A Study of Mircea Eliade S Definitive Study of Shamanism Across Numerous North and Central

The Shaman and the ISness of TO BE

By Sharada Bhanu

In The Mouse and His Child Russell Hoban has projected a concealed, but incredibly detailed portrait of the shaman as spiritual seeker, in quest of the unknown. This vision is Advaitic in that it is nondual, it testifies to the need for liberation and it establishes at a climactic point in the novel, the existence of the self beyond even nothingness. An examination of Mircea Eliade’s definitive study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy reveals the extraordinary level of assimilation of the religious traditions of Asia in this work, recognized as a contemporary classic. Nearly every important trait identified by Eliade as characteristic of the shaman in this work (published in America in 1964 during the years that Hoban was working on the novel) is found in Hoban’s novel. In his article “The Shaman and his Exo-Brain” James Hopkin states of Russell Hoban that “he thinks of his devotion to writing in terms of shamanism. ‘Most of my novels are celebrating a willingness to admit the unseen,’ he says, ‘and the shaman is open to the unseen and makes himself a medium for it - that's the kind of writer I see myself as.’ ”(<http://books.guardian.co.uk). It seems possible that reading this text constituted a vital act of self-definition for Hoban, by which he came to see himself as setting out on exploratory journeys as a writer to recover and make manifest the element of the unseen, the soul that the world is not aware it has lost.

However it is the play of difference which emerges in the author’s use of his source in TMAHC which makes for interest. Hoban reconciles being and becoming, good and evil in a nondual perspective consistent with the Indian philosophy of Advaita, which holds that what exists is one. Chris Bell states, “What Hoban does so compellingly is to make us feel good about the notion that we belong to a community of perception and emotion. He quotes Schroedinger's 'The overall number of minds is just one,' and asks us whether it feels like that to us” (http://www.ocelotfactory.com).

The shaman belongs to the “small mystical elite [who] not only directs the community’s religious life but as it were, guards its ‘soul.’ The shaman is the great specialist in the human soul; he alone ‘sees’ it for he knows its ‘form’ and its destiny.” ( Eliade 8). The Siberian initiate is reluctant to take on the frightening and onerous task of shamanism, and will often try to reject the intimidating advances of a female tutelary spirit connected to “the Great Mother of Animals” (81). The mouse child does not want to go out into the world and take up his calling but the elephant – later mama to the child and wife to the father, insists that “everything must, in one way or another, go. One does what one is wound to do” (6). Unlike the amorous spirits that Eliade records, the elephant refuses to bond. She is sold, broken, rejected, suffers abuse and enslavement at the hands of Manny Rat but somehow retains dignity and even a heroic defiance. She learns humility and comes to value the mouse father and son. However she is still very much the tutelary deity in that her home is protected and Manny is electrocuted into wisdom through her unwitting but unerring intervention.

The animals in the text may be seen to have a vital importance. The shaman gets helping spirits in animal form, and learns to speak their language, incarnates such an animal spirit himself through his actions and this “is another way of showing that the shaman can forsake his human condition, is able, in a word to ‘die’”(93). In TMAHC ‘imitating’ animals and learning to ‘speak their language’ is caught in the theatrical scene with the Caws of Art. The toy mice are not proving they can die but trying to save the animals in the troupe and themselves from death (63). However as Eliade notes a “mystical solidarity…exists between man and animal “ and “each time a shaman succeeds in sharing the animal mode of being, he in a manner re-establishes the situation that existed in illo tempore, in mythical times, when the divorce between man and the animal world had not yet occurred” (94). From the Hindu point of view and according to Advaita no such divorce exists; the omnipresent Brahman resides in animals, plants and non-living matter as well as man and while human birth is precious, in that normally in this alone is mukthi, or a state of realisation possible, legends abound with exceptions. A well known story in Indian mythology concerns the elephant Gajendra, a devotee of Vishnu whose leg was caught by a crocodile, who prayed in distress and received the grace of the Lord. In the Hindu pantheon some gods such as Hanuman, are animals; some half animal and half human, such as Ganesha and Narasimha.

The dance is according to Eliade, a means by which ecstatic trance is induced by the shaman (451). In this text the dance of the mouse father and son is experienced as joyful by that participative onlooker, the tramp (3) but father and son see it as part of the tedium of a toy’s life, expressive of monotony and subject status (9). The decisive moment which makes one a shaman comes when the initiate is killed by demonic beings, dismembered, parts of his body, such as intestines are taken out and substituted by better parts ( Eliade 43). After this the shaman can die and come back to life many times. In Hoban’s text the protagonists die three times and are brought back to life. The initiation happens with the accidental breaking by the cat (who corresponds to the animal who carries the shaman beyond) and the tramp who repairs them. Then death and salvation both come from the air when the hawk drops them and the frog transported by the bittern comes to the rescue. Finally at the hands of the demonic Manny their clockwork is taken apart, substituted and they achieve the autonomy of self-winding. In terms of Advaita, the mouse child willingly accepts death because he does not see himself as identical with his body. He allows himself to be altered and achieves final liberation, not mere initiation.

The shaman makes a difficult journey to the underworld to find a soul that is lost and bring it back. This involves going into a trance and making diving motions on the part of the ecstatic. In TMAHC the protagonists enter an underworld in one sense when they come to the dump with its gaming dens and peepshows and organized crime; in another sense when they fall into Serpentina’s pond. Apparently among the Eskimos the term most commonly used for shaman meant “ ‘one who drops down to the bottom of the sea’” ( Eliade 293).They circle endlessly round Muskrat’s tree preparing themselves with the parody of a dance then literally fall into water. In the pond the mouse child and father have two tutelary deities male and female, Serpentina and Miss Mudd. The latter seems to be a revisioning of the “Mother of the Sea Beasts” who is “dirty and slovenly” and who must be appeased before she will set animals free so the shaman’s people can find game again (Eliade 294-5). Here Miss Mudd is liberated from her ugly body in helping the mouse child and father achieve freedom.

The shaman finds that at the bottom of the ocean, “a dog with bared teeth defends the entrance” to the underworld and he must fearlessly pass by (295). The omnipresent can of Bonzo dogfood that manages to mean “anything and everything”(54), that connects sky, earth and watery underworld, suggests mineral, animal, human and divine modes of existence, that is both dog and God, that represents infinite transcendence yet teaches immanence is Hoban’s memorable reworking of this mythical beast. In TMAHC not someone else’s soul but one’s own is located. The crowning intuition comes as an act of self-recognition. “There’s nothing beyond the last visible dog but us” (100).This is a crucial difference. The shaman exits from the underworld with the help of two bird spirits; here, the dragonfly Miss Mudd and the hawk.

Eliade elaborates on the importance of the World Tree which: “rises at the center of the earth…connects the three cosmic regions…its branches touch the sky and its roots go down to the underworld…it represents the universe in continual regeneration, the inexhaustible spring of cosmic life, the paramount reservoir of the sacred…the sacrality of the world, its fertility and perenniality…and…a Tree of Life and Immortality as well.”(270-71). Shamans are hatched by a giant bird in the branches. This is paralleled by the bittern and the kingfisher who protect the toys after they have made a home in the tree. Significantly, the dolls’ house perched on this tree is the “return to origins, a reversion to the mystical age of the lost paradise” regained by the shaman in ecstasy through tree and cord (486). It becomes a home to migratory birds in TMAHC, suggestive of the shelter accommodating all who undertake risky journeys crossing many boundaries, all spiritual seekers. “The Goldi , the Dolgan and the Tungu say that the souls of children perch like little birds on the branches of the Cosmic tree and the shamans go there to find them” ( Eliade 272). But the text also has another tree that brings death even as it falls, the tree felled by Muskrat’s knowledge and pride.

The shaman’s drum is “derived from the actual wood of the Cosmic Tree, the shaman, through his drumming is magically projected into the vicinity of the tree; he is projected to the “center of the world” and thus can ascend to the sky.” Prior to the ascension the drum is reanimated and both the wood of the drum and the skin narrate their former history as tree and animal. (Eliade169) The skin of the drum belongs to the shaman’s “exemplary model, the primordial animal that is the origin of his tribe…We are in the presence of a mystical experience that allows the shaman to transcend time and space.”(170-1) Hoban’s text does not insist on the magical properties of the drum, though it is referred to as the nutshell drum, therefore it has originated from a tree. It is a reminder of its former owner, the drummer boy in the shrew army who dies snatching up the fife to sound a distress call. “He tried to shout, ‘Onward shrews!’ but had no breath to say it and died without a word” (43). The boy’s innocence and courage make him in a sense the mouse child’s ancestor. The drum participates in the raising of the mouse father and child from the pond (102) and the mouse child beats a “ rataplan both fierce and loud”(127) on it when he descends out of the sky in n attack on Manny Rat. A symbol of defeat has been converted into victory.

Magical flight itself is symbolic according to Eliade of the liberation of the soul, knowledge of hidden truths and ecstasy. All the three times the mouse father and son are borne into the sky, birds carry them. The first two times involuntarily, the third time leading a campaign against Manny. Other correspondences include the entry of a foreign object inside the shaman’s body which here does not confer magical power but is a hindrance and must be removed, again a skill that shamans possess. When the mouse father and son come out of the pond they are unable to move even when wound up; we later learn a small snail has wedged itself inside and comes out only when they are smashed (107).

The shaman’s costume looks like a skeleton and includes metal. This signifies that the dead can undergo a “mystical rebirth” from the bones (Eliade 63). The special status of that sick healer the shaman, on which Eliade insists throughout his narrative is caught brilliantly by Hoban in the metallic bodies of the mouse father and son. They are both animal-like and less than animals. They cannot hunt or defend themselves or even move of their own volition but when they break their bodies can be repaired. They are pitifully helpless in a predatory world where animals prey on each other but as they cannot eat or be eaten, they break the cycle of violence in which all animals live in this text. Hoban frequently draws attention to the wearing away of the clothes the mouse father and son originally had, to reveal the tin underneath (82). This is a stripping down to basics as well as a sign of entropy and pathos, a reduction of life to “an ephemeral illusion in perpetual transformation (Eliade 63).

It is interesting to note that the novel is profoundly nondual in refusing to see evil in simplistic terms. Manny Rat is a pursuing spirit who finally brings the mouse father and son under his screwdriver but is also himself a reluctant shaman. He is followed by the “Mother of the animals” the female tutelary spirit the elephant who refuses to speak but whom he abuses and through whom Manny both gets a shock and accesses light. Manny performs the ritual killing of a sacrificial animal, usually a horse, in this case a donkey. This is at one level murder as the mouse father grimly recognizes, at another a chilling game. The dead donkey however does not become a means to flight for Manny; his transplanted legs survive to inflict the crushing blow that Manny suffers through the mouse father. The successful shaman showed power over fire, being able to hold red hot coals, etc. Eliade records that smiths were ambivalently “at once despised and venerated”(472) but by virtue of their knowledge and skill in metallurgy they were often associated with shamans. Here Manny exactly answers this description with his skill in repairing clockwork, his knowledge of electricity, his ability to touch a high tension wire and live. Manny too undergoes risk of death at the hands of the weasels, a death of the spirit when he loses his teeth and near physical death from fire to emerge transformed. It is he who undergoes the enlightenment experience that the Eskimo shaman knows as a mysterious light inside the brain and the whole body ( Eliade 61). The overt clash of heroes and villain is subverted by a secret similarity which slowly comes to be acknowledged and accepted. In recognizing that his enemies “were not unlike him” (147) and that the roles of hunter and hunted, slave and master have been reversed, Manny learns a rhythm of “ungoing into going and back again” (148).