My brother shaman

My brother shaman Richard Selzer In the cult of the Bhagavati, as it has been practised in southern India, there is a ritual in which two entranced shamans dressed in feathered costumes and massive headgear enter a circle of witnesses. All night long in the courtyard of a temple they lunge and thrust at each other, give shouts of defiance, make challenging gestures. It is all done to the sound of drums, conches and horns. Come daybreak, the God Kali "slays" the demon Darika, then plunges her hands into the very bowels of Darika, drinking of and smearing herself with blood. At last Kali withdraws from the field of battle having adorned herself with the intestines of the vanquished. It is a far cry from the bloody trances of shamans to the bloody acts of surgery. Or is it? Take away from Kali and Darika the disciplinary beat of tautened hide and the moaning of flutes, and you have ... an emergency intestinal resection. The technique is there, the bravado, the zeal. Only lacking in surgery is the ecstasy. In both surgery and shamanism the business is done largely by the hands of the operator. The surgeon holds his scalpel, hemostat, forceps; the shaman, his amulet of bone, wood, metal. For each there is the hieratic honoring of ritual objects. The handling of these objects induces a feeling of tranquillity and power. One's mind is nudged from the path of self awareness into the pathless glade of the imagination. The nun, too, knows this. She tells her beads, and her heart is enkindled. Surely it is true that the handling of instruments is conducive to the kind of possession or devotion that is the mark of both professions. The surgeon and the shaman understand that one must honor, revere and entreat one's tools. Both do their handiwork with a controlled vehemence. This is most dramatically seen in those offshoots of Buddhism wherein the shaman ties his fingers 42 MY BROTHER SHAMAN in "knots," each having a strange distorted appearance. These priests have an uncanny flexibility of their finger joints, each of which has a special name. During these maneuvers the shaman is possessed by finger spirits. He invokes the good spirits and repels the evil ones. Such hand poses, or mudras, seen in Buddhist iconography, are used in trance-like rituals to call down the gods to possess the shaman. In like manner the surgeon restrains his knife even as he gives it rein. He, too, is the medium between man and God. The shaman has his drum which is the river of sound through which he can descend to the Kingdom of Shadows to retrieve the soul of his tribesfellow. The surgeon listens to the electronic beep of the cardiac monitor, the regulated respiration of anesthesia, and he is comforted or warned. Even the operating table has somewhat the shape and size of the pagan altars I saw in a tiny sixth-century baptistry in the Provencal village of Venasque. Upon these slabs beasts and, in certain instances, humans were laid open to appease the gods. Should one of these ancient pagans undergo resurrection and be brought to a modern operating room with its blazing lamps and opulence of linen and gleaming gadgetry, where masked and gowned figures dip their hands in and out of the body of someone who has been plunged into magical sleep, what else would he think but that he had happened upon a ritual sacrifice? Nor is the toilet of decoration less elaborate for surgeon than for shaman. Take the Washing of the Hands: Behold the surgeon at his ablutions. His lavabo is a deep sink, often of white porcelain, with a central faucet controlled by the knee. The soap he uses is thick and red as iodine. It is held in a nozzled bottle on the wall. The surgeon depresses a pedal on the floor. Once, twice, three times and collects into his cupped palm a puddle of the soap. There it would sit, lifeless, if he did not add a little water from the faucet and begin to brush. Self-containment is part of the nature of soap. Now, all at...