Excerpts from The Call of the Trance

 

 Among the perspectives about contemporary life in The Call of the Trance (2014) is author Catherine Clément's declaration "The possessed today are singers . . ."  Nowadays 'possession' is associated with the word 'demon' or 'demonic' connoting evil as a superstitious derivative of the Latin/Greek 'daemon'/'daimon.'  A point of reflection for Clément was a reviewer's comparisons of a rap singer's movements to those of animals.

 

2014 TV image

 

The Call of the Trance was translated to English by Chris Turner.  Catherine Clément's writings include essays on anthropology and psychoanalysis.  Contemplating some of the occurrences mentioned in the book, I recalled circumstances documented in case studies of visions, trance mediumship and channeling (topics of many previous blog articles).
 

Garabandal (1960s) is one of the sites where people experienced visionary trances that are now known categorically as cases of 'Marian apparitions.'  ("Ecstatic Marches" video)
 

Trance medium Mina Crandon (1881-1941)

 

In addition to trances, other phenomenal experiences are occasionally mentioned in the book, including: "the 'super nature' within which the shamans move," prophecy, 'intestinal rumblings,' losses of voice, visions, haunting smells, omen, healing, ecstasy, 'ecstatic sleepers,' reincarnation, 'multiple personalities,' ascetics, immortality, disequilibrium, sneezing, "rain can even be summoned," purification, "'supernatural' voices," compulsion, metamorphoses . . .

The inclusion of commentary about some popular fictitious works reminds the reader of vicarious aspects of life in societies with ensconced commercial traditions of entertainment.

 

The following excerpts are some of the noteworthy passages from The Call of the Trance.

From the chapter "Changing Life"

The scene takes place at Dakar [Africa] at the turn of the twenty-first century.  It's nightfall.

 

They call the trance that possesses them 'dancing.'

 

They belong to the global masses who live on less than two dollars a day.

 

But when they are in a trance, each evening as night falls, these women are queens for two hours.

And we are too, sometimes.  The trance is universal.

 

Elsewhere, the spirits are called djinns, angels, demons, devils, rock music, love, anger, madness or, quite simply, God.  Here in the Dakar region, they're called rab . . .

 

That evening at Dakar, a cook from Mali fell down suddenly, without warning.  Often mistreated by the trance-mistress, her boss, she wasn't one of the official group but among the onlookers.  Yet the spirits are no respecters of class distinctions . . . A sudden jolt and off she went.  She was on all fours, growling fiercely.

 

I saw her up close.  Her eyes, crazed with worry, rolled in all directions, while her breathing grew panicky and her mouth opened and roared involuntarily while her every limb trembled.

 

We're all like these women.  We all need dancing and breaks, times of silence and absence, withdrawals that may take the form of illness.  We all need a sudden escape, a refreshing bath, a thrill that brings no lasting consequences, life without commitment or promise, disorder, holidays without beginning or end.

From Chapter 4

Popularized by films in which special effects perform their wonders, shamanism now forms part of the Western imaginary landscape.

 

In 2002, studying the trances induced by the tromba spirits on the island of Mayotte, the anthropologist Bertrand Hell set to work with specialists on hypnosis and found that, in this very closely trance-related phenomenon, 'loss of control' expresses itself in changes in the anterior cingulate cortex, the brainstem and the thalamus, changes made visible through neuro-imaging techniques.

From Chapter 5

Loudon, a fortified town and a solid Protestant fortress which the Catholic powers have designs on, has in the middle of the seventeenth century fourteen thousand inhabitants.

In 1632, plague suddenly breaks out, killing more than three thousand between May and September.

 

The plague epidemic is coming to an end when another epidemic breaks out in late September.  Erotic frenzies in a convent.

 

That the nuns are in love with the priest is something all can divine.  But caterwauling in their shifts in the trees spells such disorder that the devil must have a hand in it.

The exorcisms begin immediately.

 

The abbé d'Aubignac's conclusion was that the whole performance was merely 'deceit, fakery, abomination and sacrilege.'  But when the trickery was unmasked, what remained in the excellent abbé's account that was inexplicable?  Those thick, black, stuck-out tongues among all the possessed.

And a sublime moment when Élisabeth Blanchard, whom the exorcist told that she must obey God because she is God's—tu Dei es.  She replied, quick as a flash, "To be sure, I am God."  The exorcist corrects her but Élisabeth replies with verve, "You think I didn't hear you, but you're wrong, for you're saying that I'm God's and I'm saying that I am God."

It is she who is right.  Mystics attest to this—at Baghdad, in 922, the great Sufi al-Hallaj died on the cross for similar remarks.

 

The possessed today are singers of both sexes who offer up their tattooed muscles, their bound, corseted bodies, their boots, sweat and exhaustion for public veneration.

From Chapter 7
 

The girls you see screaming and waving their arms in the air at the feet of singers are often called 'hysterical.'  Hysterical fans. 

The term 'hysteric'—an offshoot of the sorcerer's trance and the convulsions of Saint-Médard and also the soil from which, around the year 1900, psychoanalysis emerged—is a classic one in psychiatry.

 

In India, they say that yogis, who have entered a state of voluntary catalepsy, have been buried for a month—locked up in chests, under surveillance—and come out alive. Catalepsy, giving the outward appearance of death, is a silence of the organs, the merest murmur of life, with the heart operating in slow motion.

From Chapter 8

Laughter, perturbing and short-circuiting the mind, is a little trance; it is uncontrollable, coming in involuntary bursts and clouding the brain.

From Chapter 12

In his home between Chennai and Madurai in southern India, I met a man who, in a state of trance, was a woman.  Nothing about his appearance was feminine.  He had a little moustache, a pot belly, a white loincloth and a deep voice.  He was married with four children in an exemplary Indian family—well-turned-out children, a self-effacing wife.

Seated on a bed of sea-buckthorn leaves, that sacred tree with its therapeutic properties, Our Mother spoke in a woman's voice.  When she comes out of her trance, she returns to her man's body, but for the rest of the time 'he' is Our Mother.  And, in this latter persona, She has built a temple, a university, a hospital and numerous hotels.

Chapter 14

In 1966 . . . in a little room at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital in Paris, I saw a girl assume the hysteric's 'crab position.'  "Her head was touching the ground and she was on the tips of her toes with her body thrown backwards as an arc," as the physicians treating the nuns of Loudon put it.

If I hadn't seen the incredible phenomenon with my own eyes, I wouldn't have sought high and low for the meaning and function of trance states.  Had it not been for that disturbing sight, I wouldn't have written this book.

 

We have epidemics specific to girls today.  Anorexia has taken the place of hysteria—ninety per cent of anorexics are girls.

They're obsessed with the idea of beauty and want a body without an ounce of fat.  The means employed to lose weight are simple and violent: starving themselves, forcing themselves to vomit after eating, taking laxatives or enemas.  In health terms, the results may be catastrophic . . .

 

The violent coming and going of the alimentary bolus inside the body is a trance.  Filling and emptying one's internal plumbing violently, making the abominable 'things' enter and leave one's body is an imposed trance.

 

Chapter 16

In an initiation, work is done on the skin [in some unmodernized countries]. 
 

The bodily manufacture of belonging [in modernized cultures], without initiation, reconnects with some old models.  This is the case is prisons, where 'families' are created, or with Stephanie Meyer's new vampires.  You change species, you're another type of human.   

 

They [the punks whose doings were recorded by Ralf Marsault] invented their own rite—a drunken dance in which one of them, throwing him- or herself from a stage, surfed from arm to arm above an ocean of heads, incurring no bodily harm.  They assisted one another as a group and help was available.
 

  

We've seen this burning desire for initiation everywhere.

 

To mutilate yourself by cutting strips of flesh from your skin; to knock yourself out massively and hurriedly with alcohol so that you fall straight into the state so well described as 'dead drunk'; to gather together, with music and drugs, so as to form one single body with a host of other people—these are wildcat initiations, manufacturings of fears bereft of the attendant knowledge.

 

Binge drinking—getting hugely, instantaneously drunk—is a dangerous eclipsing of life.  Otherwise, it's not done right and it's not an eclipse.  The subject has to disappear and the trance state must prevail.  But there's no safety-net to this dangerous activity.

The eclipse may suddenly occur as raptus, when consciousness is abruptly snatched away.  It happens, indeed, that people kill themselves by eclipsing themselves from life.  It's even crossed my mind at times that the harrowing mass phenomenon of suicides in the workplace, caused by excess of authority and the hounding of employees—particularly at the Renault factories—has to do with these eclipses from life. 

 
. . . A compulsion to throw oneself over a guard rail, to hurl oneself from a great height, to fall out of life.

 

After living among the Achuar Indians of the Jivaroan group, the ethnologist Philippe Descola calls the animals and plants that share the world with humans 'non-humans.'  In the shaman's trance, they're not external, alien beings but alter egos that are 'invited to lend their aid' . . . .