| This dissertation traces an historical continuity between the shaman's song as it appears in myth, legend, shamanic narratives and ethnographic literature, and mystical, visionary, avant-garde and experimental poetries within the Western tradition. I show a poetics of liminality in the ancient epics of Gilgamesh and Inanna, in the magico-religious philosophies of Hermes Trismegistus and Giordano Bruno, and in the Great Vision of Black Elk, and trace a lineage of poets from Saint John of the Cross to the Romantics, to the Modernists, to the Post-Moderns, showing how poetry enacts a continual tension between individual spirituality and cultural constraints on shamanic power and vision. Closely associated with shamanic praxis in the West is a rather wide ranging Gnostic speculation. Indeed, the Gnostic mythos can be viewed as the unique product of a collision between the shamanic paradigm of hunter-gatherer tribes and the increasingly limited empiricism of the monolithic, agrarian-based Western culture. Informing Gnostic thought is an ancient, non-mimetic poetics which views poesis as a magical activity. The bulk of this dissertation examines the import and outcome of this poetics. Shamanic and Gnostic themes are, however, not confined to the literary arts exclusively but have a tremendous impact on other media. Kandinsky's reinterpretation of shamanic motifs triggers the Modernist revolution in painting even as the shamanic seance is recreated by Hugo Ball in the confines of a smoky cabaret and by Rene Clair in the decidedly twentieth century setting of the darkened movie house. Legerdemain of God bridges literary, film and fine arts studies by placing alongside close readings of poetic, mythic and philosophical texts phenomenological descriptions of films, paintings and performances. Texts by Blake, Coleridge, Poe, Rimbaud, Valle-Inclan, Loy, Carrington, Breton, Kaufman, Burroughs, Spicer, Duncan and Notley, and filmic, visual and performance art by Kandinsky, Ball, Carrington, Clair, Houdini and Keaton show the shaman's perennial theme of the Otherworldly Journey ever reconfigured according to the artist's relationship to a specific culture, and that culture's relationship to the shamanic paradigm. |
