The Shaman

The energy which created religion as a trace in the process of working itself out is very real. On the other hand, the process that creates every religion turns the free-play of signifiers that was in the beginning into a game with rules and borders. One is not allowed to edit and revise those rules or redraw those borders once the game is in progress; seeing any gap between the map and the territory strips the emperor naked, un-tunes the sky and makes it harder for the simply devout to properly digest their food, whether we are talking about material bread or spiritual sustenance. A shaman is a visionary walking between worlds, gesturing madly in an attempt to make us see the absence of everything missing from our side of the divide. We live inside a map which is one of the worlds the shaman walks between. The shaman is no prophet. She does not claim exclusive rights to anything. She leaves no true map of things to ensnare later travelers.