primitives and for society, a shaman undergoes ecstatic psychic ascents to heaven and descents to hell, with all manner of related physiological pain, to acquire an elixir or healing power for patients. Whether literal or metaphorical, shamans frequently achieve their status by way of extreme personal trauma and out-of-body experiences. Eliade emphasizes several times in Shamanism that what is really central to the shamanic experience is undergoing of concrete psychological processes of death, dismemberment and resurrection: a process similar to that of an initiation rite, except that the shaman experiences it repeatedly, whenever the psychic health of the individual or the society demands. (Scigaj, 90) Undergoing this initiation into the multi-layered world of spirits, a shaman learns the methods of trance and soul retrieval, and becomes, in Eliade's recurring phrase, a "technician of the sacred,” a “Master of Ecstacy”; of ex-stasis (from the Greek, meaning outside the normal stasis of consciousness). From a state of waking sleep he wakes up to true reality, the reality of the nagual 5 or the reality of imagination. In civilized societies the shaman is primarily the guardian of existing collective ritual and tradition; a repository of the knowledge its culture's history, both sacred and secular. Joan Halifax, in Shamanic Voices , writes: It is the shaman who weaves together the ordinary world that is lived in and the philosophical image of the cosmos that is thought of. Human existence, suffering, and death are rendered by shamans into a system of philosophical, psychological, spiritual, and sociological symbols that institutes a moral order by resolving ontological paradoxes and dissolving existential barriers, thus eliminating the most painful and unpleasant aspects of human life. The perfection of the timeless past, the paradise of a mythological era, is an 4 In A Match to the Heart" by Gretel Ehrlich writes-“Death is a dark thing, but it is also an illumination....Ritual death followed by resurrection stands for the death of ego. It is the hero's journey and the teacher's...as well as any shaman's or healer's.” 5 The word “nagual” belongs to the Nahuatl language spoken by the people of Tehotihuacan, the Toltecs, Aztecs and many other indigenous groups of the past and present in Mexico and even some regions of Central America. Nagual is half of the reality in which we live and half of our own nature. Plath Profiles 162 existential potential in the present. And the shaman, through sacred action, communicates this potential to all. Shamanic practices occur, with wide variation, in most regions of the world, most prominently among indigenous peoples, but with some important manifestations in late 20th century and contemporary western art. Naturally, there is often a hint of pseudoscience and mysticism in the air as soon as shamanism is mentioned, and some of the popular literature like the works of Carlos Castaneda embraces a broad usage of the term, drawing on anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, art history and aspects of popular culture. Today, in a broad sense shamanism can be described as a set of practices concerned with metaphysical or psychic processes. True poetry, for Ted Hughes, was always a shamanic activity, and the shamanic flight to the spirit world for the healing energies needed in our own world was, for him, "the fundamental poetic event." 6 In folktales and myths, he had found the basic experience of the poetic temperament to be of the heroic quest which had shown its superior examples in Eliot, Yeats and Graves, but he had to refashion them to serve his own purpose. And not until he had studied archeology and anthropology was Hughes able to identify its variations in shamanism all over the world. For him, the shaman is the man who has a vision, undergoes a magical death, is dismembered by a demon and is resurrected with new ideas and a new body created for him by the spirits. In his flight and return he displays healing powers and provides clairvoyant information bringing up to our ordinary mind the revelations of our deepest instinct and spiritual insights. Like the shaman, for Hughes, the poet undergoes with phenomenal intensity the flight and return that will produce the practical result of the regeneration of spirit. Hughes initially got his concept of shamanism from reading Mircea Eliade's book Shamanism , which he reviewed in 1964, as well as from the Tibetan Book of the Dead , Bardol Thodol, which is a record of such a psychic journey. Hughes writes in his review: “the shamanic flight is one of the main regeneration dramas of the human psyche: the fundamental poetic event,"7 and it is the regenerative power of the shaman/poet's flight which was of 6 Faas, The Unaccommodated Universe , pp. 206-7 7 In the 29th issue of The Listener (1964), Hughes reviews Mircea Eliade's Shamanism , now reprinted in Winter Pollen (Hughes 1994, 58). 163 utmost importance to him, being the means by which he has consistently sought to counter the divisions and the sterility which he sees in our world and to restore it to wholeness. “The results, when the shaman returns to the living, are some display of healing power, or a clairvoyant piece of information. The cathartic effect on the audience, and the refreshing of their religious feeling, must be profound” (Scigaj, 91). Hughes had repeatedly stated that many of his poems are deliberate shamanic flights of fancy into the spirit world, excursions to the “other side” where he might properly inhabit the nature of his subject, be it animal, vegetable or mineral and the role he plays as poet must be understood literally in terms of the activity of the shaman.

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