Deep Ecology and Wonder: Notes of a Sleight-of-Hand Sorcerer

David Abram

David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Vintage, 1997), for which he was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. An accomplished sleight-of-hand magician who has lived with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, his writings have appeared both in academic journals and in such publications as The Ecologist, Tikkun, Orion, Utne Reader, Wild Earth, Resurgence, Parabola, and Environmental Ethics, as well as in a host of anthologies. His work focuses upon the intertwined mysteries of perception and language —the way in which these two dimensions modulate the relation between humankind and the animate earth. Dr. Abram lectures and teaches widely on several continents, and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships; in 1995, he was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred leading visionaries currently transforming the world. Nomadic by nature, David and his wife, naturalist Grietje Laga, circulate between the high desert of northern New Mexico and the coastal Northwest. A passionate spokesperson for night-herons, cedars, and storm clouds, he maintains a strong interest in interspecies communication and in the rejuvenation of oral culture. “Deep Ecology and Wonder: Notes of a Sleight-of-Hand Sorcerer” first appeared in Earth First! under the title "Deep Ecology and Magic: Notes of a Sleight-of-Hand Sorcerer.”

These are dark times for magic. Few people in North America believe in magic anymore, and no one has contributed to this sad state more than the magicians themselves—those sleekly suspicious characters who perform at our gatherings and bedazzle us on TV, making things vanish and appear amidst a flurry of sequined assistants. Since the days of vaudeville, our magic has become an increasingly secular craft, forgetful of its origins in initiation, in communion and secret communication with nature, and in trance. Today, having mislaid the original significance of the rites they perform, my fellow magicians prefer to call themselves "illusionists.” For although they sense something great and mysterious in the work they do, the rational language and world-view of our time fails to provide any way to acknowledge that mystery. "Your magic,” say the scientists, "is reality just an illusion set up to fool our perceptions, for the real world is not magic.

And yet there are a handful of magicians who still believe in the m: As sleight-of-hand practitioners, we know that we are connected to ancient tradition by the fact that we work with the sacred mysteries of perception, the same mysteries that were studied and taught by our progenitors, the tribal shamans and sorcerers. Magicians, whether witch doctors or warlocks, have always been those individuals chosen to follow the way of the incarnate or earthly powers. As a result of their deep trust in bodily or sensual experience, these individuals became adept at activating the imagination of the senses. It was by tapping this wild, perceptual creativity in others that the tribal sorcerer was able to effect numerous transformations and remarkable cures.

But the role of the sacred magician has shifted with the rise of civilization. Through the progressive domestication of tribal humanity, through the spread of institutional religion and urban logic, our species has all lost its native ability to smell, to hear, to see deeply. Today’s magician’s great task, then, of reawakening the deep creativity of perception. Through the use of sleights and subterfuges, the magician endeavors to trick the senses free from their static holding patterns. If and when he or she is successful, we find ourselves abruptly immersed in a perceptual world far more vivid and wild than our tame definitions of reality.

In 1980, I received a generous fellowship from the Watson Foundation to support a year’s research into modes of perception utilized by traditional sorcerers in the equatorial islands of Indonesia and the mountains of Nepal. One aspect of this grant was especially unique: I was to journey into rural Asia not as an anthropologist but rather as a magician in my own right, in hopes of gaining more direct access to native practitioners. By presenting myself not as an academic researcher but as a magician from the West, I would be able to explore from the inside the relation between these traditional magicians and their magic. My unorthodox approach was ultimately successful; my magical skills brought me into company of several exceedingly powerful and bizarre individuals of a sort known as dukuns in Indonesia or djankris in Nepal. Indeed, it was while staying in the household of one of these djankris that I experienced a unique shift in my own sensory awareness.

On one of our first walks along the narrow cliff trails that wind from his village high in the Himalayas of eastern Nepal, my host casually pointed out a certain boulder that he had “danced” on before attempting some especially difficult cures. It was a large rock which thrust out several feet beyond the cliffs’ edge, its surface alive with pale white and red lichens. Two days later, when hiking back alone to the village from the yak pastures above, I climbed onto the rock to sit and gaze at the snow-covered mountains across the valley. It was a sparkling blue Himalayan morning. Between gleaming peaks, two Lammergeier Vultures floated, wings outstretched, riding invisible currents. Without thinking, I took a silver coin out of my pocket and began an aimless sleight-of-hand exercise, rolling the coin over the knuckles of my right hand. One of the huge birds swerved away from the snow peaks and began gliding over the valley, heading in my direction. I stopped rolling the coin and stared. At that moment, the Lammergeier halted its flight and hung motionless for a moment against the peaks, then wheeled around and headed back toward its partner in the distance. I pondered for several seconds, then, on impulse, began rolling the coin down my knuckles once again, letting its silver surface catch the sunlight as it turned, reflecting the rays back into the sky. Instantly, the bird swung out of its path and soared back in a wide arc. As I watched it approach, my skin began to crawl and come alive, like a community of bees in motion. The creature loomed larger—a sort of humming grew loud in my ears—and larger still, until it was there: an immense silhouette hovering just above my head, huge wing feathers rustling ever so slightly as they mastered the breeze. My fingers were frozen, unable to move — the coin dropped out of my hand. And then I felt myself stripped naked by an alien intelligence ten times more lucid than my own. I do not know for how long I was transfixed. I only know that I felt the air streaming past naked knees and heard the breeze whispering in my feathers long after the Other had departed.

It was dusk before I returned to the village, stunned and wondering at this strange initiation. Elements of my own magic (the coin-rolling exercise) and the djankri’s magic (the sacred boulder) had been woven together by the sunlight into an unlikely meeting, an experience that suggested that the deepest magic has its source not in humanity itself but in the meeting, the encounter of the human with what is not human. I had had intimations of this teaching many times in the past, but I had never felt its implications as clearly as I did that evening, and as I have ever since. After a dinner of potatoes dipped in salt and ground peppers, I took out my field notes and began to write. The following is excerpted from my research notes written in the Thami Valley, eastern Nepal:

I have made progress in the task, set for me months ago by a Javanese witch, of thinking sensually—thinking, that is, with the senses, or sensing with the thoughts. It is a sort of clairvoyance, really, since we usually imagine thoughts to take place in some interior space (we say that we think thoughts inside or that we are being "inward” when we are thinking) while the senses are in direct contact with the exterior world. But to have one’s thoughts in direct contact with an exterior, open space—thoughts not just processing and interpreting data from the other senses, but thoughts which themselves are feeling their way through the shifting contours of an open world—how is this possible?

Perhaps it is best to begin with this fact: There is, indeed, an interior into which I commonly close myself when I think, but it is not inside my particular body or brain. It is, rather, the "inside” which my brain shares with all other brains that think in the same fashion. This interior is a sort of cave which has been formed among the sounds of the world, an auditory hollow that continues to define its limits and to isolate itself. It is, in other words, this verbal space, the house of human language, this one region of the world which is inhabited strictly by us humans, and which we therefore feel to be an "inside” or an “interior” in relation to the “outside” world. We readily perceive that this planet has given birth to many species, to many styles of awareness and ways of being, yet our everyday thoughts as humans currently inscribe themselves within a region of awareness that seems strictly our own and that presumptively shuts out all other styles of consciousness. Today we see and hear the rest of the planet only in terms of this privileged space—all the other animals, all trees and oceans, rocks and storms, all that lack a human tongue including Earth itself, we view from our insiders’ space of purely human discourse. “If it cannot be put into words, then it does not exist,” we say, efficiently banishing all other types of awareness. What arrogance! That to be human is a unique thing is quite certain, but surely it is also unique to be a crow, or a frog, or a night-blooming cereus. To be able to think with words is a neat power indeed—but that crow can actually fly!

By way of analogy: A person who is gifted with a certain type of intelligence is not thereby rendered unable to understand, empathize, and communicate with the rest of humanity. If he chooses to shut himself within his particular sensitivity, and to communicate solely with those few who share his gift, then so much the worse for him and his potentially wondrous sensitivity, which will become swollen and distorted. In a like manner, our collective gifts as Homo "Sapiens” hold wonderful promise, but we betray that promise when we hide behind those gifts and use them as a barrier between ourselves and all else that lives. We have such potentially grand powers for empathy and communication, since there is something in us of every animal, and also something of plants and stones and seas, for we are woven of the same fabric as everything on Earth and our textures and rhythms are those of the planet itself.

Yet we have staked out and established a space that contains only what we believe is unique and privileged in ourselves. All who cannot speak our type of language are necessarily dumb, not really alive; nothing is mindful but ourselves—all else is inert, determined, and therefore fit only for our observation and manipulation. We have closed ourselves into a universe of human verbiage.

How strange this is, and sad. And how clear it is why we have come to a crisis in our particular history, which is also a great crisis for the planet: How can we ever become fully human when we have forgotten how to be genuine animals?

The magicians I have traded with during the last nine months—like the monsoon magician of the rice paddies, or this mountain shaman whose medicineless cures are so remarkably successful —are persons who struggle to regain those memories. That is what sets the magician’s path apart from that of the mystic; while others seek to move out of their bodies, the magician fights to return to her/his body, to recover a place in this material world from which s/he feels somehow cut off and estranged. Thus the successful sorcerer is hardly a transcendent being—he is an animal, human, a creature of Earth. His magic, far from being a supernatural power, grows out of an almost proto-human attentiveness to nature itself—out of his ability to listen not only with his verbal mind, but with his animal mind, his plant mind, his soil, rock, river, and deep Earth mind. For the sorcerer knows that the verbal space, this human gift, only makes sense for those who have learned how to enter that space, how to grow into it out of the silence, how to grow into the head from the body itself.

Yet there are many people these days who speak of communication with supernatural powers and other, a-physical worlds, many who write that our destiny as conscious beings lies not with the planet, but elsewhere, on other, more spiritual worlds or in other dimensions. The New Age lecture halls resound with such assertions, backed up with accounts of profound mystical experiences, of deeply spiritual sensations, of magic. I have an elegant intuition about all this, an intuition born from certain sensations experienced as a boy drawn to the study of conjuring, and then again, here, among the shamans of Asia. I, too, have had some extraordinary mystical experiences in my life, some powerful bursts of oceanic awareness. But somehow these shifted states were always caught up in the material world that surrounds; they did not take me out of this world into that purely spiritual region of disembodied freedom and light about which so many of my cohorts speak. No, as a young magician those experiences always revolved around a heightened and clarified awareness of the organic world that enveloped me. Far from drawing me outside of this domain, my "spiritual" or "ecstatic" experiences never failed to make me startlingly aware of my corporeal presence, here, in the depths of a mysteriously shifting but nonetheless thoroughly physical world. So there grew in me steadily a sense that the so-called spirit is really the breath of the material world; indeed, there is no spirit more spiritual than the dance of light on the water’s surface or the wind rustling in the leaves. What the conjuror is ever straining to express with his vanishing coins and color-changing cards is that the world of the most mysterious and mystical transformations is this world, right here, under our noses. And yet still I am confronted by news of another world, more eternal than this one (can it be?), an utterly transcendent, non-physical realm to which all "truly” mystical revelations give us access. From this, I am forced to conclude either that my own ecstasies have nothing to do with the genuinely religious path, that they are, in fact, false ecstasies and unreal revelations still basely “attached" to the "physical plane,” or else that there is some sort of mundane clarity in my own ecstatic experiences, which is lacking in the experience of those who feel the need to postulate the existence of some other wholly transcendent source.

Which brings me back to my aforementioned intuition about all our mystical encounters and revelations from elsewhere. Can it be that such experiences are, indeed, intimations of another, larger world than the one we usually inhabit with our everyday thoughts and perceptions, but that the larger world to which we thus gain access is none other than this very Earth, this very sphere within which we move, seen clearly now for the first time?

Is it possible that at such times we actually do break out of a limited, constricted world, although that limited world is not the material landscape that surrounds us, but is, rather, our limited and prejudiced human way of perceiving these surroundings, that stuffy house into which we lock our sensibilities by considering all other forms of life and existence to be without consciousness, inert, and determined? I wish to ask, finally, if it is possible that our ecstatic or mystical experiences grow precisely out of our receptivity to solicitations not from some other non-material world but from the rest of this world, from that part of our own sphere which our linguistic prejudices keep us from really seeing, hearing, and feeling—from, that is, the entire non-human world of life and awareness, from the sphere of whales with their incredible alien intelligence, of goats and apes and the fantastically organized insect colonies of flowers and hurricanes and volcanoes. It is the living, breathing, conscious Earth of creatures who are being bred and “harvested” as meat in our mechanized farms, of schools of fish choking in polluted waters, of whole rainforest universes, whole intercommunicating systems of elements, insects, plants, and animals that are falling apart and dying from our fear, our species-amnesia, our refusal to recognize awareness anywhere outside our own brains.

The other animals have given us much, and they have been patient with us, as have the plants, the rivers, and the land itself. Many creatures have donated their lives to our quest. Many have undergone excruciating pain in our laboratories before being “sacrificed.” The fish find it more and more difficult to swim in the stinging waters, while the passage upstream is blocked by dams. Birds spin through the chemical breeze, hunting in circles for that patch of forest that had been their home. They are not alone in their dizziness, for things are worsening throughout the biosphere. Naturally, then, the mountains, the creatures, the entire non-human world is struggling to make contact with us. The plants we eat are trying to ask us what we are up to; the animals are signaling to us in our dreams or from the forests. The whole Earth is rumbling and straining to remind us that we are of it, that this planet is our own flesh, that the grass is our hair and the trees are our hands and the rivers our own blood —that the Earth is our real body and that it is alive. And so, everywhere now, our “interior” space of strictly human discourse begins to spring leaks as other styles of communication make themselves heard, or seen, or felt. All over, in so many different ways, we feel intimations of a wholeness that is somehow foreign to us, and we see the traceries of another reality. It is indeed a time for magic, a magic time. But it is no supernatural thing, this magic. We are simply awakening to our own world for the first time, and hearing the myriad voices of Earth.