Word: shamans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some 20 years ago in Milan, reporters in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro sought to trace his early years in South America. Correspondent Bernard Diederich visited known witchcraft centers in rural Mexico in search of Don Juan, and Sandra Burton herself traveled south of the border seeking the shaman. In New York, Reporter-Researcher Patricia Beckert interviewed Castaneda's friends and fellow anthropologists...
...bleak altar half hidden by incense smoke holds down the front of the stage. Shaman figures appear, chanting to a kind of voodoo drumbeat. On the altar, the body of a child is laid. The darkness is pierced by a primal scream. A priest plunges his hand into the human sacrifice and lifts out the heart, thrusting it, like a savage challenge, toward the civilized middle-class audience at Minneapolis' Tyrone Guthrie Theater...
Gradually the stage fills with weird, masked figures from the mists of prehistory: tribesmen in vast, shaggy costumes thumping drums, bonging gongs, pinging cymbals. Enormous idols appear. Frenzied, the primitives swirl and bang and jabber. The shaman speaks: God demands a sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice is sex, a taboo is born...
Magic and Line. The most mysterious and commanding work in the show is by a young New York sculptor. Nancy Graves. 30. Her Shaman is a group of ten objects made of latex, muslin and wire, hanging from the ceiling. They derive (she says) from the ceremonial costumes worn by priests of the Kwakiutl Indian tribe in North America, and they have an eerie "presence," as if the magicians, like shadows, had vacated the elaborate cloaks and headdresses, which were also their skins of power, and left the shucked-off relics behind them, battered but still imbued with magical force...
Suicide? Even in death Aimee kept the public guessing. That was her style-and perhaps her privilege. It should hardly be a biographer's privilege, but Thomas claims it. He chooses to see her as a showman; but she was also a shaman, one of the charged and chosen few in whom the divine and the demonic hold alarming dialogue. There was a chance here to deep-psych a deplorable genius and put calipers to the phenomenon of religious fervor. Because Thomas passed it up, Aimee emerges as a personality who overflows the scope of the book...