-:- little vision tricksters -:-
-:- notes and references -:-
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:: Notes ::
(*1) – And indeed, a group of scientists in 2005 planned to visit some of the remote caves where the islanders report the last of the Ebu Gogo lived to see if there are any remains to be found that date from later than 11,000 years ago.
(*2) – Most of these Chamorros were not elderly, as one might imagine when discussing apparently superstitious beliefs such as these. One of the guys I befriended was a DJ, another was a flight attendant, a third was a bartender. All were thoroughly Western in appearance and in the majority of their attitudes such that to say so seems almost offensive. It simply goes to show the persistence of these ‘spook beliefs’ with which this essay deals. We will see a similar phenomenon among the Japanese.
(*3) – including, in the most famous example in Irish mythology of this kind of abduction to paradise tale, the poet Oisin, who returned several hundred years later thinking that he had only been away for a few years. He thus now lived in the Christian Age, but died when he suddenly aged after stepping off his horse. Irish mythology is filled with this sense of the Passing of the Ages, and its elaborate and ancient mythical system lends itself well to anyone with a taste for the fabulous.
(*4) – This type of thinking in the Irish is often derided, particularly among the British and their cultural descendants. This is unfortunate and misses the point. Rather, I believe the Irish should be well congratulated for successfully preserving a multiple functioning pre-Christian mythical image into the modern age, and then marketing it across the world as a kind of national ‘brand’ along with the shamrock and St. Patrick to help draw in both tourists and earn the country a healthy measure of international business confidence.
(*5) – and as a fluent speaker of Japanese for over seven years, I believe I am able to hold an opinion on these conceptual and lexical boundaries of such words with a measure of experience and authority.
(*6) – Many of my students in Japan went to shrines to pray for good fortune in their exams. Their method of praying was enchanting as it clearly conserved a very ancient and primitive aspect – that of clapping before praying so as to bring the kami’s attention to the worshipper. This practice can probably be traced back to some of the earliest modes of religious thinking in mankind.
(*7) – Alas, as in many other parties of the world, a small native nation had become subject to a larger neighbour and as a result, the vast majority of Ainu have been Japanised, and this unique relationship to the sacred has disappeared. In no other anthropological literature have I read of such ‘berating’ songs as were once practiced among the Ainu to punish their ‘gods’.
(*8) – The terms ‘Carib’ and ‘Arawak’ are predominantly linguistic terms and refer to two groups of peoples who, like the ‘Indo-Europeans’ (another linguistic term), migrated out from an ancient homeland to cover vast areas of the world. By 1500AD Carib and Arawak peoples could be found as far afield as the island of Cuba in the north and Paraguay in the south and by and large they replaced the languages of the peoples with whom they came into contact with a dialect of their own. However, the Amazon also contains numerous tribes, who like the Basques in Europe , held their heads against this cultural onslaught and still speak what might be terms a pre-Carib/Arawak language. The Yanomami are one such people.
(*9) - For some reason, until very recently, mankind has almost universally done it this way - externalise his own creative, transformative and destructive powers and then entreat those powers as if they were in reality external to effect change within the world. It is as if mankind was afraid of his own power and sought to hide it with this ritual way of thinking. It is only with the rise of the technological age that mankind has sought a more direct transformative method.
(*10) - Of course it is by no means certain that this assumption can be made - it may be that the vast majority of reports are literally true and we are in actuality regularly visited. However, in this essay, aliens are modelled as a type of modern spook, an assumption which may be equally shaky.
(*11) - Sometimes, a good imagination is not my forté!
(*12) - This is not the only experience with spooks that I have had. Whilst in Japan there were numerous times when I felt the presence of kami within their shrines, and since that time I have detected them in forest glades as well as salvia space. One might equally conclude that I have a nervous system particularly sensitive to their presences (if one is to believe that they are external), or that I am particularly creative in manipulating my own belief systems and levels of experience so that spook-based neurologies can enter my senses (if one is to believe that they are internal).
(*13) - Actually it also survives in modern, technological Japan, untouched as that country is by dogmatic religions which have ravaged other cultures.
:: References ::
David Mowaljarlai & Jutta Malnic - 'Yorro Yorro: Aboriginal Creation and the Renewal of Nature' - 1993, Inner Traditions
William Fitzhugh & Chisato Dubreui - 'Ainu: Spirit of a Northern people' - 2001, University of Washington Press
Ben Blas - 'Bisita Guam' - 1998
Sokyo Ono - 'Shinto - The Kami Way' - 1995, Charles E. Tuttle
Napoleon Chagnon - 'Yanomamo: The Fierce People' - 1996, Thomson Learning
Rick Strassman - 'DMT: the Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of near-Death and Mystical Experiences' - 2001, Park Street Press
(c) Bruce Rimell, June 2005
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