The Shaman

The energy is very real which, in the process of working itself out, created religion as a trace. 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 boundaries. 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. We call this map the real and see the other side as somehow surreal, as a dream sometimes collective and sometimes private. We think of inside information about everything we have made real by mapping as being hidden like ciphered messages or Easter eggs in these dreams. Insider trading is what most people have in mind if they pay rapt attention to some mad woman, suspected of hiding real secrets worth knowing inside a word salad of oblique allusion that never says but only suggests, making indirect reference to things always at least one link away on a chain of signifiers leading to something that is real because it has value inside the real. They are listening to a senile pirate muttering about a half-remembered map to real treasure more lost than hidden in ruined chains of tangled reference.

The shaman is no prophet. She does not claim exclusive rights to anything. She leaves no true map of things to ensnare later travelers. Religion provided the structural model for every later type of human collaborative involving enough people to make strong personal ties between everyone involved impossible. The shaman is always the mad woman hidden in the attic of every trace of spent energy, that is to say, of every organization. She remembers where all the wealth hoarded and even occasionally  nurtured within the structure came from. She knows the actual un-retouched or photoshopped behind the creation myth. She is an embarrassment, a resource and a threat. She is the secret weapon and the Achilles heel. The treasure was not made tinkering in a garage. It was born illegitimate in a flash of passion gift-wrapping an insight into the nature of the game. Sometimes the game is poker and the stakes of the game are the right to play law-giver but only the way a child plays enraptured at being king, wishing his magic to be real for now, for as long as free play continues, but then gone for good and quickly forgotten. It is not good to leave the world littered with the dry bones of dead play. Better to write the rules of a game yet to be by playing, just playing beyond and outside any game in the place where games wait with endless patience to be born and play dies in the very first moment the rules are spoken.