Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1999 01:44:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Orpheus <cw_duff-AT-alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject: shamans/for charles gavette(fwd from the bataille list)


Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1999 13:49:06 -0500 (EST)
>

In their reading of Castaneda, D&G in How Do You Make Yourself A Body
without Organs, in 1000 PLateaus, write that shamanic experimentation,
with or without drugs, involves letting go of interpretation which is
most effective when consc. is dipped in a river of forgetfullness.
While in this situation it cannot be said to be passive because
attentive to whatever may emerge for itself while reading urban oracles
whose outcome always is uncertain, like the throw of dice. Also, in
this text D&G, allow the constructive concept of making a BwO to resonate
with Artaud's theater of cruelty which undermines the authority and
intentionality of a prior text on what is going, on stage, which is an
alchemical transformation of subjectivity. You know, the sort of thing
discussed in all serious academic enviroments. Ha ha.

Aeneas, in one of the seminal ports of shamanic practice, Book six of
Virgil's _Aeneid_, The Visit To The Underworld, comes to Euboean
Cumae's coast, that is, comes to hear some _Sybilline Oracles_, twelve
books composed between second century BCE and the seventh century CE
combining Jewish apocalyptic literature with Christian elements, a
hybrid work, border-writing. Aeneas and his companions must pass
through Diana's woods but there is also traces of cretan culture "with
the wandering track that might not be unraveled"...

a warning perhaps for all travelers...