Healing Through Images: The Magical Flight and Healing Geography of Nepali Shamans Author(s): Robert R.

Desjarlais Source: Ethos, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Sep., 1989), pp. 289-307 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/640435 . Accessed: 19/12/2010 11:43
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Healing The

through Magical

Images: Flight
and

Healing

Geography of

Nepali

Shamans

ROBERT R. DESJARLAIS
During their healing ceremonies, Nepali shamans journey on magical flights in pursuit of lost souls or in search of medicinal knowledge concerning their patient. Traveling through a landscape both physical and metaphorical, the shaman's spirit visits several features of the countryside, ranging from the valley of Kathmandu to the "inner mountain snow fields" of Tibet. On this voyage he may communicate with supernatural beings who inhabit and represent certain geographical domains, such as "the master spirit of the forest" or "the spirit of the crossroads." This itinerary also affects the subjective experience of the patient, who ruminates over the images and events articulated by the shaman. This paper analyzes how the "healing geography" developed by the shaman during his magical flight-images of forests, rivers, mountains, and crossroads-provokes a healing transformation in his patient. After outlining the phenomenon of magical flight as it is found in Nepali shamanism,' I explore the landscape of images enROBERT R. DESJARLAIS is a Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles.

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countered by the shamans during their journeys and inquire into what such images may mean for the patient.2 Then I examine the healing dynamics which I propose are embedded in the shaman's expression of his journey. My thesis is that, along with other symbolic idioms (such as cosmological and interpersonal "relational" images), these geographical images serve as a symbolic matrix representing certain personal experiences of the patient.3 The shaman creates a dynamic healing context in which he guides the patient through such metaphors of experience. Healing, as I define it, entails a transformative process in which a person moves from one "domain of experience" (Fernandez 1986) to another, that is, from a personal experience of illness to one of lasting health. Through the manipulation of images symbolic of personal experience, I argue, the shaman simultaneously transforms the patient's experience of selfhood. In light of this, I wish to examine how the shaman transforms the experiential world of his patient by evoking, manipulating, and interpreting distinct "geographical" images in order to both re-present experiences of illness and present novel ones of healing and health. My presentation is in part a metaphorical one, for I want to give a sense of how human beings creatively anchor their experiences within a culturally constituted matrix of symbols. As I will show, the notion of "magical flight" may be viewed as a metaphoric window through which we can understand how people move, imaginatively and experientially, through their healing geographies, be they of the earth, the body, or the mind.4 MAGICAL FLIGHT One of the intriguing aspects of the magical flight of Nepali shamanism is that the shaman's excursion does not always involve a pure "magical flight," as the excursion of Siberian shamans is said to do (cf. Eliade 1964). Although the Nepali shaman is occasionally reported to journey to a lower- or upperworld (Mumford 1985; Watters 1975), he usually ambles along a familiar-albeit highly significant-terrestrial path.5 The shaman moves from hill to knoll toward his destination, reciting step-by-step his detailed itinerary to the participants of the healing ceremony. One shaman's chant, for instance, successively mentions a half-dozen hamlets, two river crossings, a cave dwelling, a monastery, a sacred shrine, and a

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"place of origin and fertility" (Allen 1974:8). We can see how the shamanic flights in Nepal are basically "earthbound" in this passage from Hitchcock (1967:157):
[The shaman's] closest approach to the classic otherworldlyjourney is a real terrestrialjourney to the burial ground, where he lies on the stones of the grave and calls to the soul as if it were a child, luring it from the clutches of its captor or enticer.... Even the helper spirits of the Nepalese shaman are somewhat earthbound. They are conceived of as grazing in various localities. When the shaman calls, they journey across the local countryside, journeys that sometimes are specified in elaborate detail.

Throughout the ethnographic literature on Nepali shamanism we find that such journeys are expressed in great detail. Messerschmidt comments on a Gurung ceremony geared toward delivering the deceased to the land of the dead:
[The shaman] recites, among other things, the names of well known geographic locations leading from the high mountains, down through familiar highland pastures and forests to the village. This funerary geography includes points on the route along which the forefathersare said to have come when they first settled south of the Himalaya (from the North). It now serves as the route along which the spirits of the deceased reapproach the village after death. [1976:208]

Although the shaman's flight is earthbound, it is doubly meaningful, for a symbolic matrix has been graphed onto the physical landscape. This combination of environmental features and icons symbolic of human experience is illustrated in the healing geography of a Magar shaman:
The shaman travels east to a high mountain pass, and from there descends into the "underworld." Many of the geographical names used are both real and symbolic. For example, just beyond Dhorpatan is a large stone with a natural groove around its middle. The stone is called "The Tying Place of the Death Sacrifice," and as such is a symbolic road marker for the road to death. The groove is attributed to the wear of the ropes of animals which have been tied there for the "Casting-awaythe-soul" sacrifice. Further on, at the.mountain pass, is a dividing of watersheds. The water which runs toward the village is known as "The Waters of Remembrance," and the water flowing the other way as "The Waters of Forgetfulness." In retrieving the soul, it is said that if the shaman can overtake it while it is still within the Waters of Remembrance, its capture and subsequent reinstallation is comparatively easy. If, on the other hand, the soul has reached the Waters of Forgetfulness, it will forget its home and family and wander into the underworld. [Watters 1975:146]

In sum, traversing the Himalayan countryside, either to inter the dead or revitalize the living, Nepali shamans essentially use a geo-

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graphical model of human experience, ranging from the Waters of Remembrance to the road to death. THE SHAMAN'S ALTAR The shaman's flight finds iconic expression in the altar that some Nepali shamans use during their healing ceremonies. For the Tamang and Sherpa shaman, this altar is composed of a set of rice dough tormaeffigies (Furer-Haimendorf 1964; Holmberg 1980; Ortner 1978). Within this "house of spirits" (Holmberg 1980:300), each tormarepresents a particular spirit or deity invoked during the performance of the ceremony. At another metaphorical level, however, there is a veritable "world imagined in the altar," for enclosed within are hills and forests in which the la (spirits) reside (Holmberg 1980:300-301). The shaman travels within this world when he shamanizes: "Chanting he steps up from high peak to high peak, and those high peaks are before him on the altar" (Holmberg 1980:312). The spirits and deities represented in the shaman's altar-and which possess the shaman-are generally considered to reside at specific locales within the vicinity of the village. Hitchcock, for instance, notes that some of the spirits that possess the Magar shaman "are known to live nearby, in a waterfall, a spring, a rock, or a part of the forest" (1974:74). Gods, meanwhile, are believed to originate and reside at the tops of hills and mountains (Furer-Haimendorf 1955; Winkler 1976:261). There are grounds, then, for inferring historical and analogic relations between the animistic healing geographies and the pantheons of supernatural beings with whom the shamans communicate, both during their magical flights and when they are possessed by such spirits. Like the Tamang shaman, the Limbu shaman uses an elaborate altar in the diagnosis and cure of disease associated with witchcraft and Nahen, the spirit of envy and jealousy (Jones 1976:37-38). Jones reports that one Limbu shaman constructed his altar out of a bamboo ladder with seven steps.
According to theyeba [shaman], the steps symbolized the "evils of existence" with which he was capable of communication during trance .... During his trance, his "soul" would journey up this ladder symbolizing his journey through seven celestial realms inhabited by supernatural beings. At the base of the altar, he constructed a small "fence" of bamboo .... The fence ... symbolized the land of the dead. The yeba's soul was believed to travel to this realm during trance, if need be,

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to release the spirits of those who lost their "soul" during illness, sleep, or attacks by spirits of the dead. [Jones 1976:37-38]

The shaman's altar thus serves as a symbolic map for his journey through sacred terrain.6 THE LANDSCAPE OF IMAGES This terrain does not exist solely on an esoteric, supernatural plane evoked within the pale glow of inner-room shamanic ceremonies. Culled from the surface features of their daily environment, these images permeate the everyday words, experiences, and "imaginings" of Nepali highland peoples. These villagers, in turn, project a profusion of meanings and memories onto the experiential fissures of their countryside.7 To adopt a concept from James Fernandez (1986), such images represent "domains of experience." In an analysis of religious revitalization movements, Fernandez discusses how these movements draw upon a "repository of images," anchored in the "nether regions of the mind," in order to represent communal motives and experiences (1986:174).
Each of these images derives from or is a pictorialization of a domain of experience-the domain of forest life, of domestic life, of military affairs, of supernatural relations.... The performance of these images revitalizes a domain of experience and participation. [Fernandez 1986:175]

As the Tamang shaman calls out the places where a lost soul may reside, it is evident that he, too, revitalizes domains of experience through the performance of images arising out of the nether regions of his and the patient's mind:
. . . in a ne [place or heaven] of the homeless in a neof confusion in a ne of distress in a neof rumorous gossip in a neof cannibals in a neof closed mouths in a neof licentious sex. ... [Holmberg 1980:294]

What is most striking about this passage is how foreign to us are the "etiologies" of illness evoked by the shaman. The images contained within our own healing geography-maps of "inner worlds," infantile neuroses, and DMS-III categories-would leave us poorly

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outfitted to explore the terrain that the Nepali shaman roams. Nevertheless, if we inquire into how images give form and articulated meaning to the inchoate flow of subjective experience, we can understand how the shaman works with such metaphors of experience to provoke transformations in the worlds of his patients.
ILLNESS

As is glimpsed in the passage above, incidents of illness among Nepali highland peoples are often mapped out onto the landscape. Individuals fall sick when unwittingly traversing through the locale of spirit beings, including various bridges, streams, trees, forests, and mountains (Greve 1981-82:108; Mumford 1985:100-101). The offended spirit assaults the intruder, provoking illness. In describing the onset of illness, an individual will often give meaning to his malaise by embedding it within a matrix of geographical metaphors: "A Bhut [ancestor ghost] attacked me as I was at the crossroads up along the ridge . . .," a sick Sherpa woman from related to me one day. Sharma the village of Gulphubanyang (1986:29), meanwhile, reports that Ranke Bhut, literally meaning Bhut in the form of light, "are very common at the banks of a river or around cremation grounds." Finally, if a Tibetan living in Northern Nepal dreams either of falling off a cliff or "walking naked in a strange land or in a wide open field or along a river," then that person's soul has probably been lost (Mumford 1985:238-239). Macdonald (1976:322-323) describes how the Limbu believe there to be seven feminine spirits who provoke illness. The spirits, each specializing in a certain malady, are generally known to live in distinct habitats. For example, the tangled-haired Latte burheni,who renders one deaf, mute, and blind, is found in places hot and cold. Her partner, Kali burheni, inhabits the jungles of the Himalayas. Chamki burheni roams among plains, sandy places, and bamboo thickets, tugging on peoples' eyelids and hair. Finally, the blackgarbed Khut Khattai burhenileaves henlike footprints. Anyone who follows these tracks becomes crazy and dies. Like her associates, then, this chicken-footed spirit scratches out a malignant path through the frailties of Limbu experience.

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THE FOREST The forest is a vivid example of how such geographical images touch the lives of Nepali villagers. One ethnographer sums up the Nepali's perception of the forest as
the evil world of wild beasts and hostile spirits. In this region, where adults are reluctant to enter, there are numerous stories of people being injured, deformed or lost in the jungle. Children go to live there for several days without food in the company of elves and malevolent spirits. [Fournier 1976:105]

During my own stay in Nepal, I was baffled by this recurrent emphasis on the domain of the forest, or, as my Nepali friends called it, "the jungle." I heard numerous stories of adolescents who withdraw into this realm, wander there for several days in a hallucinatory state, and meet a varied assortment of creatures.8 One such creature, the shaman spirit of the forest, or banjhankri, is known to meet such spirit-crazed individuals, take them into his home (usually a cave), and teach them the shamanic craft. Ban Jhankriis usually depicted as being of dwarf-size, with feet facing backward, and of enormous strength and intelligence. His wife, meanwhile, wishes to eat the shamanic initiate. The image of the forest represents a certain domain of human experience. It is a place "where life is dangerous" (Macdonald 1976:337), where rationality and culture are lacking, and where the beasts and goblins of the dark, wild side of human action run rampant. Westerners have another term for this experiential domain, an image equally metaphorical, located less among the shadows of our physical terrain and more within the symbolic matrix of our corporeal selves: we call it "the unconscious." How such images shape the everyday experience of individuals is expressed in the 16-year-old Limbu Muktuba's account of his interaction with Tamphunga, the master spirit of the forest, believed to be a source of evil and an agent of illness and bad luck (Sagant 1969, 1976:42). The Limbu depict this anima-like creature as follows:
Tamphunga lives on the outskirts of homesteads, on the edge of forests, and along

trails. She has power over numerous nature divinities, which she uses to harm people who fail to placate her demands with frequent offerings. [Sagant 1976:42]

Tamphunga is also known to appear within cemeteries and "the rivulets which descend from the mountains and pass close to hamlets" (Sagant 1969:110).9

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Tamphunga was always "playing tricks" on the shaman-to-be Muktuba (such as bending bamboo trees to block his path along the "lower road" home from a wedding). While on a trip to Sikkim, Muktuba and some friends stopped to rest at a wayfarer's bench.
Near [the bench] and a little farther down the hill was a small mountain stream that crossed the path we had just climbed and continued flowing into the jungle. From where I was sitting, I saw an old woman arrive. She was carrying a small basket and had a sickle in her hand. I was watching her when all of the sudden she disappeared by the stream. [Sagant 1976:62]

Unseen by his friends, the master spirit of the forest appears along the margins of the boy's consciousness, soon to vanish within a small mountain stream descending into the hidden recesses of the jungle. Emerging from the coarse landscape surrounding his existence, chimeric images such as Tamphunga permeate the experiential mosaic of Muktuba's life. More than fodder for the tangible expression of subjective experience, such images, as I will presently discuss, can also generateand transform experiences. HEALING IMAGES How does healing occur through the use of "geographical" imagery? How does the shaman's magical flight provoke ideational and behavioral transformations in the patient? Healing is a multidimensional process involving a combination of imaginative techniques and therapeutic strategies. I outline below several mechanisms involved in this process.
VISIONARY KNOWLEDGE

One reason the shaman goes on a magical flight is to diagnose the nature of the patient's illness. Penetrating the obscurity of the forest, a Limbu shaman cries out to his tutelary spirit, "Look, guru, look closely, so the jungle does not prevent you from seeing; will his body be sick? Will he have fever?" (Sagant 1976:81). Holmberg (1980:312-314) gives a vivid description of how a Tamang shaman learns of his patient's condition by visiting one site within the healing geography. The shaman travels to the beyhul(hidden places or god-heavens), often described as "inner mountain snow fields." Achieving a visionary consciousness there, he "reveals the faces of the la [spirits]" of the house and village, and "circles up

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citing hills and peaks on the way to the gates of the heavens in Tibet" (Holmberg 1980:313). Similarly, when a Gurung shaman searches "in his imagination" for the lost soul of his patient, he calls out "the names of goddesses of rock, soil, rivers and trees to ask if the soul has been taken and hidden in these domains" (Mumford 1985:246). He conducts a parallel exploration when searching for a householder's "wealth," stolen and hidden by a "witch." He tells his tormaspirits to search, among other places, within fields, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, "the high cliff on the mountain," "the crevasses between the cliffs," "the great mountain (Mt. Meru)," and the underworld (Mumford 1985:171). "All possibilities are covered," Mumford observes, "a perspective that is central to the shamanic tradition" (1985:246). In conducting such an exploratory surgery, searching for signs of the patient's situation, the shaman, and thus the patient, derive some knowledge from the images arising out of the healing geography. "Reading" the condensation of associations stored in the faces of the neand other places and beings he sights, the shaman has the intuitive ability to "see" the various experiential dynamics tacitly embedded in the patient's condition. He then re-presents this visionary knowledge to the patient through imagery, making explicit what was once implicit. The use of the verb "to reveal," denoting a sort of revelatory vision, is found throughout Tamang shamans' commentaries of their magical flights (Holmberg 1980). For example, the Tamang consider the so, or "life-force," of a person to be represented by a sapor ling, referredto as so dungma, "life-force pole." When a person is sick, the shaman goes on a revelatoryjourney to determine the condition of this tree:
So dungma refers to the tree of an individual that grows in a beautiful, heavenly also hill. On this celestial hill grow trees, one for each adult; when bombos [shamans] reveal the condition of the so, they go there and see the so dungma their client. The of so dungma an image of the integrity of life force.... If someone is ill, the bombo is must revive the so. Before revival, a bombo first must proceed on a revelatoryjourney. He envisions the beautiful heavenly hill on which grow trees for all humankind. [Holmberg 1980:295]

This reading of images embodied in the Tamang healing geography, where trees symbolize life forces, is also reflected in a Limbu shaman's divinatoryjourney, where flowers denote life forces:

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When the phedangma [shaman] finally reaches the Crossroads of the Three Paths and Confluence of the Three Springs, he stops. Before him stretches the domain of Nahangma, called co-lung.... The co-lung that the phedangma sees from the crossroads appears to be an immense field of flowers, each one of them symbolizing a human life. Those nearest him are the adolescents, while those farther away are the The phedangmacan also prophesy after observing women, and finally the men.... the flower that symbolizes the life of his client. Bent, withered, or faded, it may announce an illness or approaching death. [Sagant 1976:81-82; see also Hardman 1981:163]

The Limbu shaman concretely visualizes the condition of his patient using the metaphors invested in the multivalent image of the flower-bent, withered, or faded.
INTERPRETATION WITHIN THE METAPHOR

Healing with images occurs through an interpretation and reinterpretation of the patient's condition within the metaphors charted out along the healing geography. It is through such metaphors of experience, and the experiencing of metaphorical images, that the patient is healed. Similar to Ekstein's (1966) advice to deal with a patient's subjective reality by way of "interpretation within the metaphor," the shaman presents certain images that speak metaphorically to, and about, the patient's illness. Like the Western psychotherapist, the shaman chooses particular images, "because they accurately reflect [the patient's] inner psychological reality and the state of his ego" (Shafh 1972). Once forests are paired with subliminal secrets, and life choices matched with mountain paths, the shaman can then work with the patient's experiential condition on that metaphorical level. This is seen in a Limbu shaman's handling of a father-son relationship, as reported by Sagant (1976:82). Sagant writes that an adolescent became ill and called a shaman, or phedangma,to conduct, in the name of his father, a ritual that shamans conduct to determine a person's vocation. During this divination, the shaman journeys to the mythical "domain of Nahangma," where there are three paths: the left path is that of the bijuwa (a shamanlike priest); the middle path, that of a layman, or head of the house; and on the right, the path of aphedangma (shaman) (Sagant 1976:82). Sagant's informant told him that when the shaman came to the three paths, he "remarked that the paths of the father and son were not the same, that they must be separated or the son would die. The former had the path of the layman; the latter was on the phedangma'spath" (Sagant

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1976:82). The image of the forked road both crystallizes the interpersonal dynamics tacitly embedded in the father-son relationship and suggests an objective resolution to the patient's malaise. Similar to Ericksonian therapy, the shaman communicates indirectly to the patient through a metaphorical system, suggesting alternative ways of thinking about certain experiences (Gordon 1982:117).
MAGICAL MIMESIS

Levi-Strauss (1950) and others (Dow 1986; Sandner 1979) have observed that the shaman provides a salubrious mythic model which gives form and meaning to his patient's inchoate malaise (as in the example above). Such models can transform experiential states as well. The cultural myth acted out by the shaman is the patient's reality; any manipulation of the ritual narration changes this reality. Through the creation and transformation of imaginative realities, the shaman simultaneously effects a transformation in the experiential reality of the patient. I would liken this process to that of mimesis, derived from classical literary theory: an author preas sents a reality by vividly (and selectively) describing its features.10? As for the shaman, he magically transforms the old reality (of illness) and creates a new one (of health) through the presentation of concrete, sensory images. This process is highlighted in one account of illness and healing told by a former patient of two Limbu shamans (Sagant 1978:245246; my translation and analysis). This Limbu man told Sagant that once, when he was sick, his family arranged for a shaman to perform a chicken sacrifice to ThebaSam, the spirit of the ancestors, in the hopes of retrieving the patient's lost soul. In order to carry out this sacrifice, the shaman first had to travel along a mythic road to Theba Sam'scastle; inside the castle he would then offer the chicken in exchange for the soul. During this ceremony, which lasted late into the night, the shaman apparently dozed off. Seeing this, the patient smacked the shaman alongside the head. The shaman woke with a start, yelling and flailing his arms. After the spectators finally calmed him down, the shaman said that the ceremony had "misfired." He reported that he had arrived at the castle, passed the doors, and was offering the chicken to Theba Sam."He had seen my spirit," the patient recalled, "but at the moment when I hit him, all the doors closed, and my

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spirit remained trapped inside" (Sagant 1978:245-246). The shaman's spirit, however, managed to escape hurriedly. In the following days, with his soul trapped in ThebaSam's castle, the patient fell gravely ill: "I could no longer open my eyes. I no longer heard anything. I did not eat for two days" (Sagant 1978:245; note the metaphoric parallel between the closing of the castle and the impermeability of the patient's body). Finally, another shaman was called to perform the same ceremony. He traveled the same road, arrived at Theba Sam's castle, entered its doors, and saw the chicken left by the previous shaman. He was then able to retrieve the patient's spirit. At dawn, the shaman said that in his dreams he saw the patient ascend toward the mountain crests, confirming that the patient's spirit had returned. That same morning, the patient recalls, he suddenly felt better and gradually regained his health. Thus, by weaving mimetic realities out of mythic images, the shamans determine that the state of the patient's health hinges on his spirit's incarceration or release from ThebaSam's castle.
SYMBOLIC PERFORMANCE

During the curing ceremony, the shaman catalyzes core human as the release of chains or the return of a soulexperiences-such behaviors performed along the visceral expanses of the pathrough tient's subjective experience. The shaman, above all, acts through movements and images, transforming the symbolic into the real. Toward the end of a Kham-Magars curing ceremony, the shaman purports to wash "impurities" and "evil omens" away:
If the shaman determines that the soul has fled because of aggravation, then the The figure of a demon on horseback is made of evil must be "washed away".... dough and painted yellow to symbolize its evil nature. At night, the shaman's assistant puts the demon in a tiny boat on the river, where it floats away. Meanwhile, the shaman sits in the house beating his drum, and he describes step by step the itinerary of the horse and its rider until it reaches Chumktutya bridge (about ten miles downriver). The evil has been eradicated. [Watters 1975:150]

Once again, the shaman acts within a detailed geographical scenario in order to transform the patient's experience of selfhood. As the tiny boat of demonic evil floats down the stream of images, so experiences defined as evil are purged from the symbolic matrix of the patient's self. It is this combination of physical performance and metaphorical movement through geographical space that makes the shaman's ac-

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tions so efficacious (Allen 1974:17). For example, the Bhuji shaman performsa ceremony in which the patient climbs onto a winnowing tray and is then boosted up by members of his family into the "sky" while the shaman dances underneath (Hitchcock 1967:154). From the ceiling a carved wooden model representing the sun and the moon is suspended; below this image hangs a lanceolate leaf of the Sonchampa tree. While being bounced up and down, the patient bites into the leaf, breaking it into two. Afterward, the shaman questions the patient:
Did you see the sun and moon? Yes, I saw. Did you see the stars in the sky? I saw. Did you climb the nine steps? I climbed. Did you climb over the obstruction? I climbed. [Hitchcock 1967:154]

Thus, through a metonymic ascent into the heavens, the patient climbs over the debilitating "obstruction." Through such performative acts graphed onto the physical landscape, the patient's world is changed. Paths are blazed, souls returned, evil impurities washed away. The myriad forms and folds of the healing geography are revealed and revived.
RESTRUCTURING THE SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPE

During his medicinal voyage, the shaman operates on the symbolic landscape he encounters, restructuring its complex of images. On one metaphorical level the shaman acts within the symbolic contours of the healing geography; on another, he works within the experiential matrix of the patient's self. As one Tamang shaman notes:
When you arrive to cure someone, it is like a chain there, a place of chains. As you go you must say, "Oh phamo!look behind me, look in front of me, look from your heart-mind, I have come to this place. This person is sick in such and such a way." You ask them to reveal those places, to release those iron chains. You say, "let's go and reveal all those ne [places]." [Holmberg 1980:314]

As with the Tamang shaman's visit to "the neof the closed mouths," previously hidden (and perhaps repressed) domains of experiences are revealed. The domain of chains, simultaneously visualized and cast off, has been transformed.

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Just as chains are released, so souls captive in the underworld are freed. Returning to the Magar shaman's journey beyond "the Waters of Forgetfulness," we find the shaman continuing in his search for the patient's soul:
Finally, he comes to the place of the soul's captivity where he gives a shout of triumph and begins to bargain with the gods of the underworld, imploring them to free the soul. Finally, with the soul in his possession, the shaman returns by the same route. As he approaches the village he cries out, "I've captured the soul and I bring it for you!" [Watters 1975:146]

Here the shaman spins a web of images based on the plight of the patient. He saves the errant soul from the Waters of Forgetfulness, reintegrating it with the village at the core of the patient's life. When Holmberg asked one Tamang shaman why his revelatory visions come at Daksin Kali, a gorge exiting out of the southern part of the Kathmandu valley, the shaman replied:
There is a great god there. Below you open up all the la, all the earth is opened up and taken-the Ganges, Banaras. From there all the places to the west are opened up and taken .... After you reach Daksin Kali you lift up and take [off]. There the eyes are closed briefly and you see what happens. After that you come back up to the village; all the villages are put in order. Then you go right on up to uisame beyhul [in Tibet]; you go up to midspace. Beyhul is a ne; it is the ne of the bombos .... [In the hrikap], you must recount all the hills, you meditate on all those hills. [Holmberg 1980:304]

Passing through the gorge that pierces the valley, the shaman is, to use Michael Taussig's (1987:200) word, an "imagician" who transforms the experiential world of his patient. All the earth is opened up and taken; villages are put in order; hills are recounted and meditated upon. Images are explored, articulated, ordered, and revitalized. It is movement and medicine at the same time; a magical flight from illness into health.
DOMAINS OF TRANSFORMATION

Since each image the shaman conjures up during his flight is predicated on a certain domain of experience, the shaman can move the patient through experiences, as represented by these images. When the shaman flies from forest to inner-mountain snow field, he also shifts from one domain of experience to another. Pictorialized vividly by the shaman, these images become actively lived by the patient." The patient is thus guided, experientially and affectively, through this transformative stream of images.12

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Many of these images possess an active sentiment of "liminality" as Victor Turner defines it: "a fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures" (1986:41). In his journeys the Nepali shaman often visits cliffs, crossroads, cremation grounds, river edges, and the "jungle." The Magar shaman has a wild goat stave lead him to the place of an errant soul, "usually a graveyard or swampy area" (Watters 1975:82). Searching for his patient's lost soul, a Tamang shaman sings of where the soul may lodge:
Above a great rock above a great tree above a great cliff above a great scar in the earth above a crevasse.... [Holmberg 1980:295]

Liminal images such as these are more than symptoms reflecting the nature of the patient's situation or signifying his debilitransitory tating sickness. The scars and crevasses exposed in the feverish earth of the shaman's visionary consciousness also serve as motivational forces which catalyzea liminal, transformative stage in the sick person. By finding the soul in the twilight of liminality, within a domain of subjective transformation, the shaman snares it within, "a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise" (Turner 1967:97). Repeatedly invoked, such liminal images delodge the patient from the domain of sickness and steer him toward one marked by health. "Men become the metaphor predicated upon them" (Fernandez 1974), and by being encapsulated in images of liminality, the patient himself becomes
transformative.

These liminal niches also help the shaman to deconstruct the pattern of malaise defining the patient. Once the shaman uproots images previously enshrouded in a pathological terrain and upsets their malignant hold on the patient, he begins his reconstructive return to the village. Once all the earth is broken up, all the hills are then put in order. A new landscape is woven together, a terrain now surveyed within the matrices of a healing geography. CONCLUSION To summarize the dynamics of shamanic healing outlined above, I offer one final, epilogic image. It is the image of the shaman who,

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as a weaver and worker of images, creates experiential mosaics through word, metaphor, and symbolic action. It is the myth of the "imagician" who shapes and shifts the realities of his audience through imagery culled from the everyday worlds in which they live, and of the healer who heals by traveling through the morbid hinterlands of confusion, distress, and closed mouths. Opaquely reflected in this image are ourselves, for just as the shaman images the patient through the mountains and graveyards of their countryside, so our healers and diviners move us through the symbolic terrain of our own experience. NOTES
I wish to thankJacques Macquet, Kenneth Lincoln, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Acknowledgments. Molly McGinn, and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks to Tracy McGarry and John Kennedy for their invaluable assistance and encouragement. 1I use the term "Nepali Shamanism" categorically in order to denote the shamanic complex found among several Tibeto-Burman tribal peoples who live in villages on the southern side of the Himalayas in Nepal: namely, Tamang, Kami, Sherpa, Limbu, Thulung Rai, Gurung, and Magar. Although each of these groups bears a way of life distinct from one another, I believe that their shamanic practices are similar enough to merit a collective analysis of their healing strategies. 2I write "may mean" because the present literature on shamanic healing in Nepal-which, like the anthropologicalliterature at large, lacks any systematic data on the individual patient's into experiences of illness and healing-only enables us to make inferences what the patients actually experience during the healing ceremony. Thus, while this paper, being primarily an analysis of the relevant literature, does not include an in-depth inquiry into how patients subjectively experience and interpret the images evoked by the shaman, I do plan to collect such data through subsequent field research. 3Foranthropological research on shamanic uses of imagery, see Peters and Price-Williams (1980), Noll (1985), and Merkur (1985). For research concerning the use of imagery in psychotherapy and other healing practices, see Watkins (1976), Achterberg (1985), and Singer and Pope (1978). 4My orientation here is informed by that of Foucault: For us, the human body defines, by natural right, the space of origin and of distribution of disease: a space whose lines, volumes, surfaces, and routes are laid down, in accordance with a now familiar geometry, by the anatomical atlas. But this order of the solid, visible body is only one way-in all likelihood neither the first, nor the most fundamental-in which one spatializes disease. There have been, and will be, other distributions of illness. [1973:3] 5In his dissertation on Gurung shamanism, Mumford (1985:273) provides a "Trail Map" marking the road used by the shamans for guiding the soul to the land of the dead. Other geographical voyages-albeit of a more concrete nature-include the Huichol's peyote hunt (Furst 1968; Myerhoff 1974) and religious pilgrimages, as analyzed by Turner (1974). 6The mesasof North Coastal Peruvian healers contain similar symbolic maps (Joralemon 1984; Sharon 1978).

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7Renato Rosaldo (1980:16) noted a similar phenomenon occurring among the Ilongots of the Philippine Islands, who, like the Nepali mountain peoples, map "excursions into the past" onto the landscape. This is a process well documented for the "Dreamtime" of some Australian tribes as well (see Elkin 1946 and Myers 1986, for example). 8See Peters (1982:80-81) and Sagant (1976:68-70) for personal accounts of such "retreats into the forest." 9Sagant (1969:110) writes that one Limbu shaman beckoned to Tamphunga as follows: "You, Tamphunga, wherever you may be, in the rivulets, in the forest, in the irrigated or dry fields, let the spirit of the dead go." l?See Aristotle's Poeticsand Auerbach (1953). "This movement through domains of experience may provoke a cathartic response in the patient (cf. Scheff 1979). Whatever emotional complexes are embedded within the dark forests and "the Hidden Country" (Hofer 1974:177) of the Himalayas, they are evoked when the shaman images them, catalyzing the patient's experience of these potentially distressful emotional processes. Yet since the shaman is working on a metaphorical level-ostensibly traveling through a healing geography abstracted from the patient's condition-the dramatis personae would be "properly distanced" in the sense that the patient is both observer and participant in the shaman's acts. The action would be effective, and emotions sufficiently discharged, without the drama cutting too close to home (Scheff 1979). 12A vivid illustration of this process comes from a Cuna etiologic-and thus therapeuticchant that describes the mythic stages involved in the progressive development of "mental illness," wherein shamanistic spirits encounter a series of villages, such as "the village of obscurity" and "the village of transformations" (Severi 1982). Kapferer (1983), meanwhile, observes that Sinhalese exorcisms transform patients' identities by having the patient's "inner" experience parallel the transformations that occur in the objective structure of the rite.

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