These questions are just as relevant today as they were 100,000+ years ago. Why is there birth and why is there death?. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of The Dead): In other words, the shaman’s task was to help everyone in the tribe find answers to their variations of the four great questions (from W. Her statement sounds very similar to Shelley’s remark that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and Ezra Pound’s statement that ‘Artists are the antennae of the race.’ It was the job of the shaman to be, as Joan Halifax says in Shamanic Voices, ‘the fine tuner of the psyche of his tribe’. I hope you find something stimulating and worthwhile in them.)Īs Rogan Taylor shows in his book The Death and Resurrection Show, all artists, both serious and popular, are descendants of the original shamans who helped their tribes understand their place in the cosmos. Owing to its length, I’ll publish it here in two instalments. As with last month’s blog post on Imagination, I had forgotten about the piece until recently. I wrote this revision a few years ago but never found a home for it. (The following is based on a chapter of my MA thesis.
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