Myths
and Symbols on the Quest for Vision
-Steve Beyer
Wilderness Drum, Inc.
http://www.wildernessdrum.com/html/myths.html
Introduction
The Quester and the Community
Toward a Core Mythology
The Healing Earth
The Rite of Passage
The Heroic Quest
The Initiation
The Center of the World
The Beginning of Time
The Regaining of Paradise
The Attainment of Balance
Conclusion
Notes
References
Introduction
The wilderness vision quest has increasingly become a recognized part of the
repertoire of both transpersonal psychotherapy and personal growth (Segal, 1998;
see generally Foster, 1992; Foster & Little, 1984; Linn, 1997). The complex
history of the contemporary vision quest movement has yet to be written; but
there is little question that at its center stand Steven Foster and Meredith
Little and their profoundly influential School of Lost Borders (Foster &
Little, 1984; Foster & Little, 1987; Foster, 1992; Foster & Little,
1997; Foster, 1998). Other first-generation founders of the movement include
John P. Milton of The Way of Nature and Joseph Jastrab of Earth Rise Foundation.
In addition, there is now what we can call the second generation of vision quest
leaders, most of whom have either received training in or been strongly influenced
by the School of Lost Borders, including Sparrow Hart of Circles of Air and
Stone, Bill Plotkin of the Animas Valley Institute, John Davis of High Desert
Passages, and Marilyn Foster Riley of Wilderness Transitions. The movement is
also becoming increasingly professionalized. John Davis, for example, is a professor
in the Department of Psychology at the Metropolitan State College of Denver
and a senior adjunct faculty member in the Transpersonal Counseling Psychology
Department at the Naropa Institute. There is also now a professional organization
of wilderness vision quest guides and leaders, called the Wilderness Guides
Council, which currently has more than 200 members, and which seeks, among other
things, to establish standards for the conduct of ecologically sound vision
quests.
The quester and the community
The vision quester goes out alone, and returns alone, but
is nonetheless a member of a community. There is, in fact, both a smaller and
a larger vision quest community. There is, first, the relatively transient group
of questers and their guides, who meet together before and after the solo fasts
to prepare for and then to reintegrate their wilderness experiences. As psychologist
and quest leader Fran Segal puts it, “Vision quest involves preparing
to go to the wilderness in search of meaning with the help and support of a
group of peers, spending time alone and fasting in the wilderness to seek wisdom
or a ‘vision,’ and returning to share it with the group and one’s
society” (1998, p. 203). And there is also the larger vision quest community
of professional guides and therapists. Both form what first Joseph Campbell
(1949/1968, p. 384) and then Jerome Bruner (1960, p. 280; 1962, p. 36) called
a “mythologically instructed community.” Such a community, says
Bruner, possesses “a corpus of images and identities and models that provides
the pattern to which growth may aspire” (1960, p. 280). Myths and images
are what inform the wilderness fast experience, make it meaningful, turn it
into a vision quest.
Toward a core mythology
It is not surprising that the contemporary vision quest borrows
heavily from the mythology and symbolism of native North America. For example,
Steven Foster, one of the seminal figures in the modern vision quest movement,
was heavily influenced by the controversial Hyemeyohsts Storm, from whom he
borrowed not only one of his central myths, the story of Jumping Mouse (Storm,
1972; Storm, 1983), which forms the core of Foster & Little (1997), but
also all the psychological and cosmological symbolism of the Medicine Wheel
and the Four Shields, extensively elaborated in Foster (1998).1 Such borrowings
and adaptations have become increasingly controversial; even the use of the
term “vision quest” has been challenged as a form of cultural appropriation
(Bucko, 1998, pp. 244-245).2 Equally important, many Native Americans perceive
the use of indigenous forms by non-natives to be intrusive, rude, and disrespectful
of spiritual things (Swinomish Tribal Mental Health Project, 1991, p. 129).
Such claims of insensitivity and cultural theft have to be
taken seriously. Certainly, reasoned responses are possible – for example,
Buhner (1997). But, beyond that, I believe, it is possible to construct a core
vision quest mythology which is transcultural, which can empower and inform
the quest without appearing to misappropriate particular cultural forms. The
following sections are an attempt to gather such a core mythology.
The healing earth
One of the foundational myths of the contemporary vision
quest is the myth of the healing power of the earth, which empowers and informs
reliance on the “life-sustaining integrity, beauty and intelligence of
nature” (Cohen, 1997, p. 20). Under this myth, entering into nature is
an experience of “depth and complexity … of exquisite beauty and
clear impact” (Greenway, 1995). The Lakota medicine man Pete S. Catches,
Sr., expressed the same idea: he lived in a remote cabin where, he said, “[t]he
soul might constantly expand in the presence of natural beauty” (Lewis,
1990, p. 50). Under this myth, too, the quester is already set apart by the
intention to fast in the wilderness; the quester has “the courage and
faith to return to our Earth as a source of emotional healing, as a way to go
from being lost to being found” (Chard, 1994, p. 17). This myth is deeply
embedded in the American view of the world. In 1862, Henry David Thoreau wrote:
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.… When I would
recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable
and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place,
– a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.…
In short, all good things are wild and free (Thoreau, 1862/1992, p. 645, 647,
652).
Thoreau states several of the themes in this myth. All value lies in nature;
nature is where one goes to “recreate” oneself, to make oneself
new; to be able to perceive the strength and marrow of nature in a dismal swamp
sets one apart from the community.
Now, the myth does not maintain that nature is entirely benign.
Rather the myth asserts, with Thoreau, “Here is this vast, savage, howling
mother of ours, Nature, with such beauty, and such affection for her children,
as the leopard” (Thoreau, 1862/1992, p. 655). The myth teaches the quester
to trust in the earth, to expect healing and growth as a natural consequence
of immersion in nature, even in its most fearsome aspect. The myth of the healing
earth sets the foundation for the quest.
The rite of passage
Probably the central informing myth of the wilderness
vision quest is that it is a rite of passage, as classically defined by Arnold
Van Gennep (1908/1960). Indeed, in a culture widely perceived as lacking adequate
rites of passage – particularly from childhood into adulthood, and from
adulthood into old age – the wilderness vision quest is often put forward
as a contemporary model for ritualizing such transitions (Foster, 1996; Henley,
1996, pp. 102-106; Foster & Little, 1987; Sullwold, 1987, pp. 124-125).
According to Van Gennep, the function of the rite is to effect the passage from
one life stage or social status to another – at birth, puberty, initiation,
marriage, old age, and death. Such rituals are performed at special times or
places, away from the centers of community life, at night, in the wilderness,
naked or in special clothing, in order to remove the participants from normal
or profane space and time. They interpose a sacred interval in the flux of profane
experience, in order to facilitate the transition from one condition to a totally
different one (Kirk, 1974, p. 89).
Most influential on the contemporary wilderness vision quest was Van Gennep’s
subdivision of all the rites of passage into three stages – separation,
transition, and incorporation (1908/1960, p. 11).3 The stage of transition is
often called the liminal or threshold stage; this is the stage of “betweenness,”
when the participant is at neither one stage nor the other, in neither one condition
nor the other. The liminal stage is a sacred state – as anthropologist
Victor Turner puts it, “one of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all
the customary categories” (1987, p. 7) – and thus is filled with
power and the potential for power. Among the Plains Indians, for example, “[t]his
general pattern of separation, visionary revelation, return, and new (or renewed)
responsibility has its locus of acquisition in the liminal period of separation
during which the individual encounters the dream-spirits” (Irwin, 1994,
p. 84).
Thus, the myth of the rite of passage has two functions. First,
it provides a structure for the quest process, dividing it into stages, and
allowing the apportionment of tasks and rituals appropriate to each phase. Second,
it empowers the quester to seek change, to expect a transition, to accept transformation
in the wilderness.
The heroic quest
The quest of the hero is claimed to be the central myth of
narrative literature; so basic is the quest pattern to narrative that Joseph
Campbell labels it with the Joycean term monomyth (1949/1968, p. 30; Joyce,
1939/1999, p. 581).4 Here, in Campbell’s’ words, is the monomyth,
the myth of the hero’s quest: A hero ventures forth from the world of
common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered
and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure
with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (1949/1968, p. 30). As Campbell
points out, the mythological adventure of the hero is in fact a magnification
of the formula represented in the rite of passage, which Campbell gives as separation
– initiation – return, and which he calls “the nuclear unit
of the monomyth” (1949/1968, p. 30) .
Campbell’s seminal idea has been elaborated not only in his own work but
in countless derivative works of widely varying merit. The myth of the heroic
quest, like the myth of the rite of passage, structures the quest. For example,
the quester may deliberately create a gateway, such as a line drawn on the path,
which leads into the magical world of wonder where the quest will take place.
Moreover, the myth empowers the quester to be courageous in the face of fear,
to expect victory, to anticipate meetings with fabulous forces, and to mythologize
ordinary encounters into meaningful and wondrous events.
The initiation
Another potent myth for the quester is that the vision
quest is not simply a rite of passage, or a heroic quest, but something more
specific – an initiation. Initiation ceremonies are universal among indigenous
cultures. It is difficult to draw a bright line between rites of passage and
initiations, but perhaps we can best capture the difference by saying that indigenous
initiations typically involve some sort of test or ordeal – fasting, darkness,
fearful seclusion, endurance of pain, and often scarring or other changes to
the body. Initiations are a special case of the rite of passage, typically marking
the passage into either sexual maturity or a secret society.
Thus, trial and testing are part of the initiatory process; all initiations
find a place for ordeal (Sullivan, 1988, p. 346). The function of ordeal is
to mark transitions, to prepare the way for new being. “Pain, discomfort,
and restriction separate one from one’s prior existence in order to assay
the truth (the defining relationship to a unique configuration of sacred powers)
of one’s new character” (Sullivan, 1988, p. 353). And again:
[A]ll these prohibitions – fasting, silence, darkness,… –
also constitute so many ascetic exercises. The novice is forced to concentrate,
to meditate. Hence the various physical ordeals also have a spiritual meaning.…
The physical ordeals have a spiritual goal – to introduce the youth into
tribal culture, to make him ‘open’ to spiritual values” (Eliade,
1958, p. 16).
For contemporary wilderness vision questers, the trial
and testing consist primarily of solitude, fasting, and exposure to nature (Foster
& Little, 1997, p. 37). Many questers go as well without fire or shelter.
Some questers also try to spend one night – usually the last night of
the quest – in wakefulness; Steven Foster calls this the rite of the “purpose
circle” (Foster, & Little, 1997, pp. 120-123). We will briefly discuss
the symbolism of three of these initiatory ordeals – solitude, fasting,
and the sleepless vigil – which offer potent symbolic resources for the
quester.
* Solitude, writes Lee Irwin, in his work on the visionary traditions of the
Great Plains, is, according to the ethnography, “the most fundamental
condition for the visionary, power-bestowing dream” (1994, p. 83) As Jungian
analyst Louise Mahdi puts it, “Solitude helps us listen to the inner voice
and to be open to the images” (1996, p. 356). To be separate from the
social community is to be immersed in the mythic and visionary world. Without
the resources of the community, the quester conquers fear in solitude, learns
the depth of inner resources, and can begin the journey to the self.
* Fasting is, of course, in many ways the defining ordeal of the contemporary
wilderness vision quest. Among the Plains Indians, “The fast was a test
of strength, endurance, and humility: the faster stayed until he received a
vision or was too weak to continue.… Greater power could be attained through
longer fasts … The general relationship between power and suffering is
that the greater the suffering and sacrifice of the individual, the greater
is the possible gift of power to the individual” (Irwin, 1994, p. 110,
111).
In all cases, fasting for a vision among Plains peoples involved the voluntary
abandonment of the comforts of food, drink, and normal shelter. Further, the
seekers placed themselves in a liminal condition devoid of normal social relationships
in the hope of establishing more powerful kinship relations with the dream-spirits
(Irwin, 1994, p. 11).
Fasting is a traditional means of self-empowerment and a means of attaining
clarity (Foster & Little, 1987, p. 97). To deliberately abstain from food
is to mark the liminal state, the state of paradox and openness, and to negate
one’s prior human and social existence. Without meals to organize the
day, having only constantly recurring circadian rhythms, time quickly becomes
timelessness; linear time – that is, history – becomes circular
time, the time of beginnings. Thus fasting is a particularly potent way to mark
a new transition, a willingness to change.
* The vigil, in its attempt to conquer sleep, becomes a major symbolic expression
of the new spiritual condition of the initiate (Sullivan, 1988, p. 353). As
historian of religions Mircea Eliade points out, in the context of Australian
aboriginal initiation ceremonies, “Not to sleep is not only to conquer
physical fatigue, but is above all to show proof of will and spiritual strength;
to remain awake is to be conscious, present in the world, responsible”
(Eliade, 1958, p. 15). To forego fire, too, falls within the scope of the vigil.
To pass the night without fire reproduces what Eliade calls “the initiatory
night watch” (Eliade, 1958, p. 125). Again, abstaining from sleep, like
abstaining from food, marks the liminality of the quester, and differentiates
the quester, during this threshold stage, from the rest of the human community.
The center of the world
A series of spatiotemporal myths also may be used to inform
and empower the contemporary wilderness vision quest. These are the myths of
the center, of the beginning of time, and of the return to paradise. All of
these myths empower the quester to seek new beginnings.
The location of the vision quest – the quester’s special place or
spot – may be mythologized as being at the mythical center of the world.
At the center of the world, says Mircea Eliade, stands a mountain or a tree,
which is the axis of the earth (Eliade, 1952/1991, p. 42, 44; Eliade, 1954/1991,
p. 12). In mythical space, this is the earth’s navel, from which creation
began (Eliade, 1952/1991, p. 43), and where heaven and earth meet (Eliade, 1954/1991,
p. 12, 15); it is only from the center of the world, for example, that the shaman
can travel to the other realms to meet with the spirits (Eliade, 1952/1991,
p. 47).
Thus, the center is the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute
reality (Eliade, 1954/1991, p. 17); conversely, every sacred place – every
place where there is an incursion of the sacred into ordinary space –
is at the center of the world (Eliade, 1952/1991, p. 51). For example, among
the Plains Indians, the center “is the place of visionary or ritual instruction.”
The seeker of visions “is taken into a center or the center becomes a
place where visionary experience occurs.… Any place where visionary experience
occurs or is invoked becomes a center and a place of power”(Irwin, 1994,
p. 59). Similarly, the center lies at the innermost part of a labyrinth, or
a mandala, or a temple (Eliade, 1952/1991, pp. 52-53). The circular Blackfoot
sweat lodge, for example, is at the center of earth and sky, and thus “deeply
reflective of a sacred space” (Harrod, 1987, p. 129).
Now, the way to the center is always arduous, requiring danger-ridden
voyages, wanderings in labyrinths, because going to the center of the world
is a form of initiation. “The road is arduous, fraught with perils, because
it is, in fact, a rite of passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral
and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life … Attaining the
center is equivalent to a consecration, an initiation; yesterday’s profane
and illusory existence gives place to a new, to a life that is real, enduring,
and effective” (Eliade 1954/1991, p. 18).
Thus, the place where the vision quester comes to rest, to seek
the vision, is the center of the world. The quester, like the Buddha, sits beneath
a tree at the world’s axis. But the center is something else as well –
the womb of the earth. In many mythologies, the initiate descends into Mother
Earth, Terra Mater (Eliade, 1958, p. 51); the initiate enters a sacred spot
identified as the womb of the earth (Eliade, 1963, p. 80). This return to the
womb is a precondition to rebirth in a new form; the return to the origin allows
access to a new mode of existence; and the return, the regressus, is structurally
isomorphic to the reversion of the universe to its primordial state (Eliade,
1963, pp. 80-81). This symbolism of the womb integrates the spatial and temporal
dimensions of the myth: to move to the center is to move to the origins of things,
to the beginning of time, before the individual – or the cosmos –
fell into history.
The beginning of time
At the center of the world is the abolition of profane time, of
history, of duration. At the center is found mythic time, where first things
occurred, and where the actions of the quester are imitations of the archetypal
gestures of the myth (Eliade, 1954/1991, p. 35). The quester abolishes history;
during the liminal state, there are only the recurring cycles of the day –
the rising and setting sun, the circling stars, the slowly growing or decreasing
moon, endlessly repeating. To return to the beginnings of things gives every
action of the quester its mythic resonance, for the quester is in the Dream
Time, when the world was first laid out. This mythical state of timelessness
is symbolized as well by deliberate abstention from food or sleep, which, outside
the liminal state, away from the center, mark the passage of time in human society.
The quester is in the timeless realm, to be reborn to community, to history.
The regaining of paradise
The abolition of profane time and the return to the beginnings of
things, to the time when the world was first put in order, is mythically the
same as returning to a state of paradise. Here the cosmic realms are once more
joined together; in the first days, before the fall, humans could pass easily
among the cosmic realms, using trees or ropes or tent poles. Most important,
in illo tempore, before the fall into history, humans and animals were friends.
Animals know the secrets of life and nature; to have contact with them, to speak
their language, to become their friend means the possession of an abundant spiritual
life (Eliade, 1960, pp. 64-65).
This mythological theme is often played out in wilderness encounters
with animals. There is a clear sense that animals can serve as the quester’s
teachers. “Any time I come into unexpected contact with a large animal
in the wilderness,” writes Cass Adams, “I pay close attention, not
only because of the joy of being witness in the presence of a magnificent creature,
but because through the process of witnessing, some place of mystery is opened
up to me” (Adams, 1996, p. 94). Among the Plains Indians, too, “animal
powers are seen as allies and friends who wish to assist human beings and give
them special powers” (Irwin, 1994, p. 34). But the relationship between
the human and the animal spirit involves testing and trial. “Every creature
inhabiting the visible world is a potential giver of power, but not every human
being can be a recipient of that power” – only those willing to
undergo fasting, prayer, trial, and solitude (Irwin, 1994, p. 35).
Thus the quester – like the shaman – attains intimacy
with the animals, “a blessedness and spontaneity inaccessible to his profane,
everyday state” (Eliade, 1960, p. 65). In seeing animals, discerning their
purposes, receiving their messages, the quester reenacts the original state
of human beings as an integral part of nature, the state from which we have
now fallen into linearity, away from the center, and into history. The quester,
in the state of liminality, abolishes history and returns to paradise, to speak
with animals.
The attainment of balance
Finally, the spatiotemporal myth leads us to a final, psychological
myth – the myth of achieved balance. As we have noted, the center of the
world, the world tree, the axis mundi, is also the center of the self; the dangers
on the road to the center are the same as the difficulties of the seeker on
the road to the self, to the center of one’s being (Eliade, 1954/1991,
p. 18). And what the quester finds at the center of the self, at the center
of the world, is a special state of balance. This state of balance is characteristic
of the sacred condition. At the beginning of things, the universe itself was
balanced, an idea which lies at the heart of the Navajo Blessingway ceremony,
which tells about the creation of the world (Beck, Walters, & Francisco,
1996, p. 14, 41-42). Among the Huichol, too, “the sacred … seems
to embrace above all the concept of attaining wholeness and harmony.…
It is a dynamic condition of balance in which opposites exist without neutralizing
each other …“ (Myerhoff, 1974, p. 74). This balance is maintained
most dramatically by the shaman in the flight between the layers of the cosmos
(Myerhoff, 1974, p. 75). Like the shaman, the vision quester seeks to return
to illud tempus on behalf of the people, to make an ecstatic journey through
the assistance of animal tutelary spirits and bring back information of the
other realms. As mediator, the quester, like the shaman, travels back and forth
and, with exquisite balance, becomes attached to neither realm (Myerhoff, 1974,
p. 253). The anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff tells this story about the Huichol
shaman or mara’akame Ramòn Medina Silva:
One afternoon Ramòn led us to a steep barrance, cut by a rapid waterfall
cascading perhaps a thousand feet over jagged, slippery rocks. At the edge of
the fall Ramòn removed his sandals and told us that this was a special
place for shamans. We watched in astonishment as he proceeded to leap across
the waterfall, from rock to rock, pausing frequently, his body bent forward,
his arms spread out, his head thrown back, entirely birdlike, poised motionlessly
on one foot (Myerhoff, 1974, p. 45).
This was, Myerhoff writes, “a virtuosic display of balance” (1974,
p. 46).5 The myth of balance tells the quester that such balance, both inner
and outer, is attainable, and provides a model for the new being into which
the quester has been initiated.
Conclusion
We have looked at vision quest participants and vision quest leaders as constituting
a “mythologically instructed community.” We have reviewed several
myths that might contribute “a corpus of images and identities and models
that provides the pattern to which growth may aspire” within that community
(Bruner, 1960, p. 280). The intent has been to discern a set of transcultural
myths that might inform and empower the contemporary wilderness vision quest
while avoiding any imputation of cultural appropriation. The mythology that
we have examined includes the myth of the inherent healing power of the earth;
the myths of the rite of passage, heroic quest, and initiation; the spatiotemporal
myths of the center, the beginning of time, and the return to a harmonious relationship
with the natural world; and, finally, the myth of finding the center of oneself,
returning to one’s own beginning, and achieving a kind of inner and outer
balance in the world. These myths are transcultural and empowering – a
resource for the re-visioning of the vision quest.
Notes
1 For indigenist critiques of Storm, see, for example, Kehoe, 1990, p. 200;
Deloria, 1994, p. 37; Churchill, 1996, p. 317.
2 There is thus some question about just what the process should be called.
Tinker (1998, p. 135) uses the term “Rite of Vigil” to refer to
the ritual as practiced by Native North Americans. Lakota practitioners use
the Lakota term hàblécheya, or speak of fasting, or “going
up the hill” (Bucko, 1998, p. 245). The highly respected Lakota medicine
man Pete S. Catches, Sr., insists that the proper term for the ritual is “Pipefast”
(Catches, 1999, p. 147). Some non-native practitioners speak of “vision
fasts,” “wilderness fasts,” “wilderness rites of passage,”
or even just “solos.” I will use the term “vision quest”
in this paper, but with some misgivings, since the term has, over the last several
years, acquired an uncontrolled mass of connotation.
3 There is some variation both in the number of terms and in the terms themselves
among vision quest guides and leaders. For example, Steven Foster of the School
of Lost Borders speaks of severance, threshold, and incorporation; Joseph Jastrab
of Earth Rise Foundation speaks of separation, initiation, and reincorporation;
and Bill Plotkin of the Animas Valley Institute speaks of the five phases of
preparation, severance, sacred world, reincorporation, and implementation.
4 It is not at all clear, of course, whether Joyce meant by the term what Campbell
means. This is how Joyce uses the word: “At the carryfour with awlus plawshus,
their happy-ass cloudious! And then and too the trivials! And their bivouac!
And his monomyth! Ah ho! Say no more about it! I’m sorry!” (Joyce,
1939/1999, p. 581).
5 Interestingly, Myerhoff’s account of Ramòn’s display of
balance is probably the source for the almost identical feat alleged by Carlos
Castaneda to have been performed in his presence by the Mazatec sorcerer don
Genaro (Churchill, 1998, pp. 37-38; see Furst, 1996, p. 182).
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