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Well, I study Social Anthropology, but like I said, this is a wild module. Animals And People is actually part of the conservation degree I think.
My seminar leader is not, or at least has never suggested that he is, a shaman. However we have been studying the shamanic figure for a while and he, like my lecturers from my Social Anthropology modules, has lived with, or at least had sustained contact with, an indigenous people.
From the point of view furthered by this module, the shamanic experience shares an awful lot of similarities throughout the world, and I think the leader was attempting to create a sort of architypal shamanic experience.
I truely wasn't expecting anything from it, being pretty cynical, but some people had experiences, and like I said, I was intruiged.
In terms of what happened to me, I was mostly concerned that it didn't fit the expected pattern. I could imagine going into the earth (Through a tree stump, in my case), then crawling through a tight earth tunnel, the coming out on to a wide stone spiral staircase, running around the outside of a cyclindrical chamber too deep and dark for me to see the bottom of.
The seminar leader had told us that there may be some ambiguity between where imagination ends and something else begins. With the staircase, I began to feel like this.
He had also told us that we would (hopefully), break out into a well lit, open skied world, and see many animals. He told us that it was generally accepted you needed to see an animal three times for you to able to call it a 'power animal' and that cold blooded creatures were generally considered too dangerous for unexperienced people to form a bond with.
Well eventually I started falling down the center of this chamber, dreamed I was in dark water, and felt that I was moving strangely. This is where my 'animal experience' is, if it even qualifies. I could only describe my movement in terms of a fish or a centipede. Those were the images that I had. Not that I'd met one, but that I was one. I was a fish or whatever.
Well from there it got less interesting. It became more mundane. I dreamed that I was still in bed with my ex girlfriend, and that all the time that I'd spent away, and at university, was a dream that I was waking up from. I dreamed that a line of cold was drawn around my body like a white line. Other, 'normal dream' stuff like that. And then I heard the drumming signal that we were supposed to listen to to come back, and (following the instructions my seminar leader had given), retraced the journey down I'd taken, and came back out of the tree stump.
Other people in my class had dreams about meeting Jaguars, or seeing lots of animals in the underworld, and I felt I'd missed something.
I may well give it another go, especially after next terms module, 'People and Plants', which is almost entirely an invstigation of hallucinagens and our interaction with them.
(Also I think "The Way of the Shaman" is on the reading list for one of my modules, not sure its this one) |
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