Spirit Talkers: A Story of Masks, Healing and Transition

I still have Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth” on my desk. From time to time I leaf through hoping that I had missed an idea, imagery or symbolism in my previous countless readings of his works.

And I often find such a missed symbolism.

Recently I have been reading academically inclined books about Native American Medicine Man, sometimes referred to as “Spirit Talkers”. A most recent book by William Lyon titled “Spirit Talkers: North American Indian Medicine Powers” (2019) caught my attention as he approaches the question of a shaman’s genuine medical powers from a scientific angle of demonstrating that these powers exist.  His analysis and decades long personal; observations of Native American Medicine men take us closer to Joseph Campbell’s line of thinking and convincing us about masks, heroes and myth. One approach that Lyon uses is to make a distinction between the medicine men who use herbal remedies and those who engage spirits to do the healing. The latter are called “Spirit Talkers” and act as the brokers in the interaction between ill people and healer spirits.

… So, as I was thinking about Campbell’s masks I re-read some of his explications of how we all use masks. He wrote:

‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ and when at home, do not keep on the mask of the role you play in the Senate chamber. But this, finally, is not easy, since some of the masks cut deep. They include judgment and moral values. They include one’s pride, ambition, and achievement. They include one’s infatuations.”

I also searched for artistic interpretations of a Spirit Talker’s appearance. As expected, I found drawings and paintings where these medicine men had extensive facial paintings, to the extent of transforming their own faces into masks through paint.

… I have four hare hide I ready to become canvas. I had not been inspired by a topic or imagery to start painting, but a few days ago the Spirit Talkers gave me that inspiration.

I started painting a medicine man staring with the shape of one hare hide where I could place head feathers. Then the face took shape, then the torso. The first phase looked like this:

Now I had to decide if it would be a Spirit Talker in a ceremonial posture. I have not been to an actual ceremony like Lyon describes so meticulously in his book, so I could not have a personal vision of how it would be. As I was struggling about the identity of my medicine man, I decided to give him (her?) a squirrel hand! Suddenly, the shaman got transformed in front of my eyes like a moth would be to butterfly.

Metamorphosis!

And that is what I ended up painting – a swirling lower body that detaches this masked hero from the initial idea I had about Spirit Talkers. He IS now a spirit – the spirit of transformation and metamorphosis.

After adding some Arizona turquoise stones to the scenery and a rabbit clump of fur en guise of a flower, my healer spirit took shape as shown at the outset of this posting.  And I placed it on the wall behind my reading rocking chair that I have owned for more than 30 years: it was given to me by my hospital care research mentor who back in the 1980s told me to sit in this ricking chair an hour a day, look out of the window and think about a creative way to tackle common research issues.  

And it was on one of these “dreaming séances” that I came across a few lines by Joseph Campbell as he reported on the advice given to a young Native American during his initiation ceremony:

As you go the way of life,
You will see a great chasm. Jump.
It is not as wide as you think.”

And so I did.

April 26, 2019

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2019