ABSTRACT

Early in my anthropological career I became an owl in my imagination during my first shamanic journey, a form of active meditation accompanied by the rhythm of a drumbeat. Afterwards, I came to understand the experience as a spiritual communication with the bird. I was engaged in participant observation research on British practitioners of magic at the time, and my experience of transformation happened during a workshop at a conference on the performing arts and shamanism in Cardiff, Wales. All the participants of the workshop were instructed to find a hole in the ground in our imaginations and to imagine our selves going down into it. The aim of the journey was to find a spirit guide. The experience had a profound effect on me: I smelt my warm bird smell and it took me into the experience of flight; I could feel the pull of the air on my wing feathers. It was surprising to me that a neo-shamanic journey at a conference could have had such a deep impact and I came to realize the power of the imagination in the mutability of subtle-body boundaries. If I, as a person untrained in such shamanic encounters, could feel that I had become an owl in spirit then some aspect of the experience must be potentially universal to human processes of mind. My experience of such communication with spirit beings would have wide implications for my research.