The Getting of Inside Information

The book Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History by Owen Davies is a good book to have. It truly fills a gap in understanding the history of cunning people, those who used folk magic for hundreds of years to help their clients in their communities. His research draws from a wide range of sources, and is particularly useful in illuminating who had access to magical texts and how they were used in folk magic.

BUT. There seems to be a big black hole in Davies’ understanding of HOW cunning people gained their information, and he presents them repeatedly as using illusory methods or charlatanism in their dealings with clients. From a shamanic perspective, Davies misses the mark on several vital aspects of this subject.

Of particular note is Chapter 7, which makes some major missteps regarding folk magic practice and shamanism.

“Moving further westwards, the link with shamanism becomes even more culturally tenuous, despite similar concepts and motifs being found. This is because the idea of soul travel or communication with the spirit world was not culturally specific, let alone definably shamanistic.”

As has been too often the case during the last twenty years of study of the folk/spirit experience, we have an overly narrow, squished definition of shamanism hobbling a larger, necessary point of inquiry. Davies aligns himself with the camp that believes that shamanism is confined to deep trance states (visually observable, resembling epilepsy or catatonia) that are only brought about by drumming, and that are witnessed by the community, ala Siberian shamanism.

This means the author discounts all other ways that Europeans had of communicating with the spirits or taking trance journeys: oneiric practices/dreaming, simple spirit talking, relationship with the familiar, fetch or fairy, solitary (what is now called) meditation—these are all methods for inducing varying degrees of trance which put people into contact with the spirits. And none of them count, here. Because they don’t fit the definition of shamanism which is confined to one remote part of northern Eurasia. What is wrong with this picture?

“Once such widely shared core beliefs and experiences such as soul travel, spirit communication and fairy gatherings are recognized, referring to the shamanistic characteristics of magical practitioners loses its relevance in a European context.”

This statement utterly baffles me. It seems that the opposite should be true: that once we recognise how widely shared core soul/spirit experiences are, then in the European context (given the long, post-Christianization history of fragmentation and persecution) it becomes even more fertile and revealing to ascertain the shamanic relevance of these experiences in practice, expression and result.

Davies presents the case of Chonrad Stoecklin: “Whether he made up the stories of his soul journeys, or whether he really experienced some form of altered consciousness, is not important because the purpose of his stories was to legitimate his claim to special knowledge...” (my italics)

Oh, I believe it is important. Davies appears to believe that every cunning person or healer made use of stories and claims merely to enhance their reputations, to attract clients—as merely a cynical but practical ploy. And by failing to dig deeper, he seems to say that charlatanism and self-promotion were the main focus of all folk magicians.

Surely, he makes a good case that cunning people often made performances out of their special and rare skills. (I will explain why.) Because: shamanic skills are interior to the shaman. The voices and promptings are relayed on the inside, and blended with integrating the observation of signals in every day life. (In the shamanic experience, the spiritual and corporal merge.) Even Siberian shamans (like many others) enhance the performance quality of their healings, for two reasons. One, to create a deeply liminal, resonant atmosphere so that he/she can hear the spirits and respond to what they require. And two, so that all the people present are let in on the shaman’s private experience, so they too can touch the numinous, in case their spiritually-perceptive abilities are dulled, as most undeveloped people’s are. The exterior performance helps folks realize the interior healing which has occurred to them.

By Davies’ own research we see that folk magicians were paid to place and remove spells, write charms, find lost cloaks, heal dry cows, et cetera, and that they were integral parts of their communities. Because Davies at no point explains HOW they did these things, the key is missing.

Were they all just clever? Shall we say that at least a thousand years of the cunning profession points to just a collection of wily characters who were brilliant at self-promotion? Of course, those pellars who were found to be fraudulent had their works examined in court. So if a pellar simply tried to ascertain who had placed a spell simply by cleverly asking the right questions of the client, that might be revealed in these records. What hasn’t been left behind, besides good reputations, are those records concerning pellars who were able to make magic or heal without clever tricks, but with the aid of supernatural guides. When every voice or friend or fairy or animal who spoke to a pellar on the inside of their mind could be called a demon, few were ever motivated to share how they received their “inside information.”

Davies also misinterprets the relevance of fairy belief and interaction.

“Yet, while the notion of fairy fraternizing was certainly a vibrant aspect of English popular belief, it was not as integrated into the world of popular magic as elsewhere.”

This statement is absolutely unsupported. How could an important part of folk belief not have its counterpart or expression in the medium best meant to convey it: namely, human cooperation with spirits to create magic? Or: If English folks believed in fairies, danced with fairies, met fairies, and spoke with fairies...why would they have not naturally expounded on that relationship by shifting realities in our world, with fairies' help? When hundreds of years of folk myth reveal that fairies helped people spiritually and materially, giving them inside information...at what point would this have become inapplicable to cunning people? How then did cunning-people get their magical information?

“...unlike other continental fairy healers, English meetings with the fairies, like those confessed to by John Walsh, were usually conducted corporally and not spiritually.”

This displays a basic misunderstanding of the experience of walking-between-the-worlds, which would have been a necessary part of obtaining otherworldly guidance. In the strongest moments of trance-contact, experiences with fairies and spirits is often corporal and spiritual at the same time. Is Davies saying that John Walsh physically and concretely danced with supernatural beings? Could he have caught them in a cage? The shaman knows that the deepest contact with supernatural beings occurs simultaneously in the space between our world and theirs. It is corporal and spiritual, at the same time, and usually has to be experienced to be understood. (This is why in-their-heads western anthropologists started drinking ayahuasca in ceremony, because it became obvious they were missing the experience of this merging of the physical and spiritual worlds.)

So. The greatest question posed by this book is the invisible goliath in the room: How did English cunning folk do all the magical things they did, how did they actually accomplish satisfying their customers...if they had neither the shamanic abilities nor the relationship to supernaturals with which they could gain help and insight from the spirit world? A shaman’s answer would clarify everything. Despite the wide range I assume they displayed with regard to talent and power, cunning-folk were only able to help customers for hundreds of years because they had shamanic abilities, and because they were in relationship with spirits who helped them.

Cult of the House of Tudor

I just found out that the artist-illustrator Tasha Tudor died June 18, last summer (2008). She was a great influence on me while I was homeschooling my children. The sweetness and innocence of her country lifestyle and the cute books for kids she drew appeal greatly to folks who search for immaculate role models, and her property is now newly log jammed with Japanese tourists, who were rather quicker to discover her than other Americans have. She has a cult following, and her property could well become a shrine. Since she has recently died, there is that rush to define and polish her image, so she is presented as the fairy-grandmother from a dreamy rural world of perfect harmony with nature; yet the saltier aspects about her life are even more interesting.

I’m intrigued by people who appear not to belong to our time, but who steadfastly hold an idea of their perfect life in their mind’s eyes, and advance confidently toward it. She was such a figure. She seems somewhat morally ambiguous, and had a great many fairy-like qualities—fairy in the old, traditional witch-sense, that is. While Tasha Tudor was no shamanic artist, I consider her pursuit of her ideal lifestyle to be deliberately enchanted, and inspiring.

I confess I’ve watched the films about her, “Take Joy,” and “Take Peace” very closely. Both are effusive, lovely, and dignified, narrated by a deep roots-conferring female British voice, but neither were willing to reveal her complicated qualities. These somehow seep through, anyway, if you watch and listen carefully. I like the witch side of Tasha Tudor that snarls out from her shadow every now and again.

She was born Starling Burgess on August 28th, 1915 in Boston, Massachusetts, to an artsy couple; both parents were distant, self-absorbed figures: her dashing father was an early pilot and boat designer whom she worshipped from afar. Her mother seems to have been elegant, stern, and resistant to domestication. Her parents divorced when she was nine, after which she changed her name, and, so her mother could privately pursue her art career in Greenwich Village, Tasha was sent away with her brother Fredric to live with a wealthy, chaotic, bohemian, rural Connecticut family in the 1920’s, ("I was dumped into the most unconventional atmosphere you can imagine") which greatly influenced both her later independence and her attraction to the interior culture of large families.

This experience was seminal, and gave her a lifelong love of farm life. The careful moulding of her own family life was in direct reaction to the liberal yet fragmented experiences of her childhood, during which she appears to not only have gathered remnants of family traditions which she would later practice with her own children, (which I personally suspect were activities that she only got to experience second-hand, once or twice but not regularly) and she invented the same: many of these have the rare, palpable quality of ritual or ceremonial enchantment.

(Some details, from her New York Times Obit: Sparrow Post, a postal service for dolls with delivery by birds. Birthday parties featuring flotillas of cakes with lighted candles. Mouse Mills catalogs, for ordering dolls clothes made by mice, who take buttons for pay.)

She briefly attended art school in Boston, but dropped out. She was a self-taught artist, and this is clear from her work, which has a presence and numinous quality that is often more powerful than her skill in rendering. Sometimes her work was uneven in quality, but when she really hits it, her work is delightful.

It seems Tasha only ever wanted to live as if it was the 1830’s, and she wore 19th century clothing daily. Beginning in her childhood, she amassed one of the most important vernacular clothing collections of that era, many pieces of which she wore on a daily basis before the collection was partially auctioned off, and partially bestowed to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation shortly before her death.

In 1938, she married Thomas McCready Jr., a real estate trader who encouraged her to take her illustrations to publishers, and who himself wrote five of the children’s books she illustrated during the 1950’s. It was McCready’s inherited dolls which formed the cornerstone of Tudor’s legendary collection. She moved with him to a huge Hew Hampshire house on 450 acres sans indoor plumbing or electricity, bearing and raising four children (2 girls, 2 boys) during the 40s-50s. There: “Tudor washed clothes by hand, became proficient in spinning and weaving flax, made bread from scratch, sewed much of her children's clothing, and planted a vast garden of flowers and vegetables.”

The two divorced in 1961, after which the children’s last names were changed to match her own. Unfortunately, very little is known about the man with whom she shared 23 years of her life, who died five years after their divorce. Tasha later married briefly and divorced a second time. Because she deliberately refused to include any unpleasant details in the vision of the life which she had created with such intense focus, very little has ever been shared about Tudor’s loves.

As a mother of four children, she began to rely on her illustrations to bring in money—there are hints that McCready’s work was not adequate to provide for their immense farm. Her first published book, Pumpkin Moonshine, (1938) is still in print. Her reaction in later years to people supposing that it was a charming vocation for her to have taken up was greeted with a snap: she only turned to illustration as a means of support. Nevertheless, her tender stories and sweet illustrations weave their spell—they are filtered through a soft-focus lens, displaying almost no traces of 20th century, modern popular culture, nor trendy metaphors or themes. They too exist outside of time, relying on faithful observance of animals and small children, of family traditions and seasonal rituals.

Tasha Tudor and her family lived off the grid and were surrounded by rambunctious nature during the decades when a streamlined faith in the future, and the drive toward betterment and control defined modernity. (In 1972 she moved to her cabin in Vermont, which was built and roofed by sons Seth and Tom, using only hand tools.) She stepped out of time long before there was a back-to-the-land movement, and she lit her world with candlelight and cooked her food with 19th century appliances because she liked it better that way, and because the romance and atmosphere of that life was so important to her. I am astounded by her inviolate adherence to her dream.

Those of her children who speak about Tudor outside of her public perfect-granny image say that the chaos she experienced as a child was the rule during their childhoods too; there were no boundaries or predictable meal times, or even set meals. But Tudor’s children had to conform to her vision of the perfect childhood: the girls couldn’t cut their hair, had to wear 19th century clothing, weren’t allowed to play with neighbor kids—likewise, they took part in the authentically charming puppet shows and ephemeral doll weddings (also filmed for Life Magazine in the 1950’s) that she devised.

In Drawn From New England, her oldest daughter Bethany wrote, "My mother often said she wanted to live a life similar to that of New Englanders in the past century, so that is what our family did, in a way, for many a year. It was not easy, but the rewards were most satisfying,” and, “"We felt as if we were actually living some of the wonderful old fairy tales and stories my mother read to us so constantly."

Two of Tudor’s books were chosen for the Caldecott Honor in 1944 and 1956. Throughout the 1960’s to the 80’s, Tudor continued to write and illustrate books and travel in connection with their publicity. During the 80’s and 90’s she was featured in magazines, and had a series of books written about her and her distinctive lifestyle.

Watching the films about her, one sees that she did create unforgettable experiences for herself and her children—they seemed set on recapturing a childhood that remained just out of her own grasp. Yet despite the family-ethos so central to her image, most of her children are nowhere to be seen in these films. Their lack is uncomfortable, discordant; the extant scenes of today's family togetherness feel contrived. What is certain, however, is that her work influenced and inspired many, many other families who sought to recreate the magic that she illustrated.

One son and his wife, and two of their grown children (one couple plans to start a museum) carry on tours of her property and sales of her books from the Tasha Tudor website, which constantly stresses its familyness. But three other children were uninvolved with her business, the youngest daughter was utterly estranged, and Tudor bestowed token gestures to two birth children, while cutting six grandchildren out of her will entirely. In an comment for an online guest book from March 2009, her son Tom wrote: “As the second son of Tasha Tudor, I want to thank all of you for your very touching and kind comments forwarded to this website. You should also know that neither my sisters nor I are associated in any way with Tasha Tudor and Family, a company run exclusively by my brother Seth and his family.”

The Tasha Tudor that I most enjoy is a solitary figure, who, in the films about her, says offbeat and slightly cruel and eccentric things which are scattered among the many joyful and meaningful things she says. She exemplified a depth of connection to nature and the turning of the seasons, and love of animals and a facility with observing them (and she kept dead animals in her freezer as aids to illustration). She had a remarkably clever, intact sense of imagination with her dolls and her self-costuming. She was fierce and she liked to gently shock, saying that death “must be quite exciting.” She appeared admirably hard-working and inventive, doing the chores to maintain her remote and old-fashioned home and property.

In a 1996 interview, she said: "It's wonderful to grow old. You can get away with murder. Everyone takes great care of you. And they're afraid of offending you. You can say the most outrageous things and get away with it. I fully believe old age is one of the most delightful periods of my life."

I will miss her, and I look forward to one day reading her real biography, the one in which her cackling shadow may appear lurking behind her kindly facade. (The final line of a report about the legal challenges to her estate confirmed my suspicions about her. ) Tasha liked to quote Mark Twain by saying:

“Everyone is like the moon and has a dark side, which he never shows anybody:”

Bee Beard

I've always kinda had a thing for men with beards.

Now I know why.

(I'm sorry I've lost the URL for this photo...it seemed to be about helping alleviate obesity through nature or something...)

Moving on...Please check out Bees Without Borders.

Their Mission: to Educate and train impoverished individuals and communities in beekeeping skills and the value of beekeeping for poverty alleviation.

Champagne Supernovalis, final

One of the most fascinating aspects of Novalis, besides his Pollen, is a small reference in his work to what I consider to be a shamanic journey.

The young man lost himself, by degrees, in sweet fancies, and fell asleep. He dreamed first of immeasurable distances, and wild unknown regions. He wandered over seas with incredible speed; strange animals he saw; he lived with many varieties of men, now in war, in wild tumult, now in peaceful huts. He was taken captive and fell into the lowest wretchedness. All emotions rose to a height as yet unknown to him. He lived through an infinitely variegated life; died and came back; loved to the highest passion, and then again was forever parted from his loved one.

The symbol of the whole German Romantic movement came to be a small, bright blue flower, or indeed all blue flowers. Some have narrowed this down to the Forget-me-not, a tiny, electric blue blossom that comes up early in the spring. The birth home of Novalis, now a museum, features a garden of blue flowers.

In my work with bees, I have learned that they can see a broader range of blues of ultra-violet tones than people can see, and that they often see swathes of flowers, meadows of flowers, all in blue. Novalis’ next section in his journey describes a bee encountering a flower.

But what attracted him infinitely most was a high, light-blue flower, which stood close by the spring, touching it with its broad glittering leaves. Round it stood innumerable flowers of all colours, and the sweetest perfume filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower; and gazed on it long with nameless tenderness. At last he was for approaching, when all at once it began to move and change; the leaves grew more resplendent, and clasped themselves round the waxing stem; the flower bent itself towards him; and the petals showed like a blue spreading ruff, in which hovered a lovely face. His sweet astonishment at this transformation was increasing, when suddenly his mother's voice awoke him...

And finally, I’ll leave you with this Novalis-pollen grain:

The blossom is the symbol of the secret of our knowing.

Champagne Supernovalis, part 2

Novalis “envisioned a future golden age to beattained by the poeticization of the world.”

His concept of magical idealism made human beings the authors of the nature that they perceive. This ‘romanticization’ of nature means that humans can become reflectively aware of this capacity to merge with nature, and hone it consciously. So these ‘artists of nature’ transform the world into a welcoming ‘thou’ instead of an alienating threat.
He said, “Every beloved object is the centre of a paradise.”

This communion with nature was a huge leap during Novalis’ time, since 18th century people still saw the world as threatening and unknown, just before the Industrial Revolution’s re-imagination of it as ripe for the plundering.

Currently our most widely distributed weltanschauung sees nature primarily as victim, with sorrow, regret and pain about what has been and is being done to it: climate change, animal extinction, loss of habitat, genetic manipulation, et cetera. There is a great deal of fear in this which is self-perpetuating, and generates a belief in the inevitability of further loss and destruction, which is likewise internalised in the human as a pessimistic dread of our own pollution.

"There is, properly speaking, no misfortune in the world. Happiness and misfortune stand in continual balance. Every misfortune is, as it were, the obstruction of a stream, which, after overcoming this obstruction, but bursts through with the greater force."

left: E. Hausner's Happy Landscape (Glückliche Landschaft)

How much more fitting it would be to apply magical idealism to our view of nature, I mean in practice, not as a mere mental, dismissive “to do list” sense, but rather consciously participated in, in order to transform our thoughts of reality. As spiritual practice. I don’t mean to propose to “be optimistic” and “look on the bright side.” I mean to propose, that if, as Novalis says, “The power of thought is an internal sky,” and “Life is not so much a dream as life is a thought,” then the proper response is to merge with nature to re-enchant it with our thoughts, nourish it with our LOVE (love here is a verb). If this were done on a mass scale, we would see the transformation of nature before our very eyes.

“I will sink down into dewdrops and mingle myself with ashes.”

I think of Julia Butterfly and her activist odyssey in Luna the tree, when I think of the physical practice of this, or Sandra Ingerman’s Medicine for the Earth. So, it is happening today. Look how much change can occur from the work of single people.

Here are some more grains of Novalis’ Pollen.

A character is a completely fashioned will.

Philosophy is actually home-sickness; the wish to be at home—everywhere.

The person is a sun, her senses are as planets.
(I’m using the feminine pronoun here, just for kicks)
Sleep is only for the inhabitants of planets. In another time, people will sleep and wake continually at once. The greater part of our body, of our humanity itself, yet sleeps a deep sleep.

There is but one temple in the world; and that is the body of humanity. We touch heaven when we lay our hands on a human body.

Nature is a harp, a musical instrument whose tones are keys to numinous strings in us.

"It is only due to physical weakness and our inner turmoil that we do not see ourselves in a fairy-world. All fabulous stories and fairy tales are merely dreams of that home world, which is everywhere and nowhere. Our numinous powers, which one day as genies shall fulfil our will, for the present are muses which refresh us with sweet remembrances during our toilsome course."

(to be continued...)

Champagne Supernovalis

I’ve lately become interested in Novalis, one of the late 18th Century German romantic poets. He appears to have been a mystic/philosopher, and some of his writings effect me deeply—I feel a kind of interior Klang.

Even his assumed name reminds one of a supernova, the explosion of a very big star, without which there would have been no life on earth. Like Novalis, supernovas make a huge blast—using up their energy quickly, making for a very short life. Indeed Novalis’ thoughts contain the sparkle of the latest understandings in space and physics, in tune with Hawking and Einstein. And this, more than two hundred years ago, when science as we know it was only newly born.

Novalis was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (May 2, 1772 to March 25, 1801), an author and philosopher of early German Romanticism. He was born into nobility in the Harz Mountains, then one of the most inaccessible areas of Germany, known for its ancient underground mines, and suspected to be the final, remote hiding place of a middle-German witch cult. Novalis was the second child of eleven born to the second wife of a deeply pious member of the Moravian church.

Like most of his privileged contemporaries, Novalis was homeschooled and taught by relatives as a child, up until he successfully graduated from law study in 1794. He also met and befriended the core members of the German Romantic movement, including Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Tieck and the Brothers Schlegel. He became influenced by Johann Fichte’s scientific ideas, which he merged with his own spiritual revelations into ideas he called a “Religion of Love,” into a philosophy called “magical realism.”

When he was 22 years old, he met and instantly felt a soul bond with Sophie von Kuhn, then a 12 year old child. They became engaged a year later, but she began to suffer from a kind of liver cancer. Her struggle for life became an emotional and poetic focus of Novalis’ entire circle of friends. Before they could be married, Sophie died at the age of 15.

Novalis became the auditor of the family salt mines in Weissenfels, while still studying at the Mining Academy of Freiburg, where he pursued a wide range of sciences including geology, mathematics, chemistry, biology, history, and philosophy. Here he began to collect materials to create an encyclopedia, which he intended would seamlessly blend the sciences and spirituality, the language of nature with the word of God.

“The magical idealist wonderfully refracts the inner light, and poetically transforms nature by the enchanted, potent faculty of thought. This involves reinstating the Renaissance concept of the magus and applying it systematically to modern science.”

He invented a new literary form called ‘fragments,’ which he later published in a book called Pollen. (he also finished and published Faith and Love or the King and the Queen, and Hymns to the Night) These fragments are separately listed revelations and statements which range in power from simple musings to potent oracular truths. It is in these works especially, along with his poetry, that Novalis can be assumed to be a mystic, speaking forth universal truths from nature itself...perhaps spoken into his ear by land spirits.

I can only speculate as to how he reached these understandings, for they don’t seem purely intellectual, but they contain a sound of the eternal. They hold at times a power that I have myself only experienced during trance or shamanic journeying—the voice is that of beings who live beyond the veil. Apart from journeying to speak with Novalis himself in spirit, we may never know how he came to arrive at these apparent otherworldly communications.

For his life was very brief. After study he became engaged to Julie von Charpentier, a professor’s daughter, and in December 1800 was named mining ‘magistrate’ for the district of Thuringia. Yet the following summer he began to suffer from tuberculosis, from which he eventually died in March 1801.

“We are connected to every part of the universe, as with future and prehistory.
It only depends on the direction and length of our concentration which relation
we particularly wish to develop, which will become the most important for us,
which will take effect.”

He seems to know here that thought is just matter-to-be.

(To be continued...)

Pretty Beautiful

I found a new group on playlist, called Espers. They happily remind me of the first wave of British folk rock (Pentangle, The Strawbs, the many Carthys), only with the more current mellow, acoustic, EMO vibe of our times. Check out the lid of one of their CDs. Excellent. The song: Dead Queen is really evocative.

Also, have a look at the title page for Liquid Fire Mantra. These folks do public fire dances, and make jewelry. The Fae Auris are enchanting. But what I really like is the front page of their website. Hummmmm...

Norval Morrisseau: In the Shaman's Shadow, part 2

Why would this artist need to prove his authenticity? His work should really speak for itself, but because as it has been loaded with the layers of identity-making, it is assumed to be somewhat more than what takes place on the canvas. Morrisseau wanted to make paintings full of color, that were happy, that made people feel good. Because he had to play at being a shaman, he said he was making art that healed people. Did he? How?

Morrisseau’s grandfather was a shaking-tent shaman, a djessakid. William S. Lyon’s Encyclopedia of Native American Healing (1996) reports that a shaking-tent shaman makes use of the shaking tent ceremony in order to diagnose illness, see into the future, find lost objects, locate game, and talk to the deceased. In European terms this rather fits the description of a ‘diviner,’ rather than a healer, and the djessakids are differentiated from other shamans by being termed jugglers or conjurors, even though their ceremony is very physically draining and takes a great deal of maturity and strength to accomplish. A djessakid also differs from other shamans in that he (for among the Ojibway women rarely practiced this) “learns his skills from his manito, or helping spirit, rather than inheriting the ritual from his relatives. Thus, he cannot sell or transfer his ability to others.” The ceremony is one of the most widely practised among Great Lakes and Great Plains tribes, and in the recent modern era has been attended and reported by outsiders (non-Indians), therefore, the ceremony does not have (or has not always had) a blanket of secrecy around it.

Curiously, I have found no instances of Morrisseau referring to having had any particular shamanic training himself, and his grandfather’s art, as stated above, was not one that could be passed on. In fact, one gets the impression that Morrisseau’s greater childhood influence came from the catholicism of his grandmother. Morrisseau said: "The Grand Shaman is like the Pope of Rome. The Pope is on one side of coin, the Shaman on the other side of the coin." He might have been talking about the place that Catholicism and native Ojibway beliefs occupied in him, personally, equal and opposite. For I really believe that he was of two minds, spiritually, but was generally not allowed, in emphasising and playing-up his proximity to a shaman, to admit the depth of his Christianity. Here he made clear that the Christian influence moved him perhaps even more:

"I have always been attracted to religious paintings, but only the ones that had that mystical or supernatural quality in them, especially Saint Teresa by Bernini. Just looking at Saint Teresa I get some kind of vibrations from it. I can close my eyes and feel them. That's great art, and it brings on that tingling sexual feeling. Other saints, like Saint Sebastian, do that as well. But the Christ figure was always the one that was dominant for me. That's why I say that Christ to me is still the greatest shaman."

Ultimately, there are a couple of foolproof ways to tell whether or not Norval Morrisseau was a shaman. Shamans make a living of healing people, they live it 24 hours a day. It takes a lifetime of healing, or at least a significant pattern of enabling miracles to become someone who others would call a shaman. Norval Morrisseau was an artist who was deeply influenced by his ancestral legends and natural environment who made visually riveting paintings, but he didn’t heal other people. He was human — neither did he heal himself. Shamans with power also display a quality of health and balance in their own lives, and unfortunately, this does not characterize Morrisseau’s personal life. And, Norval Morrisseau was not a shamanic artist. He did not purposefully work with his manito to create his paintings, although he hinted that he did. He never mentioned a specific Spirit helper, he did not articulate how his work could heal people. He made beautiful art, and maybe his ancestral spirits did work through him and onto the canvas. But it was not because he purposefully harnessed any of his own shamanic skills or experience. He seemed as surprised by “some kind of vibrations” emanating from Bernini’s Saint Theresa as anyone else would be. A shamanic artist knows those vibrations are intentionally-aroused spiritual power, and they know how to invite it, cultivate it, and unleash it.

It would have been fascinating if Norval Morrisseau had lived just a bit later or been young in our time, so that he could have been “just” an artist, and been allowed to express himself as an individual, instead of being pigeonholed as an Indian artist, much less burdened with the label of shaman. In his case, his legend has become simultaneously more-and-less than the reality of his work. Fights have erupted over who might call themselves his successor, while work done in his style, direct copies, are frustrating professionals in the art world. I would have liked to see how Morrisseau would have progressed if he had cultivated his heritage-shamanic influences into his art practice, rather than exploiting them as marketing drama. Surely his work would have continued to grow and deepen in method and message.

Norval Morrisseau: In the Shaman's Shadow

Norval Morrisseau was a painter from the Anishanabe/Ojibway nation, who lived in Canada from 1932 to 2007. His work was discovered and began to be marketed when he was in his late twenties. This marketing was aimed at exaggerating his ‘Indianness,’ removing all modern influences on his work, and keeping his style that of a mythic ‘primitive.’ He conspired with this marketing strategy and willingly enhanced it. By all accounts he was well-versed in his ancestral legends and stories, and a man of great charisma and power of personality, exceptionally quick to respond to and integrate mental constructions of what others thought about, or “should” think about his art and his being Indian.

(In this article I use the term "Indian" because it is the term most North American tribes prefer to use for themselves, rather than "Native American" which is felt to be imposed from the outside in.)


Since his recent death, many things have been written about Norval Morrisseau. He is referred to over and over again as a “shaman” and a “shaman artist.” He is credited as being the father of “medicine” art. On some art gallery websites, he is listed as being a “Grand Master Shaman,” a made-up title which appears to have nothing to do with the Midewiwin tradition to which he was related. I can find nothing to suggest that Norval Morrisseau was either a shaman, or, indeed, a shamanic artist (one who works consciously with The Spirits to create art). But first, a bit about his background and the development of his career.

Oldest of seven brothers, he was born in Ontario in 1932, and raised by his grandparents. His grandmother Vernique was a devout catholic and his grandfather, Moses (Potan) Nanakonagos was a djessakid, a shaking-tent shaman. Norval was hospitalized when he was 19 for tuberculosis, at the same time acquiring a new name “Copper Thunderbird” during a healing ceremony. By the time his talent began to be recognized in the early 1960’s, Morrisseau had already developed his painting style in isolation, and was newly married to Harriet Kakegamic. He fathered six children before breaking with his wife. In 1962, he met Jack Pollock, a painting teacher from Toronto, who organized the first exhibition of his work, and continued to represent him. Norval Morrisseau battled life long with alcoholism and was in jail during the 1970’s. In 1972 he experienced a devastating house fire in which he was badly burned. By the early 1980’s, he was taken seriously by collectors and his works were increasingly amassed by the Canadian government to represent indigenous art. At the end of his life his health continued to deteriorate, he developed Parkinson’s disease, and Norval Morrisseau died at the age of 75 in 2007.

In the late 1950s his early paintings were initially noticed by a local state trooper, Bob Sheppard, who wrote to Selwyn Dewdney, the director of the Royal Museum of Ontario: “he has done plenty of reading since leaving school, and he himself studies and collects Indian lore.” The resulting relationship with Dewdney would prove seminal in formatting Morrisseau’s entire career.

Dewdney was personally interested in local petroglyphs, and he encouraged Morrisseau to copy them. He suggested that Norval paint on birchbark (which quickly proved unwieldy) to make it look more like ancestral style, and he was exceptionally controlling of Morrisseau’s use of materials — meticulous in limiting his early palette to earth tones. Morrisseau signed his canvases using Cree pictographs, which his wife taught him. All of this was done to enhance the ‘Indianness’ of the work, and Morrisseau collaborated, although he, for his part, corrected Dewdney on matters of Ojibway folklore.

In fact, Morrisseau’s style cannot necessarily be seen as being a “typical” Ojibway style, instead, he “relied solely on his inner vision” to create layered motifs of Great Lakes animals and people, morphing into and out of each other, eaters being eaten by their prey and unrelated/related creatures inhabiting each others’ bodies. In a letter from Dewdney to Joseph Weinstein, an art collector and early influence: “one of the most amazing things about him being the way he invents an Ojibway way of visualizing things, without the existence of any pictorial tradition to which he has had any access. He has a real passion for his people’s past, and a sense of mission in passing it on in pictorial form.”

This mission was something that Dewdney repeatedly articulated to Morrisseau during the early years: “your work is to show to non-Indians the richness and variety of Ojibway beliefs and legends through your paintings.” And, “...you are not only an artist, but a representative of your people.” Morrisseau felt this responsibility deeply, entering his career with the pressure of legacy from the outset. Most of what he had to say about his own art reaffirmed this identity as spokesman for “his people.” He said, "I want my work to be cornerstone for Indian art, to provide something that will last." It is this burden of having to carry all of one’s relations, race, and history forward, (not to mention representing the art of indigenous Canada) while avoiding any mistakes that would embarrass the elders, ancestors, agents, or politicians that proved increasingly difficult for Morrisseau.

Barry Ace writes in Norval Morrisseau: Artist as Shaman:

“As the art buying public, dealers and art institutions engaged in what can only
be described as a Morrisseau “feeding frenzy” the complexity involved in
reinventing, controlling and sheltering Morrisseau’s public and private spaces
from the outside world became a hugely convoluted and contradictory process for all involved, including Morrisseau himself. The personal impact of this monstrosity of illusion was so enormous, that few are immune from its negative impacts, and perhaps most tragically of all, the toll it took on the physical and emotional state of Norval Morrisseau.”

Morrisseau’s images are visually arresting, fluid, mythic. Visually, his is a highly attractive style, owing more to two-dimensional graphic arts than to painting (in contrast to established, western figural painting), placing it firmly in the realm of pop art/illustration. The first time I saw a Morrisseau poster, I almost felt nourished by it, it was so generous, so full of beauty, rhythm, congruence, and movement. His work does embody the truth which has become Indian-cliche: We are all One.

As his career developed, Morrisseau stepped away from some of the initial boundaries set by himself and Dewdney. First, his palette widened and modernized to include hyper-bright pinks, oranges, and purples. Second, he incorporated his Christian upbringing, including more images of people, of Christ, and church influences. Third, he became involved with the German new age movement Eckankar, which served to enhance the “spiritual” language with which Morrisseau spoke about his own work: "I transmit astral plane harmonies through my brushes into the physical plane. These otherworld colours are reflected in the alphabet of nature, a grammar in which the symbols are plants, animals, birds, fishes, earth and sky. I am merely a channel for the spirit to utilize, and it is needed by a spirit-starved society."

(This statement can be broken down into an amalgamation of new age terms, noble-Indian talk, shamanic terms, awkward art history-speak, plus the requisite negative judgement on white society tacked on at the end. His own discussion of his work seems cultivated and packaged for his clients. At the end of such a statement one feels pulled to acquire this language, this grammar, these colors, this nature, in order to quiet the shame of being part of a “spirit-starved” society.)

As a curator of Canada’s Indian art center, Barry Ace met Norval Morrisseau in 1995. His article, Norval Morrisseau: Artist as Shaman provides one refreshing drink of truth-telling among many high-blown biographies available on the Internet (although the title itself reinforces the central dishonesty about the artist). Ace describes Morriseau initiating a talk about the medicine of a grizzly bear walking stick he had brought with him.

“I was simultaneously astonished and taken aback, because, Norval, without any prompting from me, immediately launched into a diatribe on sacred healing practices. I have always found this notion of other Aboringinal people needing to validate their “indianness,” especially to another Aboriginal somewhat difficult to deal with. I quickly came to the conclusion that this was the...real public Norval Morrisseau. I remember thinking to myself how important performance and self-validation has become in contemporary Aboriginal communities, and I understood this was largely based on a desire for authenticity.”

(to be continued...)

"New Hive" Installation

I found quite an interesting site about an art installation created last summer by Derrick Cruz called A New Hive: Art to Save the Disappearing Honeybee.

Derrick, an accessories designer, used the lost-wax casting technique to create necklaces from real honeycombs. (These are called Abandoned Comb Amulets, in reaction to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), wherein bees mysteriously leave their hives, never to return.) Then he collaborated with a local confectionary to make caramel pyramids in which to house them, surrounded by fluid honey.

"The Abandoned Comb Amulet is defined by a Solomonic dilemma. A choice must be made to forcefully exhume the honey-drenched gold, violently shattering and consuming its casing, or to recognize value in its current form, nurturing a natural deterioration and the gradual revelation of treasure within."

Interesting metaphor. Do we plunder nature to get at it the gold immediately or let nature take its course? This makes the choice personal, if you ended up with one of the 30 necklaces that were cast. Also love how one's spit has to interact with receiving the treasure: you would have to lick the honey off the pendant to clean it to wear it.

The installation of the project featured a living hive from a local beekeeper and a cryptic space with the atmosphere of a Victorian-era cabinet of curiousities...I think it worked less well than other parts of the piece, (with framed pictures on the floor--why? Yet the "Hive Door" at right is...cathedral) but that could be because I'm keen to get away from the old spooky stereotypes around bees that were so prevalent in films from my 70's era childhood. Cabinets of Curiousities are still quite hip right now...but I am still very curious about the two black hooded figures in the "Examination Hive" section.

An exciting piece of art, I find. But also:

Proceeds from art sales and donations to "A NEW HIVE" will support research and education focusing on the development of sustainable beekeeping practices as well as the up-keep and foundation of new hives in local gardens." Good on them.