There’s a strange synergy about. On the one hand, the Fifth World owes a certain surge of attention to the notice of one of the celebrities of the gamer podcasting circuit, Mick Bradley of the House of the Harping Monkey. Though the thread has now turned to the subject of “agenda,” or as I would prefer, ethos, in stories, Mick’s original attention was grabbed by the idea of the GM as shaman, at once noting certain similarities, but also objecting that “the GM being on some sort of ’special’ level that only certain individuals can attain is complete bupkus.” At the same time, two threads at IshCon have featured a discussion ‘twixt myself and “Urban Scout” which has illustrated not only why I keep my religious experiences to myself for the most part, but more importantly, the seperation of one’s own imagination from genuine commuication with the non-human world, or what a more Christian audience might recognize in Paul’s “discernment of spirits.”

“Discernment of spirits” is the term given to the judgment whereby to determine from what spirit the impulses of the soul emanate, and it is easy to understand the importance of this judgment both for self-direction and the direction of others. Now this judgment may be formed in two ways. In the first case the discernment is made by means of an intuitive light which infallibly discovers the quality of the movement; it is then a gift of God, a grace gratis data, vouchsafed mainly for the benefit of our neighbour (1 Corinthians 12:10). This charisma or gift was granted in the early Church and in the course of the lives of the saints as, for example, St. Philip Neri. Second, discernment of spirits may be obtained through study and reflection. It is then an acquired human knowledge, more or less perfect, but very useful in the direction of souls. It is procured, always, of course, with the assistance of grace, by the reading of the Holy Bible, of works on theology and asceticism, of autobiographies, and the correspondence of the most distinguished ascetics. The necessity of self-direction and of directing others, when one had charge of souls, produced documents, preserved in spiritual libraries, from the perusal of which one may see that the discernment of spirits is a science that has always flourished in the Church.¹

Naturally this is couched in Christian terminology, but there is an important element here for anyone who would attempt to understand what a babbling brook is babbling about, or why the boughs of a tree sigh. As David Abram explains so brilliantly in Spell of the Sensuous, the root of all communication is empathy. Since the only life we will ever know is our own experience of it, we see life in other things only insofar as we can see ourselves in that other. We recognize other human being as “alive” only by our capacity for empathy—we can put ourselves in their place, and we imagine their experience of living to be roughly similar, in most ways, to our own. We imagine they feel pain or joy, that they think and dream, roughly the same as we do. We relate to them and their words primarily by means of putting ourselves in their place; what would we be thinking or feeling, to say those words. We take the words not as the speakers means them—because, in truth, we can never know how the speaker means them, this is the existential problem of language—but as we mean them. One of the primary points Abram makes is that language arises from ecology, that it is not, strictly speaking, arbitrary; rather, that it is informed and shaped on a very basic level by the interaction not just of human speakers, but of the non-human communities—from birds, insects and mammals, to winds and streams—upon which those humans depend. We use this medium to relate to another person.

For animists, there is nothing more natural than magic. Magic is the way of the world. Denying the reality of magic is absurd, on par with claiming the sky to be neon green with hot pink polka dots. Its root must then be so obvious as to be instinctual; yet it must be easily lost, too, because we cannot escape the fact that for 6.5 billion people in our alphabetical civilization, the notion of magic is the very definition of fantasy. How can these two facts be reconciled? Abram suggests the alphabet—the means by which we established a purely human discussion made up solely of human concepts, shared with other humans, no longer informed or nourished by the input of non-human sounds. We are, essentially, sitting in the corner at a party, muttering to ourselves. If all communication is rooted in empathy, then our decision to remove our empathy from the non-human world, to deign only human voices as carrying anything of meaning, is a significant one.

We do not instinctually limit that empathy just to human forms; human children are natural born animists who extend their empathy to everyone and everything, equally to other human beings as “inanimate” objects. In our alphabetical civilization, we must beat this natural tendency out of our children. Humans must be trained to listen only to human voices; without that training, we naturally listen to the whole world, and assume that trees and stones and brooks have as much to say as people. Abram relates many profound examples of how humans communicate with non-human things in the world, what they usually call “spirits,” and we usually mistake through the lens of our own cultural heritage of dualism as superstitious, essentially anthropomorphic forms.

When we extend our empathy to something like a tree or a rock and enter into communication with it, the question always arises, given our intense training to listen only to other humans, whether we are actually “hearing” something that tree or rock has to say, or whether we are only imagining it. We immediately translate the impressions of sight, sound, smell or emotion into words in our minds, compounding the confusion. We carry with us the legacy of our training; no matter how much we might reject it consciously, we doubt ourselves, and remain on some level convinced that what we’re doing is silly—only human voices have anything to say, so the words we seem to be translating in our head must needs be our own words, unrelated to anything that comes from the trees or the rocks or the winds.

Of course, there is a good deal of our own imagination involved in the most cut-and-dried forms of commuication within our own species and culture. We imagine the meaning of the words of the speaker; we try to make sense of them essentially by putting ourselves in their place. The same thing happens when we communicate with non-speaking non-humans; we put ourselves in their place, we empathize, we imagine what we would feel like if we shared in that experience, what would move us to sigh and babble and move as they do. It is absolutely imagination—just as it is imagination to pretend that we understand one another in human speech, and for the very same reasons. The efficacy can be judged only by the result.

My exposure to traditional magicians and seers was gradually shifting my senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of nonhuman things. When a magician spoke of a power or “presence” lingering in the corner of his house, I learned to notice the ray of sunlight that was then pouring through a chink in the wall, illuminating a column of drifting dust, and to realize that that column of light was indeed a power, influencing the air currents by its warmth, and indeed influencing the whole mood of the room; although I had not consciously seen it before, it had already been structuring my experience. My ears began to attend, in a new way, to the songs of birds—no longer just a melodic background to human speech, but meaningful speech in its own right, responding to and commenting on events in the surrounding Earth. I became a student of subtle differences: the way a breeze might flutter a single leaf on a tree, leaving the others silent and unmoved (had not that leaf, then, been brushed by a magic?); or how the intensity of the sun’s heat expresses itself in the precise rhythm of the crickets. Walking along the dirt paths, I learned to slow my pace in order to feel the difference between one nearby hill and the next, or to taste the presence of a particular field at a certain time of day when, as I had been told by a local dukun, the place had a special power and proffered unique gifts. It was a power communicated to my senses by the way the shadows of the trees fell at that hour, by smells that only then lingered in the tops of the grasses without being wafted away by the wind, by other elements I could only isolate after many days of stopping and listening.

Gradually, then, other animals began to intercept me in my wanderings, as if some quality in my posture or the rhythm of my breathing had disarmed their wariness; I would find myself face to face with monkeys, and with large lizards that did not slither away when I spoke, but leaned forward in apparent curiosity. In rural Java I often noticed monkeys accompanying me in the branches overhead, and ravens walked toward me on the road, croaking. While at Pangandaran, a nature preserve on a peninsula jutting out from the south coast of Java (”a place of many spirits,” I was told by nearby fishermen), I stepped out from a clutch of trees and found myself looking into the face of one of the rare and beautiful bison that exist only on that island. Our eyes locked. When it snorted, I snorted back; when it shifted its shoulders, I shifted my stance; when I tossed my head, it tossed its head in reply. I found myself caught in a nonverbal conversation with this Other, a gestural duet with which my reflective awareness had very little to do. It was as if my body were suddenly being motivated by a wisdom older than my thinking mind, as though it was held and moved by a logos, deeper than words, spoken by the Other’s body, the trees, the air, and the stony ground on which we stood.

I returned to North America excited by the new sensibilities that had stirred in me—my newfound awareness of a more-than-human world, of the great potency of the land, and particularly of the keen intelligence of other animals, large and small, whose lives and cultures interpenetrate our own. I startled neighbors by chattering with squirrels, who swiftly climbed down the trunks of trees to banter with me, or by gazing for hours on end at a heron fishing in a nearby estuary, or at gulls dropping clams on the rocks along the beach.

Yet very gradually, I began to lose my sense of the animals’ own awareness. The gulls’ technique for breaking open the clams began to appear as a largely automatic behavior, and I could not easily feel the attention they must bring to each new shell. Perhaps each shell was entirely the same as the last, and no spontaneous attention was necessary.

I found myself now observing the heron from outside its world, noting with interest its careful high-stepping walk, and the sudden dart of its beak into the water, but no longer feeling its tensed yet poised alertness with my own muscles. And, strangely, the suburban squirrels no longer responded to my chittering calls. Although I wished to, I could no longer engage in their world as I had so easily done a few weeks earlier, for my attention was quickly deflected by internal verbal deliberations of one sort or another, by a conversation I now seemed to carry on entirely within myself. The squirrels had no part in this conversation.

It became increasingly apparent, from books and articles and discussions with various people, that other animals were not as awake and aware as I had assumed, that they lacked any real language and hence the possibility of thought, and that even their seemingly spontaneous responses to the world around them were largely “programmed” behaviors, “coded” in the genetic material now being mapped by our scientists. Increasingly, I came to discern that there was no common ground between the unlimited human intellect and the limited sentience of other animals, no medium through which we and they might communicate and reciprocate one another.

But as the expressive and sentient landscape slowly faded behind my more exclusively human concerns, threatening to become little more than an illusion or fantasy, I began to feel—particularly in my chest and my abdomen—as though I were being cut off from vital sources of nourishment.²

The “discernment of spirits” is valuable here; note that the first method is intuition. Active, imaginative fantasy feels quite different from the sort of communication we’re talking about here. Fantasy forms images and words; in this, the sensuous and emotional impressions seem to rise unbidden; words lag behind the impressions, sometimes noticeably, in a sometimes strained and awkward translation effort. The difference can be very subtle, and the two are certainly closely related; self-doubt can overwhelm any distinction made, but at the same time, we must continually question ourselves and our experiences, prod and poke at it to make sure we’re not just weaving ourselves into a fantasy. We might call this communication with a non-human spirit, or we might consider it mere free-association entirely bound in our own minds; the two may very well be the same thing on two different levels, precisely the same way that we can never truly communicate even with another human being, as the existentialists love to point out.

The second means suggested for discerning spirits is conscious inquiry. Very often in shamanistic cultures, this involves a “check” by someone else. This is one of the most compelling facts about shamanic practice around the world—the striking commonality. We have a great understanding of how hallucinations arise from our physical neurology, but we have much less understanding of where the specifics of those hallucinations, visions, dreams, etc. come from; why do they adhere to such universal archetypes, even in the most unlikely and specific cases? Shamans report that they become animals and fly far away to witness distant events, or fly into the past or the future. They return with accurate knowledge they could not possibly have. Shamans among the Austrlian Aborigines and the Yanamamo in the Amazon both reported having heard radio static before contact with anthropologists—they claimed it was the sound of creation, when they went back to witness the event. It was noted by anthropologists as a strange tradition. Several years later, COBE established that radio static comes, at least in part, from background radiation from the Big Bang. Abram described how Koyukon shamans were told of deaths and natural disasters by birds, only to recieve word of those events in the following days. Other examples abound; the key is that the imagination of the shaman or animist is verified by others. This is tied into the subject of Mick Bradley’s ponderings in a very important way. As Vincent Baker described the essence of the RPG:

Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you’ve even got such things) have to understand and assent to it. When you’re roleplaying, what you’re doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they’re actually true or not. …

Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that’s another topic, but they don’t exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That’s their sole and crucial function.³

Bradley was unsure of the identification of the GM as a shaman because “the GM being on some sort of ’special’ level that only certain individuals can attain is complete bupkus.” This is true—but more importantly, it implies a common misconception of what it means to be a shaman, a projection of the priest of literate culture, onto the shaman of oral culture. Fully a third of !Kung males and a quarter of females describe themselves as n/om k”ausi, and everyone participated in shamanic ritual—primarily the n/om tchai—to a significant extent. More importantly, even those who were not actively engaged as n/om k”ausi have often performed the role in the past. A recent episode of the Fear the Boot podcast suggested that all role-players should GM at least a few games. The player who likes to GM, who’s good at it, and may even have a compulsion for it, plays a role similar to his playing group to that of the traditional shaman. He’s not the only one who has ever played that role, and his specialization is not an exclusive one—it comes from the fact that he’s the one who enjoys doing it, and does it well.

Many cultures express some notion of a “shamanic sickness.” Examples abound, but we’ll let this one, from a Siberian shaman named Kokuiev, stand as representative:

I also became ill when I was about to become a shaman. First my head began to ache, then my hands. Around the full moon my head was splitting with pain. I had been ailing for about three years. In the meantime the spirits came to visit me. While I slept, my tongue was chanting. It chanted like the shamans do. But I did not know anything about it. When I awoke, my mother and father and my sister told me,”You were chanting shaman songs.” After such occasions I always felt better for a few days. After three or four months the sickness overpowered me. My head was aching all the time, and when I slept my tongue was chanting shaman songs again. It went on like this, alternating every three or four months, for three years. I kept suffering and suffering. When I wanted to rest or sleep, my tongue would be chanting. I didn’t know anything about it, because really it’s the spirit chanting. But not all spirits chant equally well. Some chant beautifully, some chant hideously. The great spirit chants best. I was twenty-seven years old when I heard him chant. The little one, the little spirit used to come to me. He had flown into my mouth and then I used to recite shaman songs. When I had no more strength left to suffer, finally I agreed to become a shaman. And when I became a shaman, I changed entirely. Because being a shaman turns you into a totally different person.⁴

The methods of shamanism often involve intense pain—rock paintings by Bushmen depicting the n/om tchai long puzzled anthropologists, until they were able to observe the dance. The Bushmen believe in a power called n/om, and describe it as searing hot, resting at the base of the spine—points in common with Kundalini yoga and a number of other traditions around the world. The n/om tchai begins to boil the n/om, so that it rises up the spine. When it reaches the stomach, it boils the belly and causes such intense pain that the n/om k”ausi require “dancing sticks” to prop themselves up, or else they would collapse in agony. The dance continues, and the n/om continues to boil, causing nosebleeds (explaining the mysterious black streaks in the rock paintings issuing from the dancer’s head), until finally the n/om boils over, exploding out of the head and sending the n/om k”ausi into the “little death” that allows him to roam the spirit world. Other routes to the spirit world are often equally painful, from the “vision quests” of intense physical deprivation common among Native North American cultures, to ayahuasca (the name means “vine of the dead”). Why would anyone volunteer for such a life? The answer, of course, is that they rarely do—they are compelled to it. The shamanic crisis often leaves individuals with a stark choice—either they become a shaman, or they die.

Being a GM may not be nearly as painful, but it is certainly a fairly thankless job. The GM takes on the bulk of the effort to make a game happen; to them falls the tasks of preparation, coordination, writing, planning, and all the unseen efforts that go unappreciated, happening invisibly in the background to make the magic of the game manifest. What compels a GM to do what he does? Very often, it is less of a choice than a compulsion. The act of GM’ing fulfills something the GM needs, just as the shaman is fulfilled by the transformations he is called upon to make. The “GM crisis” may be far less painful or life-threatening than the shamanic one, but it is a similar struggle in miniature. The GM is compelled to undertake this burden to fulfill his own psychological needs.

The shaman rarely acts alone, though. He does not always enjoy an exclusive monopoly on the spirit world, though some cultures invest the shaman with more secrecy and power than others. More often, shamans lead group of both other shamans and non-shamans in rituals and ceremonies where the perception of all there is altered. The attendants of the n/om tchai dance are not all n/om k”ausi, but all feel the same changes as the frenzy grows. Perhaps most surprisingly if we, as civilized, literate folk, assume this is all an example of simple imagination, they report very similar experiences, even down to details not seen to any non-participant onlooker, such as creatures encountered in the journeys through the spirit world. So we come back to the “discernment of spirits,” and the reliance on independent corroboration to verify our experience. Of course, this is the same technique we use to verify our normal, waking reality as well; if we see something unusual, our first instinct is to turn and ask someone nearby if they just saw the same thing.

This brings us back again, as well, to the role-playing game—negotiated imagination, as Vincent Baker called it, and finally gives us the answer to Bradley’s original objection: “the GM being on some sort of ’special’ level that only certain individuals can attain is complete bupkus.” This is absolutely true. The “specialness” of the GM is circumscribed entirely within the realm of the game, just as the “specialness” of the shaman is entirely within the relationships between the human community, and the spirit world. Moreover, this “specialness” is not unique to any one individual; others can, and often are, GM’s, just as others can, and often are, shamans. That said, there are those who prefer to play the role of GM more often, just as there are those who prefer to play the role of shaman more often—and for very similar reasons, because they have a powerful psychological need to fill that role, to express themselves. In the case of the “shamanic crisis,” some shamans need so urgently to express themselves in the shamanic trance that to deny that impulse can start to destroy them. Though I doubt it very often reaches that kind of intensity, I believe most regular GM’s can relate to some lesser form of the same calling.

Most importantly, the negotiated imagination of the role-playing game is not simply the dictation of the GM, anymore than the journeys through the spirit world come solely from the shaman. They are mediated through the GM-shaman, and perhaps translated into familiar words or images through him, but they do not come from him. For the shaman, it is a negotiation between the human community, and the spirits that surround that community. For the GM, it is a negotiation between the GM and the players. In both cases, the role of the GM-shaman is the same—not as the sole, or even the most important, or the only crucial element, but most pivotally as the keystone.