Shamanism: Time, Age and Dr. Who

* Bum yn lliaws rith

Kyn bum kisgyfrith.

Bum cledyf culurith.

Credaf pan writh.

Bum deigyr yn awyr.

Bum serwaw syr.

Bum geir yn llythyr.

Bum llyfyr ym prifder.

Bum llugyrn lleufer

Blwydyn a hanher.

‘Kat Godeu’, Llyfr Taliesin VIII

January’s Open Centre seminar here in London, Shamanism: Time and Age, was an exploration of our relationship to the passing of time and accompanying physical decline, through ordinary and non-ordinary reality eyes. We discussed how shamanism relates to time and age from many, often paradoxical, perspectives.

In preparation for the seminar I made a journey to ask my spirit helpers to show me Time and Age through their eyes. This is a simple and effective way of having a view of something beyond our normal understanding. (The journey will be uploaded HERE soon).

From a purely shamanic perspective time and even age do not exist in any ordinary sense. The experience of many who journey is that time and space can be both compressed and conflated while in an altered state of consciousness. This can also happen in everyday life while day-dreaming and of course, in dreams. Humans, it seems, are hard-wired to be in more than one place at a time.

Traditionally, shamans have been both the Walkers Between Worlds – those aware of Essential Time – and the keepers of the community calendar, guardians of seasonal cycles and Material Time. This dual role reflects the dual nature of humanities’ relationship with time and age. Paradoxically we are both in and beyond time, part of the cycle of life and death and simultaneously outside and beyond it. Shamans have always been a bridge between material time and essential time, which we also know as non-ordinary reality time. Part of a traditional shaman's role is this merging of interior/spiritual and exterior/material histories.

Since The Fall, The Flood, the end of the Dreamtime, the stories suggest that we have lost connection to the origin of Time and now are left only with an awareness of material time. This in turn affects the ways in which age and ageing are perceived; mostly, in the West at least, as a inevitable, and even frightening, decline towards death and non-being.

Time v. Age
Surrounded as we are currently by a cult of youth, age and ageing are becoming increasingly taboo subjects, as death already is. However we regard time, there is something impersonal about it. Age on the other hand is very personal, affecting each woman or man differently and having different implications.

What is it about age or the prospect of ageing that affects us? Is it a loss of youth, a loss of physical beauty, the end of childbearing, an increase in infirmity and weakness, the onset of ill-health that will gradually drag us towards the grave? Most people will experience anxiety about one or more of these things. Shamans are as much part of this process as anyone; unlike most people however, the true shaman has always known that time and age are merely perceptions. This knowledge is a privilege, but one that is gained by making a journey that only the dead ordinarily make. By leaving this world and returning to it with knowledge and power the shaman proves that she is spirit, because she is able to transcend time and space and exist in a place where these things have no meaning.

Time, Age and Myth
Festivals around the world Eid, Passover, Easter, Chinese New Year, mark human time. Some, like Samhain, mark no-time, the time between the old and the new year, between life and death, when anything is possible. This can be seen in the trick or treating of Halloween – the modern Samhain - where the underlying premise remains uncertainty or surprise.

Many creation stories from around the world refer to a golden time, an era before material time was first measured. Then, all humans could do naturally what only shaman's now do, that is, pass between worlds. After this era ended humans were left with an awareness of life and death and age and material time were born. However, there is a long history of humanity aware of its own immortality. In many cultures, poet/shamans claim to have been present throughout history, existing beyond both time and age. Early Irish and Welsh myth and literature are filled with semi-historical/semi-mythical characters who through shapeshifting and a continuous cycle of existence, claim to have experienced all history in a variety of forms. Tir na n’Og, the mythical Irish Otherworld that lies westward with the setting sun, means ‘land of the ever-young’. Age and time are particularly powerful influences in Celtic myth and literature.

In his book ‘Fire In The Head’, Tom Cowan explores the shamanic roots of Celtic myth, including the stories of Taliesin and Tuan Mac Cairill. Welsh poet/druid Taliesin, an historical figure thought to have lived in the 6thC, claimed to have witnessed all history and in one poem described some of his many forms:

* I have been in a multitude of shapes,

Before I assumed a consistent form.

I have been a sword, narrow, variegated,

I will believe when it is apparent.

I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars.

I have been a word among letters,
I have been a book in the origin.
I have been the light of lanterns,
A year and a half.
I have been a continuing bridge,
Over three score Abers [river mouths].
I have been a course,

I have been an eagle.

I have been a coracle in the seas:
I have been compliant in the banquet.
I have been a drop in a shower;

I have been a sword in the grasp of the hand.
I have been a shield in battle.
I have been a string in a harp,
Disguised for nine years.

The Battle of the Trees, The Book of Taliesin VIII

Irish seer, Tuan mac Cairill, who lived in the same century as Taliesin, reputedly narrated his life as a man, a salmon, a boar, and a stag, to the Christian holy man, St. Finnian. Each time he aged and prepared to die, he was transformed into another shape. Finally as a salmon he was captured and eaten by the fisherman's wife, who then gave birth to him as Tuan mac Cairill.

Shamanism seldom explores the issue of reincarnation, in the eastern esoteric sense of literal rebirth, but the Celtic tradition offers a very different glimpse of immortality, a shapeshifting existence that does not have humanity as its goal, but offers experience of all that is, of an eternal consciousness of which we are both a part and, paradoxically, all. My exploratory journey, ‘Show me Time and Age through your eyes.’ offered an unambiguous experience of this.

As well as tales of humans aware of their existence outside of time, there are many Celtic-origin stories of humans suspended in alternate reality.

Grail legends and the medieval Arthurian romances are full of characters who become lost in time and space, and for whom time passes either very slowly or very quickly, and space/place become confused or irrelevant. Castles are discovered after many years of searching, only to vanish never to be found again. Ordinary time and space, become meaningless, as Arthur’s knights search for the ineffable in the unmeasureable.

The ancient Celtic experience is still alive in the 21stC, in digital recordings of ballads like the 13thC, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ which tells the story of an historical Scottish lord taken by the Queen of the Elves to an unseen world and returned home after many years, physically unchanged but with the gift of prophecy. Even more modern tales, such as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White contain these elements of the suspension of time and youth.

Time – Keepers
It was not just as a bridge between worlds that shamans explored time for their communities. Traditionally shamans were keepers of the calendar. The Chukchi people of north-east Siberia have a myth about how the Moon was captured, by a shapeshifting woman he’d pursued but failed to catch, and obliged to mark the passing of time by repeatedly changing his shape. In the sub-arctic regions of Siberia shamans had great social power until the Soviet period because of their connection to both material and essential time. Their opinion was sought before any seasonal activity; such as hunting or fishing. Shamans of the sub-arctic, being particularly subject to lengthy periods of light and dark, understood the power of time. They knew that what we now call the biological clock and circadian rhythms, affect judgement and perception in the same way that fever and hallucinogens can. Some shamans doubtless used this knowledge of time in a less than scrupulous way. Presbyterian missionaries who tried to convert Siberians away from shamanism in the 19th-century, found themselves unwillingly participating in out-of-body experiences along with the locals because they had underestimated the shaman's knowledge of time and showmanship!

Time and The Time Lord
Most people attending The Open Centre seminar were shamanically experienced and made a journey to meet their own spirit helpers for the purpose of asking: ‘Show me what meaning time and age have for me and how I can bring their positive power into my daily life".

Discussing this journey on the phone a few days later with an attendee of the seminar, we started discussing BBC TV’s ‘Dr. Who’. We decided that, though not exactly a shaman, the Time Lord is indeed a shapeshifter in the Celtic tradition, passing from one form to another, never actually dying; in fact Dr. Who has not aged but ‘youthed’ as the series has progressed. The Doctor ‘journeys’ between worlds and eras, looking and learning and often dropping hints about his experiences in other times and dimensions to listeners he knows can never fully comprehend him. The character’s strength, and his burden, is his awareness of never belonging to any one time or place. He (almost) never carries a conventional weapon, but wields his trusty Sonic Screwdriver which, like a rattle or drum, can open any closed door. His TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension(s) in Space) is a craft, grown, not made, which draws on all the power of the universe for its life and actions.

Even today, it seems, we have our contemporary time-travellers and shapeshifters. Taliesin, Tuan mac Cairill and the old Chukchi shamans would, I think, feel perfectly comfortable in the company of Dr. Who, and vice versa. Perhaps, as you read this, they are together somewhere swapping stories.