how insight in shamanism is obtained

The rejection of one’s allotted identity thus allows for the choosing of one’s new identity, and the acceptance of a sacred role of furthering society’s development. Thus the death of the author’s persona at the end of Black Sunlight prefigures his own spiritual rebirth, as he looks into the mirror and sees his physical self as subject to the vagaries of his historical time and place, but also as a whole self. The subject’s gaze into the mirror, life-satiated, death-satiated, in essence “wrecked out of his wounds,” indicates that he is ready to accept that it is the contingent nature of reality that gives it the quality of the Sacred for him. To accept this is not to acknowledge a diminishment of the psyche and its powers, but rather to accept that the raw experiences of fate are to be worked with, as a process of bending them to one’s will. The mirror reflects a return, after shamanistic journeying, to a wholeness of being. It recalls the gaze of the mother that, in Lacanian theory, is said to instil in the subject his original sense of egoistic wholeness. The shamanistic nature of the voyage suggests this is an ego returned to a different kind of wholeness, hoewver, than the ordinary maturity of Lacanian theory would suggest: It is as if the temporary shadow of the moon’s ‘immanence’ has cast its impression upon the nobility of the transcendent intellect. This succumbs to its lunar fecundity (its feminine density) and is thus reborn. Moreover, insight is born by shamanistic journeying, and along with that, a new capacity for action and creativity. For the journey backwards into one’s primeval past has caused the atom to be split within the psyche – such that the seeming necessity of certain power relations, as one had previously emotionally construed them, has been revealed to have a merely contingent in historical processes. Thus these power relations are capable of being dissolved in real life as well – as where they have already undergone destruction – in the psyche itself. Various forms of power and the manifestations of personal identity most commonly associated with them therefore lose their binding link, under the pressure of shamanistic regression or “soul journeying”. The perspective facilitated by this “stepping back” from fixed relations of power, in a mode of dissociation, enables one to see, from a subatomic perspective, how power and identities are conventionally congealed into atoms. This gives a shaman such as Marechera insight into the nature of power relations, much as the “alienation” technique of Bertolt Brecht was designed to do.