The Strong Eye of Shamanism by Robert E. Ryan

Author:Robert E. Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2012-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 29. Rock engraving implying shaman’s avian transformation and magical flight, southern Africa.

We can clearly see this structural similarity in an account given to Morris Opler by the son of a prominent Apache bear shaman.127 The shaman’s son recounts that his father lay asleep near a place called the White Sands:

While he was sleeping at this place, something came to him. This happened toward morning, and he was sound asleep. Something touched him and told him to awake for it had good things to tell him. He pushed the cover off his head, and there beside him sat a silver-tip bear. It spoke in a human way to him and told him it was time for him to get up, that it was here he would get something to know and to travel by.

He got up. He knew that a door was open to him. He just walked right in, into the rocks. He was led into a room, and the grizzly bear changed itself into the form of a man and told him to follow wherever it went.

He showed my father through a gate where striking rocks were hitting against each other all the time. Then they came to a place where four points of rock went back and forth. They also walked through that. They came to another rock that was rolling and was in the form of a round ball, just like a hill. It hit the bank on the other side all the time. But they walked over it and didn’t even notice it strike the bank. Then they came to a swinging rock door and passed through it safely.

Here we encounter once more the initiatory dream experience; the therianthropic spirit guide; the opening in the earth, which will become a “cave”; and the traversing of the opposites, both in the form of the Symplegades symbolism and, as we shall see, as animal pairs within the cave. The shaman has entered a door in the rock, which mystically opens to him much like the “hole too small” that Sereptie enters. And he finds himself within the type of the “holy caves shamans describe.” More tellingly, the cave journey is through paired members of supernatural animal species, each characterized by opposition (in this instance black and white):

They now saw two big bears, one black and one white, at a gate. The leader said to continue, and they went between them. Further on they came to two big snakes, a black one and a white one, but they went between these also without trouble. This time something that was never seen before [in accounts of the acquisition of supernatural power known to the narrator] was present in the cave. It was the wolf, the big timber wolf. There was a black one and a white one. In all the holy caves the shamans describe, they never speak of seeing a wolf at all. They tell of coyotes, skunks, and other animals, but not wolves. The wolf spoke to my father, but still he went on.

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