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In these stories, sexual union of some sort, with a spirit mate or with another shamanically powerful being, seems to be an essential feature of the return to sanity. In many cultures, the experience of divine union, a merging with the feared powers that bring about the crisis, is what resolves the crisis. Cú Chulainn's case is perhaps the most explicit this way, assaulted by fairy women, he then has union with one and is healed.
In later Celtic folklore, much is written on the leannan sith, or fairy sweetheart.129 The fairy mate often comes bringing gifts of poetic and musical inspiration, even actual instruments. For example, the black chanter of Clan Chattan was said to have been given to a famous Macpherson piper by a fairy sweetheart.130 Union with the spirit mate is being joined to the sacred in marriage. Later mystics, like St. Gertrude the Great, of Helfta, speak of it as being the most perfect and transformative union; a union in which the person is fully united with the sacred to which he or she aspires.131 The unio mystica is often described in marital or sexual terms. Underhill says that it was natural that "the imagery of human love and marriage should have seemed to the mystic the best of all images of his own 'fulfillment of life'; his soul's surrender, first to the call, finally to the embrace of Perfect Love."132 Therefore, the spirit mate often features in both the initiation and consummation of the mystic or shamanic call. The healing of the person in crisis, which we see in these three tales, is the most important way we can distinguish shaman from the simple sufferer. An Inuit does not become a shaman because he is epileptic, but because he can control his epilepsy.133
Footnotes
129 Evans-Wentz, 1990, pp. 135 |
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