Óðinn, chief of the Æsir, was a very complex god. He was a god of poetry, madness, healing, magic and prophecy; he was the leader of the Wild Hunt; he welcomes the heroes of Valhalla and prepares them for Ragnarök; the Valkyries serve him; he is called the betrayer of heroes, because he arranges the deaths of mighty warriors so he can have them for Valhalla; he is a shapeshifter. To find a consistency in Óðinn’s character, one must turn to shamanism: the shapeshifting, mad, poetic, prophetic magicians who oversaw the balance of life and death in forager societies. In many ways, Óðinn is an excellent stand-in for shamanism itself. Several stories tell of how he made great sacrifices for knowledge, a common shamanic theme. For example, Óðinn went to Mimir’s Well, near Jötunheimr, as Vegtam the Wanderer, and sacrificed his eye to learn the past, present and future—leading to his knowledge of, and preperation for, Ragnarök. There is a myth recorded in the Rúnatal, a section of the Hávamál, wherein Óðinn is hung from the world tree, Yggdrasill, and pierced with his own spear. Most shamanic traditions speak of an axis mundi that the shaman climbs, or descends, to gain access to other realms of the spirit world. In this myth, Óðinn sees the runes reflected in the water beneath him, and gains not only written language, but the magical powers of the written word.

Before the widespread rise of literacy, writing was often believed to be magical. The Norse runes were not just a writing system; they were also a means of divination and spellcasting. The ability to transmute thought into a visible symbol was appreciated as a powerful kind of magic, and the power that writing had to transform the mind of the reader was held with great respect. Even today, it is not uncommon (particularly in the rural United States) to encounter a certain anti-intellectualism, a deep mistrust for scholars, academics, and those whose views are shaped primarily by reading. We distinguish between “book learning” and other kinds. We recognize that an academic understanding of a subject—an understanding grounded in literacy—comes from a very different source of power than the one we’re typically familiar with.

Writing was identified by V. Gordon Childe as one of five “secondary characteristics” of civilization.¹ Though generally associated with civilization, it is only a correlation. Scholars continue to debate whether or not the unquestionable civilization and significant empire of Teotihuacan had any writing system.^2,3 The Inka quite distinctly did not have a writing system; instead, they used sophisticated quipu. That said, it is generally true that civilizations tend to have writing systems, while other forms of society tend not to.

Walter J. Ong’s Orality & Literacy remains one of the seminal studies detailing the important impact that literacy has on human thought, and how transformative it can be in shaping our most basic approach to the world. Ong points out that “human society first formed itself with the aid of oral speech, becoming literate very late in its history.” The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the grammatical organization and vocabulary of a person’s language changes the way in which we percieve and experience the world. This can defy “common sense,” but ethnographic examples abound. Some cultures cannot connect the abstraction of a picture to the physical thing it is supposed to represent; even abstractions like mathematics or colors can vary widely from culture to culture, often bound to the structure of language. With so much neural architecture in our brains for language, it seems only reasonable that our experience, our perception, and even our capacity for thought would be bound to one extent or another by the structure of our language. As early as the sixth century, Bhartrihari wrote on this topic, while Wilhelm von Humboldt’s essay “Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium” (”On the comparative study of languages”) stands as one of the key points in the Western history of the idea. The inspiration for Sapir and Whorf came from Immanuel Kant, and Franz Boas:

One important philosophical approach at the time was a revival of interest in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant claimed that knowledge was the result of concrete cognitive work on the part of an individual person—reality (”sensuous intuition”) was inherently in flux and understanding resulted when someone took that intuition and interpreted it via their “categories of the understanding.” Different individuals may thus perceive the same noumenal reality as phenomenal instances of their different, individual concepts.

In the United States, Boas encountered Native American languages from many different linguistic families—all of which were quite different from the Semitic and Indo-European languages which most European scholars studied. Boas came to realize how greatly ways of life and grammatical categories could vary from one place to another. As a result he came to believe that the culture and lifeways of a people were reflected in the language that they spoke.⁴

If we can see the influence of language in general on our capacity for thought, then the question Ong addresses becomes vital—how does orality, or literacy, shape our cognition and perception? To what extent is our experience of the world “as it is,” and to what extent is it mediated and formed by our literacy?

Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. A literate person, asked to think of the word “nevertheless,” will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word “nevertheless” for, let us say, 60 seconds, without adverting to any lettering but only to the sound. This is to say, a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people. (Ong, 1982, p. 12)

To return to our original notion of the mystical nature of writing for a moment, there is something irrevocably “lost” when one learns to read, namely, orality. This theme of a “forbidden knowledge” that, once learned, changes a person irrevocably is another common theme in mythology and shamanic experience, though this is of course only one application of that notion. Later, Ong contrasts this with the oral approach:

In a primary oral culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might “call” them back–”recall” them. But there is nowhere to “look” for them. They have no focus and no trace (a visual metaphor, showing dependency on writing), not even a trajectory. They are occurrences, events. (Ong, 1982, p. 31)

One reviewer summarizes Ong’s view of orality this way:

To “hear” the word/world is to “know what you can recall” (33). Hence, any and all sustained thought is necessarily tied to memory. Formulas construct worlds. “Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them” (35). To “hear” the word/world is to reside inside paratactic structures rather than the hypotaxis of literacy (37). Sound constructs aggregations, lending to knowing an epithetical quality of thinking/knowing/saying “which high literacy rejects as cumbersome and tirelessly redundant because of its aggregative weight” (38). The heard/sounded world, evanescent, knows itself in the redundancy of the copiously sounded expression rather than the “sparse linearity” of the durable written line (40). This need to say repeatedly what is known constructs a “highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation” (41). Knowing, therefore, operates close to lived experience; the known is always already tied to the knower (42). The tone of the oral world “sounds” agonistic to the literate; “orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle” (44). The structure of orality dualistically constructs the world into a highly “polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villains and heroes” (45). Oral subjects, living in a close, “empathetic, communal identification with the known” (45), homeostatically slough off “memories which no longer have present relevance” (46). The sounded/heard world is “minimally abstract”; it is essentially “situational” (49).⁵

Writing twelve years after the publication of Ong’s work and drawing on a number of other sources as well, Mark Willis is able to offer this summary of oral culture in “Literacy, Orality, and Cognition: An Overview“:

Goody and Watt (1968) characterize the transmission of knowledge in oral cultures as a “long chain of interlocking conversations” (p. 29). The meaning of words is established through direct semantic ratification in concrete situations, usually accompanied by gestures and facial expressions. Grounded in face-to-face events, knowledge is immediately experienced and deeply socialized.

Extended thought in oral cultures is stored and retrieved from memory through mnemonic patterns called oral formulas. The formulas organize information in carefully wrought clusters stored deep in the unconscious. (Ong, 1982) Oral cultures strive to preserve formulaic knowledge intact rather than dismantling it through analytic processes. Ong (1982) paraphrases a famous summary statement from Claude Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (1966, p. 245) thus: “The oral mind totalizes” (Ong, 1982, p. 39).

Oral cultures tend to live in the present, not the past. The content of knowledge is maintained in present rather than historical contexts. It changes through a homeostatic process of forgetting or transforming extraneous information. Inconsistencies in oral knowledge are transmuted or glossed over rather than corrected through analysis. (Goody and Watt, 1968)

By contrast:

The advent of writing in literate cultures changes the structure of knowledge and cultural tradition. Human interaction is not limited to the impermanence of oral utterance in an event-bound context. (Goody & Watt, 1968) Writing fixes utterance as visual records that are stable, transferable across space and time, and cumulative outside the memory of individuals.

Goody (1977) explains that writing transforms speech by abstracting its components. Words in written texts are more “thing-like” (Ong, 1982, p. 97). Their meaning can be looked up in other written texts and do not require direct ratification through interpersonal situations. Written texts enable backward-scanning of thought to make corrections and resolve inconsistencies. This self-analysis or criticism is inhibited by face-to-face communication in oral cultures.

Writing enables both the recording and the dissecting of verbal utterance. Literate cultures have permanent records of past thought which can be compared and questioned skeptically. Such skepticism enables the building and testing of alternative explanations of knowledge. In ancient Greece, the shift from oral to literate thought processes resulted in the “logical, specialized, and cumulative intellectual tradition” of Plato. (Goody and Watt, 1968, pp. 68-69)

The “preliterate” mode is routinely denigrated, though Ong is careful to stress that orality and literacy are radically different, but neither is superior to the other.

We find the similar distinction in the anthropology. Lévy-Bruhl, disciple of Durkheim, argued that the mode of thought of preliterate people was so different from the formal logic that it can only be mystical and expressive of emotions. Sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (like Freud), following the way Lévy-Bruhl opened, considered almost all religion, art and morality as essentially non-logical. The observation that led Lévy-Bruhl to deduce preliterate people’s thought is their personalisation of the universe, that is feeling their life in unity with plants and animals that means violation of the law of identity (or law of non-contradiction).⁶

In the same vein, Barton McLean suggests a parallel between the holistic patterns of preliterate thought and music:

For example, cultural anthropologists have found that preliterate cultures often do not systematically form thoughts with individual building-block words as we do in the West. The preliterate thought process is largely holistic (as is music), unlike the Western tendency to separate word from thought and alphabet letter from word, forming a hierarchal structure where, as McLuhan says, “semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds.” McLuhan and others have gone on to show how this separation of symbol from its meaning relates to the advent of movable type printing and is essential to the fostering of the industrial-technological-scientific society: this extension and separation of the symbol from direct contact with that being symbolized enabled it to become modular and reproducible en masse, resulting in, for example, a car part made in Japan for production in Detroit, a scientific journal in one city being understood in another distant laboratory without direct contact, or a sonata written in one location performed in another by another individual.⁷

There is a recurring theme in these descriptions, speaking to the “holism” of oral culture, and the constrasting “reductionism” of literacy. Whether this is lauded, denigrated, or seen as neutral, this is consistently the psychological and cognitive shift noted from orality to literacy. The reductionistic nature of literacy is laid out in the codification of thought, with meaning formed from a physical, hierarchical structure whereby letters form words, words sentences, sentences paragraphs, and paragraphs longer, more creative works like essays, articles, novels and so on. Literate peoples speak of the “structure” of a piece of writing, and learn from a hierarchical presentation of thought, codified in written symbols. All learning is restricted solely to the visual field, leading to the primacy of observation—distinctly a matter of primarily visual senses and measurement. The psychological implication of literacy is a tendency to break things down: literacy leads, above all, to discernment.

Ong’s study details the oral tradition evident in the Homeric epics, as an example of oral culture, and finds a powerful example of the impact of literacy in Plato, thus showing the transition within a single culture.

Ong devotes most of his second chapter to a brief account of studies done by Milman Parry and Eric Havelock on the noetic characteristics of oral cultures. After summarizing Parry’s investigation of the tradition of the oral epic and his writings on Homeric poetry, Ong states that we cannot but be convinced that Parry was correct in concluding that “the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier—to put it more bluntly, the cliché” (23). According to Ong the Greeks of Homer’s age relied on such formulaic uses of language to aid in the retention of knowledge. Without writing, if thoughts were not expressed in easily remembered forms and were not constantly repeated, they would be lost. Ong then explains that Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato, extended Parry’s conclusions to include the entirety of ancient Greek culture. In Ong’s words, Havelock shows how “Plato’s exclusion of the poets from his Republic was in fact Plato’s rejection of the pristine aggregative, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis or dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorizat ion of the alphabet in the Greek psyche” (28).⁸

Literacy helps us break the world down using abstraction and a hierarchically-organized view of reality. It also tempts us to see hierarchy as the essential nature of reality, but the persistence and greater antiquity of oral cultures shows us that what we think of as unviersal experience or objective reality may not be as universal or objective as we imagine.

Reductionism and discernment leads to a discrete seperation of the senses. Sights are only seen; noises are only heard, and so on. This eliminates the magical feeling of synaesthesia, the union of senses. Foragers are commonly synaesthetes. The senses are not broken into discrete forms, but often intermingle and are experienced as a single, sensory whole.

There are beings, many of them human beings, that see, smell, hear, remember, sense more than we do. This is not a genetic accident, like being taller than six-foot-five or having an IQ of 150 or high cheekbones. This is a matter of culture. The human beings who maintain these 0hyper-refined senses are hunter-gatherers. Their impressive powers of perception have been noted and detailed by just about every student of hunter-gatherer groups. It is not only that they sense more than the rest of us do, but that they do so in a qualitatively different fashion. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram leans on philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of synaesthesia to explain Abram’s own experience with hunter-gatherer perceptions. The term “synaesthesia” describes something every child knows. In fact, Merleau-Ponty believes that we have “unlearned how to see, hear, and, generally speaking, to feel.” Synaesthesia is the mental function (or suite of functions) in which the senses run together, in which colors have a feel to them and tastes have a color. We speak of a loud shirt, of bright music, yet how often do we sense reality this way? For Abram and other observers, the phenomenon marks a total immersion in sense, when the observer is no longer in control, no longer separating and analyzing sight, sound, and texture, and becomes a part of his sensual surroundings. That is, the observer calls forth the world. (Manning, 2004)

In light of this impact of literacy vs. orality, the differing percentage of synaesthetes in literary vs. oral cultures is something worthy of note, particularly in that we have already a suggestive mechanism for this disparity. If literacy trains the mind to break the world down into its smallest constituent parts and understand it through reductionistic logic, and oral cultures encourage a “holistic” or synthetic view—a view disposed towards synaesthesia, which may even actively encourage it—then the only surprise we should expect is how effective the two modes of communication are at training perception on such a basic level.

Where literacy codifies thought into a hierarchy of perception and reductionistic discernment, orality relies on formulas and conventions to aid in memory and retelling. The game of “telephone” is often used naïvely to dismiss the capacity of human memory, but this is a straw man. First and foremost, the game is typically played among the young of literate cultures, who have already been trained to think in a literate maner even if they cannot yet read. The reliance on writing leads to the atrophy of memory, whereas the regular exercise of memory, such as one finds in oral cultures, leads to such “astonishing” feats of memory as this:

In The Harmless People, Marshall told how one Bushman walked unerringly to a spot in a vast plain, “with no bush or tree to mark place,” and pointed out a blade of grass with an almost invisible filament of vine around it. He had encountered it months before in the rainy season when it was green. Now, in parched weather, he dug there to expose a succulent root and quenched his thirst.⁹

More importantly, the messages passed in a game of “Telephone” typically defy the patterns of human memory. Human memory is excellent at retaining certain information that it is well-adapted to, but other information is very difficult to retain—in precisely the same fashion that we literate societies have found that some information is very difficult to express in written words. In both cases, societies minimize the importance of information it finds difficult to retain, and mocks the other for failing to keep track of the same kind of vital information it values.

Traditonal storytelling is rarely a simple matter of repeating a story; much of the richness of the storyteller’s art has been lost to literate societies. Storytelling was a full performance, with elements of impromptu theater and often other senses involved—masks and props, drumming and music, dance, and so on. Beyond the repetitive phrases, mneumonic devices, and other conventions of orality that Ong noted as favoring a conservative mindset, there are whole other senses brought to bear to the relation of information, leveraging synaesthesia and the structures of human memory. Orality focuses less on reductionism than it does on pattern recognition, since the pattern is far easier to remember than any specific expression of it. Where the literate mind tries to divide the world, the “preliterate” mind tries to unify it.

The savage mind deepens its knowledge with the help of imagines mundi. It builds mental structures that facilitate an understanding of the world in as much as they resemble it. In this sense savage thought can be defined as analogical thought. … Mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of opposition toward their resolution. (Levi-Strauss, 1966, p. 263)

A minor movement towards English Prime or “E-Prime” seems to speak towards another major difference between orality and literacy, but fails to recognize it as such.

D. David Bourland, Jr. proposed E-Prime as an addition to Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics some years after Korzybski’s death in 1950. Bourland, who studied under Korzybski, coined the term in an essay in 1965 entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin). It quickly gained controversy within general semantics, partly because sometimes practioners of General Semantics saw Bourland as attacking the verb ‘to be’ as such, and not just certain usages.

Korzybski had found two forms of the verb ‘to be’—the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication—to have structural problems. For example, the sentence “The coat is red” has no observer, the sentence “We see the coat as red” (where “we” indicates observers) appears more correct as to the facts about light waves and colour as determined by modern science, i.e., colour results from a reaction in the human brain. Korzybski advocated raising one’s awareness of structural issues generally through training in general semantics.¹⁰

The essential problem E-Prime tries (often clumsily) to address is the static nature implied by normal English usage. We imply that “redness” is an objective fact about the coat, when in fact it is only a subjective matter of our perception of the coat. This is, I think, a problem that English has inherited from literacy. Written words are written as they are. They do not change. There is a static nature to them, thus suggesting a static nature to the thoughts they express. Literacy leads us to believe that there is a static, unchanging element to the world. Even when we begin to understand that most things in reality are in relatively constant flux, literate peoples often have a difficult time internalizing this idea, or understanding it except on an intellectual level. Literate people talk about “stability” and “closure” as basic psychological needs, with the assumption that such things are possible—an assumption built on the premise that there are static elements to reality. Orality, on the other hand, breeds precisely the opposite prejuidice. No telling is precisely the same as the other. Information is always recieved in a social context. Each telling is simultaneously (1) a communal expression formed by all the previous speakers who have left their mark on the information, and (2) an individual expression of the particular speaker, adding his own mark to it. This constant telling and retelling not only encourages oral peoples to see beyond particulars to underlying patterns, and attempt to unify knowledge (consilience), rather than to break it down with discernment and reductionism. The cost might be science as we know it, but certainly not knowledge.¹¹ The reward is another way of knowing that treats us like humans rather than computers, with the adaptive effect that its accomplishments often seem, to us, nigh miraculous.¹²

A major element in primitivist thought is not simply the human domestication of other species, but the means by which the system of civilization domesticates us. Manning (2001) writes of how, to a significant extent, our crops domesticated us by turning us into vehicles for their own propogation. More often, primitivists speak of the domestication of the human mind and spirit. The radical changes in human cognition attendant with literacy may explain much of this domestication process, and many of the deep psychological differences between literate civilized peoples and “preliterate” traditional peoples.

In the first chapter of The Spell of the Sensuous, “The Ecology of Magic,” David Abrams presents one of the best understandings of magic ever produced for a Western, literate audience. For instance, he provides an excellent vignette that shows both sides of the orality vs. literacy dilemna—the profound, holistic understanding of the world operating on multiple simultaneous levels held by oral cultures, and the disdain for all but the most superficial level bred by literacy:

The next morning I finished the sliced fruit, waited for my hostess to come by and take the empty bowl, then quietly beaded back behind the buildings. Two fresh palm leaf offerings sat at the same spots where the others had been the day before. These were filled with rice. Yet as I gazed at one of them I suddenly noticed, with a shudder, that one of the kernels of rice was moving. Only when I knelt down to look more closely did I see a tiny line of black ants winding through the dirt to the palm leaf. … I walked back to my room chuckling to myself. The balian and his wife had gone to so much trouble to daily placate the household spirits with gifts—only to have them stolen by little six-legged thieves. What a waste! But then a strange thought dawned within me. What if the ants themselves were the “household spirits” to whom the offerings were being made?

The idea became less strange as I pondered the matter. The family compound, like most on this tropical island, had been constructed in the vicinity of several ant colonies. Since a great deal of household cooking took place in the compound, and also the preparation of elaborate offerings of foodstuffs for various rituals and festivals, the grounds and the buildings were vulnerable to infestations by the ant population. Such invasions could range from rare nuisances to a periodic or even constant siege. It became apparent that the daily palm-frond offerings served to preclude such an attack by the natural forces that surrounded (and underlay) the family’s land. The daily gifts of rice kept the ant colonies occupied–and, presumably, satisfied. Placed in regular, repeated locations at the corners of various structures around the compound, the offerings seemed to establish certain boundaries between the human and ant communities; by honoring this boundary with gifts, the humans apparently hoped to persuade the insects to respect the boundary and not enter the buildings.

The shaman, Abrams notes, is first and foremost an ambassador of the human community to the non-human world. Shamans negotiate the boundaries and relations of the human community to other living communities: how many animals they may hunt, how much food they may gather, where the boundaries lie, and so forth.

(S)hamanism is a hunter’s religion, concerned with the necessity of taking life in order to live oneself. The shamanic view of cosmic equilibrium founded largely on the idea of paying for the souls of the animals one needs to eat, and in the societies the shaman flies to the owner of the animals in order to negotiate the price. (Vitebsky, 1995, p. 11)

The shaman is the primary healer in his society, but only because of the holistic understanding oral cultures have of the world, wherein sickness is caused by poor relations with the non-human community. We often dismiss this as anthropomorphic superstition, yet if we allow ourselves to reason in a different idiom for a moment—to date to think mythopaiecally and holistically, like someone from an oral culture—we will note that our own ideas of infection have much the same to say. We are infected by pathogens that take up residence in our bodies and use our bodies for their own ends: a failure to properly demarcate the boundaries between the human community, and the non-human (pathogen) community. We might see the shaman’s methods of treating this imbalance as superstitious and foolish, but there is no denying that they are effective—as effective as the balian offerings to the “household spirits.” This is the difference between the “holistic” thinking of oral cultures, versus the “reductionistic” thinking of literate culture. Literacy promotes a greater understanding of the raw mechanics of the world, at the expense of every other level—in short, a greatly diminished set of knowledge, but knowledge that is far more precise and detailed. The “holistic” thinking of oral cultures generates much more knowledge that operates on multiple simultaneous levels. An excellent example of this is found in the differences between Western biomedicine, which excels at the treatment of disease but is often startled to learn that there is a distinction from sickness or illness at all, and most shamanic ethnomedical systems, which are equally preoccupied with all three.¹³

Tales of “sorcery” or “witchcraft” circulate about shamans, as well, and Abrams noted that while he never saw any shamans perform such “black magic,” he never saw any of them do anything to dispel the rumors, either. “By allowing the inevitable suspicions and fears to circulate unhindered in the region, the sorcerers ensured that only those who were in real and profound need of their skills would dare to approach them for help. This privacy, in turn, left the magicians free to their primary craft and function.” That primary function, Abrams suggests, is maintaining relations between the shaman’s community, and the non-human communities around it. Healing is incidental to this; sorcery an assurance that it remains possible.

Today, in the “developed world,” many persons in search of spiritual self-understanding are enrolling for workshops and courses in “shamanic” methods of personal discovery and revelation. Meanwhile psychotherapists and some physicians have begun to specialize in “shamanic healing techniques.” “Shamanism” has come, thus, to denote an alternative form of therapy; the emphasis, among these new practitioners of popular shamanism, is on personal insight and curing. These are noble aims, to be sure, yet they are, I believe, secondary to and derivative from the primary role of the indigenous shaman, a role that cannot be fulfilled without long and sustained exposure to wild nature, its patterns and vicissitudes. Mimicking the indigenous shaman’s curative methods without knowledge of his or her relation to the wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the focus of disease from place to place within the human community. For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the living land that sustains it.

Abrams powerfully describes his own magical experiences: a change that happened to him without ever noticing it. The revival of his senses as if they had slept a long time, and his reconciliation with non-human animals that began to respond to him without fear, but rather, a kind of understanding. He also writes of how that magic faded upon his return to civilization.

From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the violence uselessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former. This may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, yet it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved. Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back upon ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate Earth; our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our life-styles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human. Only in reciprocity with what is Other do we begin to heal ourselves.

Throughout the rest of the book, Abrams comes back many times to the problem of writing, and how literacy has transformed human consciousness. Abrams’ ultimate point is that we do not experience magic because we are cut off from its source. That source is the direct experience of what Daniel Quinn called “the community of life.” We wrap ourselves in abstractions to insulate ourselves from that community, praising ourselves for our unlimited intellect that “ennobles us above the beasts.” In fact, we merely insulate ourselves from reality and hang our hopes on delusions of grandeur. Abrams writes later on:

Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient associations with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.

I find this imprecise; Abrams own connection with magic happened in the context of language, too. The difference is not, I think, a matter of abstraction versus pure experience, because the brain never experiences anything directly; all experience is mediated through our senses, so ultimately, everything we experience is always a symbol. The difference, I think, lies in orality vs. literacy, and this is something that Abrams notes, as well (if sometimes imprecisely). As one reviewer noted:

Abrams then proceeds to show how, starting at the time of alphabetization, the western mind began to grow away from direct physical knowing of the world and toward abstract, conceptual representations. Our language became removed from nature, and helped us remove ourselves from nature.

As a counterpoint to the Western use of language, Abrams then goes on to show how indigenous peoples use language as a way to connect with the body and the physical realm. In these oral cultures language “is experienced not as the exclusive property of humankind, but as a property of the sensuous life-world.” In other words, the world–the animals, plants, stones, wind–speaks a language that most of us can no longer hear. Abrams explores indigenous oral poetry and stories to illustrate this entirely other way of experiencing language.

Language can create, or it can destroy; it can enlighten, or it can conceal; it can create relationships, or it can tear them asunder. Its power is often as subtle as it is absolute. Whether or not literacy will long endure may not be up to us at all, but if we are to dedicate great effort to its preservation, we should first pause to consider whether it warrant such efforts. It may be that its benefits outweigh these costs; it may be that it is one of the most pernicious, seductive, and destructive forces civilization ever unleashed. Whichever we decide, we should decide carefully. Though we are irrevocably literate, we may not need to inflict that fate upon the next generation. We should be sure of what we’re doing before we do.

Works Cited

Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage.

Goody, J. & Watt, I. (1968). “The consequences of literacy.” In J. Goody (Ed.), Literacy in traditional societies (pp. 27-68). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Goody, J. (1977). The domestication of the savage mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Manning, R. (2004). Against the grain: How agriculture hijacked civilization. New York: North Point Press.

Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen.

Vitebsky, P. (1995). The shaman: Voyages of the soul trance, ecstacy and healing from Siberia to the Amazon. London: MacMillan, Duncan Baird Publishers.