Tchalaï Unger: Preface to La Splendeur du Chamane

April 20, 2024 by traditionaltarot 2 Comments

Translator’s Introduction

Shamanism is one of those notions that has not only a disputed definition, but also a disputed etymology. A glance at the Wikipedia entry ought to be enough to convince one of the lack of consensus on the meaning of the term, a discussion that, once again, lies beyond the scope of the present blog. In consequence, we leave it to the interested reader to pursue this line of inquiry.

Tchalaï Unger, whose seminal work has often featured in these pages, was interested in exploring this phenomenon. While she did not write a book on the subject, she did pen the preface to La Splendeur du chamane by Marc Questin in 1997, and designed an oracle deck entitled Le Tarot des Chamanes [The Tarot of the Shamans].

Far from being a passing fad, Tchalaï’s views on living a shamanic lifestyle were expressed in an all-too brief television documentary, aired in 1993, and which may be viewed here (from 9:00, and 19:20).

“… I think that everyone can understand it on their own level, that is, not everyone might be a shaman nowadays, but can live in a shamanic way, which is to say, to live in a way that is in harmony with all the elements which surround us. That also means that, here today, we are urban shamans.”

Unfortunately, Tchalaï’s deck Le Tarot des Chamanes [The Tarot of the Shamans] does not appear to have been published, or if it was, it must not have had a wide distribution and we have been unable to find any trace of it whatsoever.

Given that today marks the nineteenth anniversary of Tchalaï’s passing, we publish this piece in her memory. This preface appeared on pages 9-14 of La Splendeur du chamane by Marc Questin, éditions du Rocher, 1997.

* * *

Preface to La Splendeur du Chamane

Tchalaï Unger

You, my friend, who feel yourself confounded by the splendour of the shaman, you who find yourself alone, naked and ignorant, who think to glimpse no secret from the depth – nor, more over, to be worthy thereof – take this book: with love, with clarity, it will bring you onto the path. The fluid and poetic writing of Marc-Louis Questin, in the Greek sense of ποίησις [poiesis], “he who does,” already places you into another world, by osmosis. By incantation, perhaps.

But, you ask yourself, friend armed with constructive doubt, how could one write such a book? Who has the right and the experience?

It is, very simply, another yourself, one who has already lead a large part of the battle to find the shamanic root hidden within each of us. In times gone by, he once found himself alone, naked, ignorant, glimpsing the depth, but not knowing how to get there, approach it, … and survive. After years of thwarted enthusiasm and dead-ends, he no doubt encountered a gentle phase such as this one:

The wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees. (1)

Then, he filled himself with courage, the goal seeming less distant when one visualises it in candid images.

A confident humility came over him, which took him far away from the summaries of received ideas; let me take one from an American dictionary (2), with all due respect to Robert or Larousse (2) : “Shaman, a priest or priestess who uses magic for the purpose of curing the sick, divining the hidden, and controlling events.”

A little brief as summaries go, no? My friend, avoid applying our Western ideas on God, classical medicine and social structures to the shaman and to shamanism. Wherever he is, the shaman does not exercise the priesthood in the sense we usually understand it, and is neither aware of nor desires to use “magic” in the common sense of today: he is; and nothing else.

For far too long, the study of shamanism has been effected according to the usual systematic manner of anthropological or sociological enquiries. By exploring the shamanic cultures according to intellectual, academic norms, one only reaches a skeletal theorisation of their rich globality. Greater respect for the unknown or the unusual, and at the same time, drawing on the “insight” of which Krishnamurti and David Bohm (3) spoke, turn out to be indispensable to any progress in this domain; the taste for secrecy, here, has greater effect than the doctrinal bulldozer.

At the other extreme from the academic method (naming no names, the names being too renowned), we discover with stupefaction, by surfing on the Web (4), that shamanism is completely absent, apart from some meagre and moreover inappropriate writings, which all unanimously refer back to my good master Tim Leary, a psycho-sociologist who pioneered the therapeutic application of LSD in prisons, or to the innovator John Lilly, with his famous “flotation tanks,” of modern sensorial deprivation, or again, to Ayahuasca, favourite hallucinogen, and often lethal, of the Native Americans.

Between the microscope method and the New Age bazaar, is there any room for a shamanic understanding and practice accessible to Europeans of the year 2000? A non-inquisitorial method, as Louis Pauwels suggested in The Dawn of Magic? (5)

It must be said that, in France, with rare exceptions, we speak of shamanism like we speak of Kabbalah, of the Tarot, of sex, or of anything else at all: we first make it enter into our system of beliefs, based on our desires, our hopes, our fears and ways of protecting ourselves from them; and then we take it out, like a rabbit out of a top hat, completely flattened and disguised as whatever happens to suit us.

So, let us approach it from the inside. Who is he, the one who goes to seek his shamanic root? How to know if you too, are that one?

The shaman is one who, from childhood, has generally manifested exceptional possibilities of contact with nature and all its extensions in the human being. Sometimes these gifts, perceived by someone or by a community, are carefully cultivated thanks to a teaching, and appropriate techniques. (But more often than not, today, this is not the case – whence the interest of this book which places them within reach.) This gift, this connection with nature, emerge, according to the ecological niche and according to the character of the shaman, in a more or less combative or contemplative personality, generally, both together: he (she) is at the same time, the warrior and the intermediary between the other humans and the Presences.

Once upon a time, this held true from the Arctic Circle to Amazonia, from the Taklamakan to Micronesia, and this holds still today. Energetic key to a group that is entirely different from the “civilised” world, onto which it may be superimposed, here and now, the shaman avers to be indispensable to the collectivity since he alone can remind it of what it has forgotten, literally, to reanimate it, to give it back its soul.

The potential of the shaman is an almost osmotic power of adaptation to the environment. This power of adaptation is, precisely, the characteristic of the anthropic stock which has passed from the stage of Homo sapiens (the one who knows he knows), yesterday, to the Homo ludens, today or tomorrow. The shaman, that is the essential man.

This intimate adaptation supposes and demands a constant adjustment of action to reflection, a rectitude to be maintained to the utmost of one’s strength.

The apprentice shaman is “trained” (6), volens nolens, in different trials which must indeed be labelled initiatory. He must experience and cross the domain of the brute vital force which borrows the masks and behaviour of animals; that of the human intelligence applied to concrete tasks – modes of action on the tangible world; that of the psychic force – to sustain with continuity the same desire and the same inner intensity; that of sovereignty over the animal, vegetal and mineral realms – perhaps rather an alliance with the ecological niche, with the resulting sacred space; and finally, he reaches the domain of the spirit, or of the spirits, according to the model he accords to the intangible world (that is, the world that cannot be measured).

All along the path, without stopping, one must remain so alert that the apprentice shaman gives up a thousand times, at breaking point, to start off again the next moment or day once more into the incredible adventure. Sometimes, the general incomprehension, the public curiosity, the hardness of the times, transform the most authentically shamanic being into a fakir, into an ape-parrot, into a trickster, into a small-time fortune-teller. It is a great sadness for those who see him (her) damage himself (herself) in such a way, and an incurable loss for the collective consciousness.

First of all “trained” by the demands of destiny, the shaman then “trains” himself according to a regimen of every moment – in order to better drag us along with him. (6)

Friend, reassure yourself. The Rituals will temper your heart and safely open it up to the world: the rituals of water, tied to the ebb and flow of consciousness (what an English author called the “sparkling stream”) which cleanses and flows under its different forms; the rituals of air, which crosses, transports and caresses every thing; the rituals of fire, which heats, burns and transforms nutriments and sentiments; the rituals of our mother the earth which takes us through space, relieves us of our weight, gives us rest, and which we will nourish in return.

Thus armed, you will be confronted with solitude, with vanity, with madness, with temptations – which are choices between what must be reinforced and what must be eliminated.

You will reconnect with your ancestors, whose bones lie beneath your feet, and the old soul like a grain of gold within your young soul.

You will learn lighthearted sharing, the constant smile which recognises and accepts the Other, ancient or new.

You will let your hands identify the vigour or the smoothness of the grasses, the warmth and the touch of the rocks, the fullness or the emptiness of a pulse, and you will become a Healer.

You will resign yourself to seeing, behind the faces, the truth of each being without ever showing it, remaining confident in all the transformations.

You will make yourself a channel of crystal, through which information from elsewhere may flow, so subtle that the slightest clumsiness or slightest worry would tarnish it: such is the frailty of divination, regardless of the manner in which it is made perceptible to human eyes.

Then, by the voice, by gestures, or by prayer, you will spread peace up to the stars.

Finally, in a truly total offering, you will accept to break the fullness of the wordless perpetual encounter with the Presences, to transmit the golden speech to whosoever asks “repeatedly and with insistence” to be taught.

What a pathway is opening up to you, my friend! The world will become music and flavour; a complex and meaningful movement in which everything rejoins and rejoices… And what transparent austerity beneath this splendour! By claw and by feather, by fur and by scales, what a beautiful life!

Tchalaï Unger

Notes

1. Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea.
2. Merriam-Webster. (Robert and Larousse are two standard French dictionaries. – Tr.)
3. See Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
4. By consulting the World Wide Web connected by computer.
5. Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier, The Dawn of Magic/The Morning of the Magicians. – Tr.
6. In French, the word “entrainer” means both “to train” and “to drag.” – Tr.