GoatMan Read online

  For one thing, it’s thought that elephants understand mortality. Just like humans, they’ll tend another elephant that’s dying. Two elephants have been seen struggling to keep another, who was terminally ill, on its feet; then, when it did lie down to die, they tried to feed it by putting grass in its mouth with their trunks. And when the sick elephant did finally pass away, they stood over its body for days. Families of elephants have been documented visiting the body of a recently deceased matriarch elephant, over the course of several days. It very much seems as if they mourn their dead. And when they do eventually leave fallen kin, they sometimes cover the body with leaves and branches. The behaviour patterns of a family of elephants can take years to return to normal after a violent death in the group, such as at the hands of poachers or as part of a cull, indicating they suffer from something like posttraumatic stress. Only a handful of species, including dolphins, chimps, and gorillas, have been seen to treat a corpse of one of their kind with reverence. But elephants are the only other species besides ourselves (and the extinct Neanderthals) who have a documented ritual reaction to the bones of their species. Elephants who come across the sun-bleached bones and tusks of an elephant long dead will examine them with their trunks in a markedly different way from how they usually fling around interesting objects (including the bones of nonelephants).

  I came to realise that my internal mental idea of elephants was heavily coloured by warm feelings from my childhood towards Dumbo. The reality is elephants are complex, intelligent wild animals, frighteningly powerful and sometimes aggressive. They’re perhaps aware of their own mortality, they live in families (and we all know that families are an unending source of stress and worry), and they are prone, it seems, to suffering sadness, depression, and personality disorders just as we are (hold on—actually, that’s pretty much all there in Dumbo). I’m already an animal prone to these, so trying to escape by becoming an elephant would be akin to jumping from the existential frying pan into another frying pan. So I returned from South Africa with a somewhat disturbed view of elephants and somewhat disturbed by my newfound desire not to become one. So I went to the pub. And, of course, after a couple of pints, a friend made an excellent suggestion: I should seek guidance from an acquaintance of hers who’s a shaman who lives in Scandinavia. After all, a shaman is a kind of expert on human-animal relations. And so, when I found myself visiting Denmark to teach a master class, I went via Copenhagen.

  I find the entrance to the Ballonparken. Rows of little wooden cabins, painted iron oxide red with white window frames, sit on either side of a muddy track. It feels like a place from a different time—the past, certainly, but also perhaps a future. There’s not much plastic around (a couple of rain barrels) and few of the bright colours of modern life. A lot of wood, both in the buildings and the air; the smell of pine and wood smoke hangs in the haze. It’s also exceptionally quiet. Really, exactly the sort of environs you’d expect to feature a shaman (but rather convenient for the shops). The last cabin on the left is where I find her.

  Annette (the shaman) welcomes me in. It’s a cosy place: a single room with a high bed in one corner, a small kitchen in the other, a wood-burning stove, and various bits of dead animal dotted around (a pair of wings “from an eagle,” she tells me, a pair of antlers from a deer). I take a seat in a rocking chair next to the stove while Annette makes us some tea. She has long, white hair and black eyes and a face with some deep wrinkles. She puts me slightly in mind of a witch, but a (mostly) good witch. Her cabin really makes me feel like I’ve stepped one thousand miles north and one hundred years sideways, rather than just off a Copenhagen street.

  I’m somewhat encumbered by my technology. I have three digital recording devices aimed at us; their blinking red lights seem quite out of place. Annette requests that I turn them all off, but after some negotiation we compromise on leaving just the one running. When we’re settled with tea and crackers, she sits down on the opposite side of the small wooden table and asks me, in her Scandinavian-tinged accent, why I’ve sought her out.

  I explain that I’m supposed to be becoming an elephant, but it’s not going all that well, and that I was talking to my friend in a pub who had done a shamanic journey and she suggested I try to do one, too, to see if it’ll help with my project…

  “And, in summary, I was hoping you could send me to the spirit world to meet my power animal?”

  She sighs. For reasons of her own, she’s not going to help me undertake a shamanic journey to retrieve my power animal. For that I will have to go elsewhere. However, she can clearly see that my trying to become an elephant is, as she puts it bluntly, “idiotic.”

  Idiotic. That takes the wind out of my sails. “Oh. Why?” I ask.

  “Well, what have you got to do with the elephants? Nothing. They’re completely alien to the environment you’re connected to. If you were a bushman in Africa, then yes, an elephant would be possible. But you are not a bushman, and you’re from London. You could only get closer to an animal that’s near to you in terms of your shared environment, the places you live in and move through.”

  “But we have elephants in England—in zoos,” I protest.

  She dismisses my pedantry: “They are all mad, though.”

  I have to agree. I tell her I took a vow to never again visit a zoo after taking my girlfriend to Wilhelma zoo in Stuttgart for our second and, as it’s turned out, second-worst date. The place was simply bursting with animals driven insane by their captivity, including a pair of elephants, who endlessly performed the same sequence of stereotyped motions.

  “So what animals do you have in London apart from in zoos? You have Fox. You have Deer.”

  Deer we have: half of bloody London used to be the stag-hunting grounds of the aristocracy, and a few herds remain in Greenwich Park, formerly hunted by King Henry VIII.

  “You are much closer to Deer in terms of the connection through the environment.” She sizes me up. “In fact, Deer is still too wild for you. Really…the Sheep.”

  A pause, during which she considers me more carefully.

  “Actually, for you, the Goat.”

  A goat. Yes…a goat!

  A wave of relief and gratitude floods over me. Relief because of narrowly avoiding being proclaimed a sheep. Gratitude because with a goat I know Annette has gotten it absolutely right. A goat—a goat is so much more my level. Sure, elephants have conveniently short necks, but what connection do I have with them? I mean, just in practical terms it took a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a journey across half the world to see them in their natural environment. In contrast, there is a herd of goats just down the flipping road from where I live.

  I know. It’s a massive cliché: I sought out a shaman about an uncertainty and she told me to stick to my dream. Because, gentle reader, there is a dream mixed up in this project, too, or rather, should I say, a vision, half-remembered from when I was very small.

  The vision goes like this: there is a leafy houseplant, which one day I decide to eat. But it’s the manner of eating that I particularly remember, because I decide to eat it without using my hands. I remember tugging at a leafy branch with my teeth. The stem resisting, the bush rustling…I throw my head back determinedly, and the stem snaps off in my mouth, and I begin to chew the leaves.

  I’m not sure how old I am in this short snippet of internal video, but eating this houseplant without my hands was evidently such a profound feeling, it has stuck with me all these years.

  Annette in her wisdom has released me from the elephant that I had arrived at oh, so logically (well, sort of) and without knowing it told me to stick to the dream! Would an elephant tug at a branch with its teeth? No. It would use its armlike trunk. Would an elephant gallop across a landscape? Impossible, because elephants physically cannot gallop! But a goat? Check and check!

  Goat.

  Annette demonstrating the deer dance in her kitchen.

  Annette wastes no time getting down to brass tacks.

&nb
sp; “So how could you be a nonhuman being, in this case an animal? Well, now, there are old ways, ritual and magic and spiritual ways it’s done within shamanic tradition. And one thing is, you get the outer form, the movement, and you start by imitating that. So there are some peoples, like the Pueblo people of the southwestern United States, who would have half the skull of the deer, with the antlers. You put them on—”

  Annette rises from the table and starts sort of swinging her head with imaginary antlers from side to side.

  “—and you feel the weight…And then you have two sticks.”

  She holds her arms out in front of her, hands grasping the tops of two imaginary deer-leg sticks, and begins rhythmically stepping with them around the kitchen, demonstrating this deer dance and explaining: “So you become four-legged. And there are even hooves on the end of the legs. And so you start this honouring magic, calling Deer in a spirit dance.”

  She steps over to her mantelpiece and picks up a short stick with black beads tied to one end—a rattle. She starts rattling as she continues moving around the kitchen.

  “This is also a way of doing it…of becoming one with the spirit of an animal. A rattle with this sort of lightness of sound…The lightness of a beautiful animal.”

  She continues to dance around the kitchen, rhythmically shaking her rattle, and starts to hum deeply but then abruptly breaks out of it, returning to sit at the table and handing me the rattle to inspect.

  “These rattles are used all over the world. I have much bigger rattles, from the stag and the reindeer, which make a deeper sound, but these are the hooves of a row deer.” She’s referring to the beads tied to the end of the rattle.

  “Every one of these is like a fingernail, and there was a bone I had to pull out. Like the tip of the finger.”

  “Gruesome.”

  “Well, it was my Christmas Eve project.”

  Annette continues: “So in a way, it starts through cold imitation. But then you can enter into this ‘between-the-worlds state,’ or ‘trans-ecstasy,’ or ‘changed state of consciousness.’” She waves the words aside to imply the term itself is unimportant. “But because you have called and honoured the spirit of Deer, you can then experience this transformation, seeing the world through the eyes of the animal.”

  The earliest known drawing of a Siberian shaman, from the 1692 book Noord en Oost Tartarije, an account by the Dutch explorer Nicolaas Witsen of his travels in Siberia. It portrays an Evenk shaman, performing a ritual with a drum, and is labeled “een Schaman ofte Duyvel-priester” (Shaman or Devil-Priest).

  Hunters’ or Deer Dance, painted circa 1932 by Alphonso Roybal.

  San Juan Pueblo deer dance, photographed circa 1977 by Richard Erdoes.

  She leans back in her chair, concluding: “So, that sort of changed state of consciousness is pretty helpful.”

  “Right, yes.” I’m nodding and agreeing, but I’m wondering how I’m going to enter into a state of trans-ecstasy without visiting one of London’s more insalubrious nightclubs. She continues: “However. These people know the animal. They have been following and watching and remembering the life and the way of it their whole lives. It’s in their bones. So I don’t know how much it will work if you have no knowledge of the animal.”

  I’m a little offended by her emphasis on the word no, because surely I have some knowledge of “the animal.” But when I come to think of it, I do see many more dead (bits of ) animal than living ones in any given week. A walk through the supermarket and there are lots of bits of dead animal from a variety of species, whereas a walk through the park? Well, some pigeons and a few dogs. I did a quick survey. Number of animal species represented in my local supermarket: twenty-nine. Number of animal species I see in a trip to my local park: two. Including homo sapiens.

  So Annette’s summing up my knowledge of animals—me being someone who has lived in cities my entire life—as essentially nil in comparison with people who have grown up tracking and hunting them is perhaps fair (though I’m not that happy about this newly realised lack of nonhuman animal contact; I resolve to get a cat). In fact, that’s what Annette does professionally sometimes—she tries to “reconnect city people to their hunter-gatherer souls.” And, she tells me, “they take to it like ducks to water.”

  Our conversation continues, and Annette digs out a photograph of a shaman from Siberia doing an antelope dance (my notion that shamanism is a “Native American thing” has been corrected; the word originally comes from Siberia and is now used to describe similar practices found in cultures indigenous to every part of the globe). I comment on the fact that the photograph’s date is almost a hundred years old. Annette fixes me with a look.

  “People have been trying to bridge the gap between animal and human always. Always.”

  And it seems she’s quite right.

  In 1939 a German geologist named Otto Völzing was helping with the excavation of the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Swabian Alps in southern Germany. The excavations had been successful, and Völzing had dug up the skeletons of thirty-eight Stone Age people as well as the skulls of a man, woman, and child. For some long-lost reason, their heads had been severed and buried at the entrance of the cave, all arranged staring towards the southwest. The dig, funded by the Nazi SS to find evidence for their belief that human civilisation started in Germany, was cut short by the start of the Second World War. Völzing was called up to fight, but on his last day he found a whole bunch of fragments of ivory buried deep in the very back of the cave. These he diligently packed up in a box before going off to fight the Allies.

  The box of tusk shards ended up in a local museum and was forgotten. It wasn’t until 1969 that someone doing an inventory realised that the shards were woolly mammoth tusk and actually the remains of a statuette. The figure that emerged as the fragments were pieced together was a carving of a human figure with a lion’s head, and the latest dating techniques show it was carved forty thousand years ago. This makes it the oldest nonabstract art and the oldest figurative sculpture in existence, and it’s a human-animal hybrid.

  While we can’t know why it was carved, it’s clear it took a lot of work; a sculptor recently tried to make an (elephant) ivory copy using only the type of flint tools that were around forty thousand years ago, and it took him almost three months of solid work. This effort means it must have been important to the makers. So while it could have been a toy or something (the Lion Human does seem smiley to me), by far its most likely purpose was as some kind of spiritual talisman.

  Der Löwenmensch (“the Lion Human”) of Hohlenstein-Stadel, carved 40,000 years ago and the oldest work of figurative art yet found.

  Representations of human-animal hybrids have been found painted in the deepest parts of other caves frequented by people living during the Upper Palaeolithic (the end of the Stone Age). For example, there are the paintings in the Chauvet Cave in the Ardèche Gorge in France. This cave, stumbled into by three spelunkers in the early 1990s, had until that moment been sealed off for 25,000 years. It contains hundreds of paintings of animals, but in the deepest chamber there’s a figure of a half-human, half-bison that was painted by a person 30,000 years ago. Also, in a cave in Lascaux, France, there’s a painting of a man (he has an erection) with a bird’s head, lying on the floor, that is 16,500 years old. And there’s the so-called Sorcerer painting from around 13,000 years ago in the Trois Frères Cave in Ariège, France, showing a man with antlers, dancing.

  The bison-headed human painted 30,000 years ago on a rock pendant deep in the Chauvet Cave.

  Bird-headed man with a bird-headed staff, lying (dying?) in front of a bison that seems to have been disembowelled by a spear.

  The art at Trois Frères Cave is difficult to make out in photographs, as it’s engraved into the rock as well as drawn with charcoal. The discoverer of the cave made sketches of the cave art, though. Top: The Sorcerer figure with antlers and tail. Below: A bison-headed man playing a nose flute.

  All these examples
are from a small patch of Europe. It was once thought that the Stone Age Europeans invented the practice of sculpting and painting figures (with the implication that the cognitive and cultural beginnings of creativity were in Le Europe, reinforcing the nineteenth-century idea that Europeans and their descendants are exceptional). But this Eurocentric view seems to have been more due to the fact that the conditions in Europe have been right for preservation and, more important, study: only in 2014 did a scientist do the work to accurately test the age of some cave paintings of animals in Indonesia. She found them to be 35 to 39,000 years old, the same age as the oldest paintings in Europe. The temporal concurrence yet wide geographic separation of these similar Indonesian and European paintings suggests that the practice likely started before the populations who spread east towards Indonesia and west into Europe diverged from North Africa around 60,000 years ago.

  Who knows when a person actually first imagined being a lion-man or a bison-man or a bird-man (or, for that matter, a goat-man)? But as the cave paintings and figurines are thought to represent the beliefs people had about the world before history—our first attempts at answering the eternal questions Who am I? Why am I here? and Where do I go?—it’s likely people have been trying to bridge the gap between humans and other animals for a bloody long time, if not, as Annette said, always. So really, to want to become a goat is pretty standard. In fact, historically speaking, it’s almost odder to not want to become a goat.

  I ask Annette why a shaman would want to transform into an animal, anyway.