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The catalpa bow
Review article C. B. ON C.B.: THE SHAMAN IN JAPAN Louis Allen A review of Carman Blacker, an5 Unwin, 1975, pp- 376,
The E8.75
Catalpa
Bow,
London:
Allen
This is a rare and elegant book. Rare, because it derives from an unusual combination of gifts in the writer and from a set of circumstances in the field of research which may vanish in the not too distant future; elegant because the personal intervention of the writer in her material is both discreet and expressed with sensitivity to literary as well as scholarly values. What Dr. Blacker seems to be attempting in The Catalpa Bow is a kind of archaeology of Japanese religion. Behind the Buddhist/Shinto surface pattern of a number of rituals observable in temples or during festivals, she tries to lay bare a hidden core of beliefs and practices which are much older, and which she groups under the general term of shamanism. Her use of the term is necessarily idiosyncratic, since not all the features associated with shamanism appear in the Japanese examples she uses, and therefore do not conform to Eliade's definition. On the other hand, a good deal of para-shamanistic activity, if one can use such a term, would also fail to fall within Eliade's terms, and yet seems to belong to a general complex of ideas recognisable to those who have analysed shamanism in its original Siberian setting. Perhaps a linear account of this important book would be helpful. Dr. Blacker's starting point is a work of literature, the No play Aoi no ue. The Princess Aoi's sickness is the result of possession by the spirit of a dead court lady. To cure the princess, a miko (sibyl) beats a drum and twangs the string of a bow of catalpa wood (azusa a verbal spell. This summons the spirit, who yumi) , using approaches across the bridge leading to the main stage. An ascetic figure then intervenes, whose cantrips overcome the evil spirit, which retreats back across the bridge to 91
92
Louis
Allen
'a realm where her hatred will be transformed to compassion and she will achieve the salvationary state of Budhahood'. This sets the style and theme of Dr. Blacker's book. Her own background is literary and linguistic as well as religious, and she moves with great and deceptive ease from literature into observation of facts. And the play itself hints towards the kind of spirit world and the powers that can reach into it, which are the province of the shaman. Succeeding chapters amplify the role of the shaman who, in a state of trance, communicates with the world of spirits. The bow of catalpa wood - which provides Dr. Blacker with a memorably alliterative title page - is the standard instrument for inducing trance. On the other hand, trance itself is not the only path. There seems to be an interesting polarization of roles between the medium (mike), whose physical activities are radically transformed, and the ascetic, whose characteristic is a profound state of suspended animation. These two act upon a variety of spiritual beings: the kami (numinous presences in natural objects such as trees, rocks and mountains) ; the ancestral ghost (tama, or 'soul') which resides in a host of some kind (the human and whose frontier of demarcation from the body, an animal) kami is by no means clear; the vengeful spirits of the dead who have been slighted or disregarded; and - perhaps most interesting of all (iconographically) the 'witch animals' who may, at the behest of some malevolent controller, enter the body of a human being. The commonest of these is the fox, kitsune, Dr. Blacker records a number of cases in which a medium will descry the presence of the fox in certain families about a very or houses, a presence which - even today - brings real ostracism. The spirit world proper to these beings is not the fairly rigid cosmos with which western or ancient Sumerian civilization have made us familiar. Nor is it the cosmos of Japan's oldest chronicle, the Kojiki, which depicts a fairly conventional three-tiered cosmos of upper realm, human world, The shaman's world is along and world of the dead below it. a horizontal axis, and at the same time subject to spatial it is remote and submarine, - but even this displacement, describes too precisely a very shifting and ambivalent locus. The ascetic's power to penetrate into this world is either a gift or something acquired by practices of denial and mortification (gy0). The 9-y; include fasting and standing under cold waterfalls (reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon saints). This subjection to intense cold has the contrary affect of producing in the ascetic that inner heat which is the token of his having transcended the human condition, enabling him
C.B.
on C.B.
Dr. Blacker reports the transference to walk on hot embers. she herself has walked unscathed effect to spectators, too: on embers in the presence of a yamabushi (mountain ascetic): The path was still alarmingly red and smoking by the time my turn came, but so effective apparently were the yamabushi's spells that the embers underfoot felt no more than pleasantly warm to the soles. I remain sceptical of explanations that the usual purifying libation of salt scattered over the embers will reduce their heat, that the Japanese sole is tougher than the western one or that a collected mind is required if one is to walk across unburnt. My feet are rather sensitive and my mind at the time was in turmoil, yet a mild warmth was all that I felt (251). (The adverb 'apparently' does a great deal of suspensive work in that first sentence). Mastery of fire is of course the shamanic characteristic. One thing that needs emphasizing is the role of women in these cults as in most contemporary 'new religions', which have close affinities to the shamanistic practices Dr. Blacker describes. The medium or sibyl (mike) whose role parallels that of the ascetic in terms of contact with the spirit world, used mirror, bells and the catalpa bow as a means of manipulating communication. These women are affiliated to shrines, and in some cases constituted groups large enough to have their own village, (miko-mura). Naturally enough, modern Japan has far fewer miko than Dr. Blacker supposes to have existed in the remote past. For one thing, the symptoms of 'arctic hysteria' which denote the shaman are taken for something far different by a modern secular society. 'Many women appear neurotic, peculiar or even half-witted merely because these powers are repressed or disguised within them.' (139) There is, I suppose, a problem of terminology involved in the description of phenomena which do not conform entirely to the Eliade definitions of shamanism; but it seems legitimate to assign the term to religions and practices which contain many of the features of shamanism, if not all of them, as Alfred Metraux did in his studies of shamanism in the Amazon basin and the Gran Chaco. He, incidentally, provides some interesting parallels with Dr. Blacker's definitions and descriptions: the type of food abstinence undergone by the neophyte, the use of sound summonses (maracas in the Chaco, bokken - a kind of castanet - in Japan), of stimulated trance, the power of a particular chant, the derivations of powers either from a direct revelation or as the result of a difficult period of initiation tests. Here, too, the chief
93
94
Louis
Allen
role is the cure of sickness, by invocation of spirits believed to be either helpful, or responsible for the sickness. The Amazonian shaman also predicts the future, casts spells on the hunt, and presides over religious ceremonies and dances. On the other hand - a difference of observer? Metraux describes the shaman as subject to the temptations of leadership, political power, and outright trickery, which play no part in Dr. Blacker's account, even though she refers on several occasions to the highly suspect Deguchi Onisaburo. Dr. Blacker does not, however, offer examples of the shaman as controlling action at a distance in a malevolent way, which Metraux calls one of the most striking characteristics of s. American shamanism. Another contrast is the full and frequent role of women in Japanese shamanism, with its exuberant flowering in the 'new religions', and the extremely infrequent intervention of women in the rites observed by Metraux. One question is bound to occur to the reader who has accompanied Dr. Blacker through her accounts of various initiation ceremonies and along the symbolic journeys, usually ascents of mountains, paralleling the mantic journey to the other world, via ordeals and barriers, which characterize so many initiates' visions. Why is the end product of the shamanic power so trivial? Does that question itself betray a misunderstanding of the values of the shaman's world? I do not think so. One is bound to wonder whether the sufferings undergone in the gyo are truly recompensed by the ability to answer such questions as 'How much will the rice harvest be this year? Will there be any fires? Will the silk-worms give a good yield are the exorcising powers, next year?' More serious, no doubt, chiefly employed at the present day by priests of the Nichiren who train themselves for the task by severe sect of Buddhism, austerities. It is in discussing these that Dr. Blacker, uncharacteristically, puts forward an interpretation which seems Most of the exorcist's patients are exclusively feminist. women. Similar cases in Somaliland have been interpreted as the emergence of a submerged protest by underprivileged women, to obtain gifts from their husbands in return for silencing the spirit, which leads them to displays of public flamboyance. The Japanese case is dissimilar, declares Dr. Blacker, because the exorcism is private, not public, and the objects demanded are not things which would satisfy women, but things like slices of bean curd which would satisfy the But, she continues, possessing animal, a fox, for example. young married housewives are among the most oppressed people in Japanese society, and this can, arguably, produce a need in part of the mind to express resentment by means of unconventional speech. The unbalanced part of the mind once appeased by the acknowledgment constituted by the exorcism
C.B.
ritual,
on C.B.
the
95
patient's
mind
returns
to
balance.
or rather de-mystification, This kind of explanation, occurs rarely in Dr. Blacker's book, and this is one of her literary attractions: when her own interventions in rites are or her encounters with priests and mediums, the described, record is made without ostentatious sceptical arriere-pensee. Indeed, there are moments when the reader is left wondering precisely what the author's belief-attitudes are to the phenomena described. She recalls an encounter with an old woman in a forest reciting a rosary of invocations to tenqu, a sometimes hostile, sometimes neutral force of nature manifesting itself as half-man, half-bird of prey. Could the old women see the tenqu? She turned to face me, a brown face peculiarly like an old bird, with an expression fierce yet remote and a pair of extraordinary glittering eyes, brightly sparkling like steel. 'If you do gyo like me you can see them,' she replied abruptly. I asked again if the kami in the great tree was very strong. 'Ask it anything you like. The tree is more than a thousand years old,' she replied, and without another word and without looking behind her she plunged rapidly down the mountainside until she disappeared among the dark green trees and yellow leaves. Only after she had gone did I remember that the tenqu were traditionally believed to have brightly glittering eyes, and hence realize that the woman was extraordinarily like a tenqu herself (p. 185). The perceptiveness and sensibility which have gone into the making of this book are as important as the scholarly research and the endless journeys up remote mountains and in the depths of distant woods, in conditions of considerable physical hardship. They are the key to the author's conviction that many of the rituals she has witnessed and recorded will soon be gone for ever. The tourist buses, with their microphone wielding guides, and the intrusive television camera, will inexorably put an end to the atmosphere in which these rituals had meaning. The 'archaic mysticism', another way of defining shamanism in the Japanese context, must disappear when confronted by a world view in which there is no barrier to cross from the profane into the sacred, because the sacred has ceased to exist. The Catalpa Bow, then, more than anything else, is a historical record, which the Japanese themselves will value, of a state of affairs soon to be known to the vast majority of them only in terms of occasional allusions and seasonal festivals.
The E8.75
Catalpa
Bow,
London:
Allen
This is a rare and elegant book. Rare, because it derives from an unusual combination of gifts in the writer and from a set of circumstances in the field of research which may vanish in the not too distant future; elegant because the personal intervention of the writer in her material is both discreet and expressed with sensitivity to literary as well as scholarly values. What Dr. Blacker seems to be attempting in The Catalpa Bow is a kind of archaeology of Japanese religion. Behind the Buddhist/Shinto surface pattern of a number of rituals observable in temples or during festivals, she tries to lay bare a hidden core of beliefs and practices which are much older, and which she groups under the general term of shamanism. Her use of the term is necessarily idiosyncratic, since not all the features associated with shamanism appear in the Japanese examples she uses, and therefore do not conform to Eliade's definition. On the other hand, a good deal of para-shamanistic activity, if one can use such a term, would also fail to fall within Eliade's terms, and yet seems to belong to a general complex of ideas recognisable to those who have analysed shamanism in its original Siberian setting. Perhaps a linear account of this important book would be helpful. Dr. Blacker's starting point is a work of literature, the No play Aoi no ue. The Princess Aoi's sickness is the result of possession by the spirit of a dead court lady. To cure the princess, a miko (sibyl) beats a drum and twangs the string of a bow of catalpa wood (azusa a verbal spell. This summons the spirit, who yumi) , using approaches across the bridge leading to the main stage. An ascetic figure then intervenes, whose cantrips overcome the evil spirit, which retreats back across the bridge to 91
92
Louis
Allen
'a realm where her hatred will be transformed to compassion and she will achieve the salvationary state of Budhahood'. This sets the style and theme of Dr. Blacker's book. Her own background is literary and linguistic as well as religious, and she moves with great and deceptive ease from literature into observation of facts. And the play itself hints towards the kind of spirit world and the powers that can reach into it, which are the province of the shaman. Succeeding chapters amplify the role of the shaman who, in a state of trance, communicates with the world of spirits. The bow of catalpa wood - which provides Dr. Blacker with a memorably alliterative title page - is the standard instrument for inducing trance. On the other hand, trance itself is not the only path. There seems to be an interesting polarization of roles between the medium (mike), whose physical activities are radically transformed, and the ascetic, whose characteristic is a profound state of suspended animation. These two act upon a variety of spiritual beings: the kami (numinous presences in natural objects such as trees, rocks and mountains) ; the ancestral ghost (tama, or 'soul') which resides in a host of some kind (the human and whose frontier of demarcation from the body, an animal) kami is by no means clear; the vengeful spirits of the dead who have been slighted or disregarded; and - perhaps most interesting of all (iconographically) the 'witch animals' who may, at the behest of some malevolent controller, enter the body of a human being. The commonest of these is the fox, kitsune, Dr. Blacker records a number of cases in which a medium will descry the presence of the fox in certain families about a very or houses, a presence which - even today - brings real ostracism. The spirit world proper to these beings is not the fairly rigid cosmos with which western or ancient Sumerian civilization have made us familiar. Nor is it the cosmos of Japan's oldest chronicle, the Kojiki, which depicts a fairly conventional three-tiered cosmos of upper realm, human world, The shaman's world is along and world of the dead below it. a horizontal axis, and at the same time subject to spatial it is remote and submarine, - but even this displacement, describes too precisely a very shifting and ambivalent locus. The ascetic's power to penetrate into this world is either a gift or something acquired by practices of denial and mortification (gy0). The 9-y; include fasting and standing under cold waterfalls (reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon saints). This subjection to intense cold has the contrary affect of producing in the ascetic that inner heat which is the token of his having transcended the human condition, enabling him
C.B.
on C.B.
Dr. Blacker reports the transference to walk on hot embers. she herself has walked unscathed effect to spectators, too: on embers in the presence of a yamabushi (mountain ascetic): The path was still alarmingly red and smoking by the time my turn came, but so effective apparently were the yamabushi's spells that the embers underfoot felt no more than pleasantly warm to the soles. I remain sceptical of explanations that the usual purifying libation of salt scattered over the embers will reduce their heat, that the Japanese sole is tougher than the western one or that a collected mind is required if one is to walk across unburnt. My feet are rather sensitive and my mind at the time was in turmoil, yet a mild warmth was all that I felt (251). (The adverb 'apparently' does a great deal of suspensive work in that first sentence). Mastery of fire is of course the shamanic characteristic. One thing that needs emphasizing is the role of women in these cults as in most contemporary 'new religions', which have close affinities to the shamanistic practices Dr. Blacker describes. The medium or sibyl (mike) whose role parallels that of the ascetic in terms of contact with the spirit world, used mirror, bells and the catalpa bow as a means of manipulating communication. These women are affiliated to shrines, and in some cases constituted groups large enough to have their own village, (miko-mura). Naturally enough, modern Japan has far fewer miko than Dr. Blacker supposes to have existed in the remote past. For one thing, the symptoms of 'arctic hysteria' which denote the shaman are taken for something far different by a modern secular society. 'Many women appear neurotic, peculiar or even half-witted merely because these powers are repressed or disguised within them.' (139) There is, I suppose, a problem of terminology involved in the description of phenomena which do not conform entirely to the Eliade definitions of shamanism; but it seems legitimate to assign the term to religions and practices which contain many of the features of shamanism, if not all of them, as Alfred Metraux did in his studies of shamanism in the Amazon basin and the Gran Chaco. He, incidentally, provides some interesting parallels with Dr. Blacker's definitions and descriptions: the type of food abstinence undergone by the neophyte, the use of sound summonses (maracas in the Chaco, bokken - a kind of castanet - in Japan), of stimulated trance, the power of a particular chant, the derivations of powers either from a direct revelation or as the result of a difficult period of initiation tests. Here, too, the chief
93
94
Louis
Allen
role is the cure of sickness, by invocation of spirits believed to be either helpful, or responsible for the sickness. The Amazonian shaman also predicts the future, casts spells on the hunt, and presides over religious ceremonies and dances. On the other hand - a difference of observer? Metraux describes the shaman as subject to the temptations of leadership, political power, and outright trickery, which play no part in Dr. Blacker's account, even though she refers on several occasions to the highly suspect Deguchi Onisaburo. Dr. Blacker does not, however, offer examples of the shaman as controlling action at a distance in a malevolent way, which Metraux calls one of the most striking characteristics of s. American shamanism. Another contrast is the full and frequent role of women in Japanese shamanism, with its exuberant flowering in the 'new religions', and the extremely infrequent intervention of women in the rites observed by Metraux. One question is bound to occur to the reader who has accompanied Dr. Blacker through her accounts of various initiation ceremonies and along the symbolic journeys, usually ascents of mountains, paralleling the mantic journey to the other world, via ordeals and barriers, which characterize so many initiates' visions. Why is the end product of the shamanic power so trivial? Does that question itself betray a misunderstanding of the values of the shaman's world? I do not think so. One is bound to wonder whether the sufferings undergone in the gyo are truly recompensed by the ability to answer such questions as 'How much will the rice harvest be this year? Will there be any fires? Will the silk-worms give a good yield are the exorcising powers, next year?' More serious, no doubt, chiefly employed at the present day by priests of the Nichiren who train themselves for the task by severe sect of Buddhism, austerities. It is in discussing these that Dr. Blacker, uncharacteristically, puts forward an interpretation which seems Most of the exorcist's patients are exclusively feminist. women. Similar cases in Somaliland have been interpreted as the emergence of a submerged protest by underprivileged women, to obtain gifts from their husbands in return for silencing the spirit, which leads them to displays of public flamboyance. The Japanese case is dissimilar, declares Dr. Blacker, because the exorcism is private, not public, and the objects demanded are not things which would satisfy women, but things like slices of bean curd which would satisfy the But, she continues, possessing animal, a fox, for example. young married housewives are among the most oppressed people in Japanese society, and this can, arguably, produce a need in part of the mind to express resentment by means of unconventional speech. The unbalanced part of the mind once appeased by the acknowledgment constituted by the exorcism
C.B.
ritual,
on C.B.
the
95
patient's
mind
returns
to
balance.
or rather de-mystification, This kind of explanation, occurs rarely in Dr. Blacker's book, and this is one of her literary attractions: when her own interventions in rites are or her encounters with priests and mediums, the described, record is made without ostentatious sceptical arriere-pensee. Indeed, there are moments when the reader is left wondering precisely what the author's belief-attitudes are to the phenomena described. She recalls an encounter with an old woman in a forest reciting a rosary of invocations to tenqu, a sometimes hostile, sometimes neutral force of nature manifesting itself as half-man, half-bird of prey. Could the old women see the tenqu? She turned to face me, a brown face peculiarly like an old bird, with an expression fierce yet remote and a pair of extraordinary glittering eyes, brightly sparkling like steel. 'If you do gyo like me you can see them,' she replied abruptly. I asked again if the kami in the great tree was very strong. 'Ask it anything you like. The tree is more than a thousand years old,' she replied, and without another word and without looking behind her she plunged rapidly down the mountainside until she disappeared among the dark green trees and yellow leaves. Only after she had gone did I remember that the tenqu were traditionally believed to have brightly glittering eyes, and hence realize that the woman was extraordinarily like a tenqu herself (p. 185). The perceptiveness and sensibility which have gone into the making of this book are as important as the scholarly research and the endless journeys up remote mountains and in the depths of distant woods, in conditions of considerable physical hardship. They are the key to the author's conviction that many of the rituals she has witnessed and recorded will soon be gone for ever. The tourist buses, with their microphone wielding guides, and the intrusive television camera, will inexorably put an end to the atmosphere in which these rituals had meaning. The 'archaic mysticism', another way of defining shamanism in the Japanese context, must disappear when confronted by a world view in which there is no barrier to cross from the profane into the sacred, because the sacred has ceased to exist. The Catalpa Bow, then, more than anything else, is a historical record, which the Japanese themselves will value, of a state of affairs soon to be known to the vast majority of them only in terms of occasional allusions and seasonal festivals.