Shamans and ordinary people of the American Indian tribes undertook dangerous missions to meet their spirit guides. Paul Devereux embarks on his own quest to uncover the sites for Fortean Times.
All images are by the author.
PLACES OF THE VISION QUEST
The "vision quest" was one of the prime elements in American Indian spirituality. In broad terms, it involved a person retiring alone to a remote spot in search of a life-guiding vision or a gift of supernatural power ("medicine") for healing or warfare. The individual would go without food or sleep for three or four days and nights and undertake certain physical activities to help promote the sought-after visionary experience. This would often, though not always, involve the appearance of a spirit in human form that would approach and address the vision seeker, then leave as an animal – this would be understood as becoming the quester’s power animal or helper spirit.
The spirit appearing in the vision or waking dream might make a gift of a special song or dance step to the quester so that he or she could use it to "call" on that spirit helper in the future. The nature of these power songs varied among Indian nations. In British Columbia, for instance, Wenatchi vision songs were distinctive, while Upper Skagit songs tended to be fairly indistinguishable one from another.
A person would typically undergo a vision quest as a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, but in some tribes a brave might undertake several vision quests over a lifetime in order to restore any perceived waning of his supernatural warrior-power. Also, medicine men or shamans, the magician-seers of American Indian spirituality, would typically undergo far more vision quests than normal tribal members in order to replenish or enhance their supernatural power, converse with spirits, and engage in other shamanic tasks such as divination or weather magic. Shamans’ visions would occur in particularly deep and powerful trance states that were often aided and abetted by the use of potent mind-altering plants – often strong tobacco and sometimes plant hallucinogens – along with chanting, drumming and other forms of trance induction.
Vision quests were by no means always successful – among the Sanpoil Indians of British Columbia, for example, ethnologists have estimated that about 25 per cent of boys failed, and perhaps seventy per cent of girls. To lie about the successful outcome of a quest was thought to bring misfortune and even death on the failed vision seeker.
SEEKING A VISION
The specifics of vision-questing differed to greater or lesser degrees from one Indian nation to another. The Kiowa vision-quester, for instance, would go off to a high place in the Wichita Mountains and there settle down on a bed of sage, facing east, with a buffalo-hide robe around his shoulders and his shield beneath his head. After offering tobacco to the spirits, he would smoke a long-stemmed, black stone pipe while calling out to the spirits for their attention and compassion. A cycle of fasting, praying and smoking went on for four days before he was brought back down to the village by a tribal member. The spirit appearing in the man’s vision or waking dream may have bestowed supernatual power, doi, on him, giving him protection in battle, or, conversely, it may have granted him dwdw, curing power. If he had been successful, the vision- quester would not speak about his experience but simply paint his shield with symbols of his newly acquired powers. The Kutenie of British Columbia, on the other hand, pre-selected the spirit they wished to contact and went out in the daytime for the vision quest. Both girls and boys could seek a vision. (Shamans of the tribe, though, had their vision quests at night, in a sweathouse or at a cemetery so the ghosts of deceased shamans could join with the other spirits that might appear.) In a more extreme case, Sioux braves sometimes used the famous Sun Dance (shown below) as a particularly excruciating form of vision quest, entering their visionary trance state by rotating round a pole to which they were linked by thongs that were skewered through the flesh of their chests.
ABOVE: Rock painting depicting a shaman and his
helper spirits at a vision quest site at Ayers Rock, California.
ABOVE: Ancient astronomy in visionary action. The crescent setting of rocks in the foreground marks a vision quest site in Arizona’s Gila River Valley. A straight line marked on the ground (indicated here with white tape as it is now darkened with age) connects this with a rock 100 yards distant, visible in the picture. This rock has a notch in its top edge which aligns to a distant sacred peak where the Sun appears to rise on midsummer’s day. The site as a whole dates back about 1,600 years. The shaman who came here may have belonged to the Pima Indians; ethnology suggests that he would have come at the calendrically significant time and taken an infusion containing the hallucinogenic jimson weed. He would have gone into an out-of-body “dream” or trance and “flown” along the axis of the line to the distant peak, there to meet the spirits and receive gifts of supernatural power.
It was deemed necessary to carry out certain prescribed activities during most vision quests. A typical task was to collect physical objects such as distinctive stones (especially quartz or other crystals), oddly perforated bones, feathers, animal hair and other objects considered to be imbued with supernatural power in order to create a "medicine bundle". This would be kept as a receptacle of power after the quest was over. Depending on the tribal tradition, there were numerous other kinds of activity, most using physical exertion, linked with sleep deprivation and fasting, to help provoke a sort of waking-dream trance state. In some traditions, the vision-quester had to dive into a lake and remain underwater for as long as possible; some questers reported that when they did this they found themselves in a large underwater house filled with spirits.
But perhaps the most distinctive kind of ritual exertion was that employed by the Papago of Arizona – namely, running. There is a wide range of ritual and ceremonial running among American Indians – it is a subject in its own right – but the Papago used the activity for vision-questing on the beaches of the Gulf of California at the end of a week-long pilgrimage for salt. After arriving at the salt deposits and making offerings, the Papago pilgrims who had trained for it set off on a speed run to and from a headland 10 miles (16km) distant. The runners hoped to receive a vision during the exceedingly arduous ordeal – it was so arduous, in fact, that some participants are known to have died from their exertions. Early ethnologists recorded that one runner saw mountains slowly revolving in front of him and received songs; another heard a disembodied voice saying that the sea shaman wanted to see him; after his run, he resorted to a coastal cave where he learned sacred songs over a four-year period. He emerged as a powerful shaman.
Vision quest sites were usually situated in places such as caves and rock shelters, secluded areas around springs, streams, lakes and waterfalls, remote desert locations, spots with panoramic views on hills, mesas and mountain ridges, strangely-shaped or distinctively coloured rock formations, landmarks, and places were there were noteworthy acoustic phenomena such as rock faces offering exceptional echoes (locations the Navajo call Talking Rocks – see FT188:46–50). Because all these sorts of places tend to be off the beaten track, and because vision-questing was usually a solitary activity, it might be supposed that no visual indications of vision quest sites survive. In fact, signs of them abound in certain wild areas of the Americas – but one has to know what to look for, as they are usually very subtle and easily missed.
AN ARCHÆOLOGY OF THE SPIRIT
Vision quest sites reveal their presence in two ways: in their physical structure (where there is any at all) and in the results of the physical activities carried out during quests.
ABOVE: Ayers Rock, California. This giant boulder, as big as a house, was the resort of rain shamans. Recesses and overhangs around its base were used as vision quest places, and these are marked with rock paintings. It is thought rain shamans visited the site up to the turn of the 19th century.
Vision quest beds or "prayer platforms" are minimally marked sites, where they were marked at all. An inconspicuous horseshoe or circle of small rocks can mark a vision quest location in a desert area, for example. In the bare tablerock areas of Whiteshell Provincial Park in Manitoba, vision quest sites tend to be marked by small stones laid out in the shape of turtles – these are located amidst extensive and very mysterious boulder patterns. In the Rockies, vision quest beds can take the form of small stone-walled enclosures just big enough for a person to sit or lie in, or platforms of rock slabs – several of these features are in precipitous locations as high as 10,000 ft (3,000m) up in the mountains. Occasionally, a buffalo skull that had been used as a "pillow" can be found at them. Lichen encrustation reveals some of these sites to be hundreds or even thousands of years old, though others are more recent, with some still in use. Vision quest beds on mesa tops in old volcanic areas such as Death Valley, California, can be very subtle indeed – they are distinguished only by the fact that the surface covering of darkened volcanic pebbles has been "sorted", meaning that all loose and irregular stones have been removed leaving a barely-defined smooth circular area. It is all too easy to simply walk past or across these features without noticing them.
Different forms of prescribed dream questing activities also leave their mark. In the Columbia-Fraser Plateau region of British Columbia, for example, many wall-like lines of stones can be encountered on mountainsides, resulting from vision-questers in the past piling up stones in assigned ways. Vaguely similar lines and patterns of rocks – sometimes termed "petroforms" by archæologists – can be found on mesa-tops in Death Valley and the neighbouring Panamint Valley in California. In these cases, comparative ethnology hints that some of the ground patterns might relate to weather magic activities conducted by vision-questing shamans seeking to halt the encroachment of extreme aridity that was causing the last shallow lakes in the valleys to evaporate 2,000 years ago. Rock shrines or cairns were built at some vision-questing sites, and isolated offerings of objects like deer antlers or animal skulls can be another tell-tale sign.
Some activities left even more enigmatic markings, such as occur near Topock in the Colorado River Valley on the California-Arizona state line. A large tract of arid ground here is criss-crossed by sets of linear furrows. Sometimes referred to as the "Topock Maze", the patterns have long mystified visitors. It is now thought they were tracks for ritual runners.
Rock art can be another key indicator of a vision-questing site or area, almost invariably those that belonged to shamans. Perhaps the most important of these areas was the Coso Mountain range, adjacent to Panamint Valley. This was deemed to be a particularly sacred area, well populated with points of poha, supernatural power; a spot where the visioning was good was called pohakanhi, "house of power", in the Shoshone (Numic) language. It is known that Numic shamans – mainly rain shamans – would make pilgrimages to the Cosos to conduct vision quests, often assisted by the use of the strongly hallucinogenic jimson weed (Datura stramonium). Some came from hundreds of miles distant. There are thousands of rock art panels scattered throughout the range, the markings created by engraving or scratching away the darkened patina formed on rock surfaces by the desert conditions; this was done by shamans after they had experienced their visions. The rock art motifs include abstract and geometric signs, thought to derive from specific mental images known as "entoptic patterns" that are produced naturally in the visual cortex during certain stages of trance (see FT163:42–46), and representational depictions of mythic figures and helper spirits seen in visions, along with creatures like bighorn mountain sheep – not hunting scenes as once supposed, but symbols relating to rain shamanism. Sometimes shamans were themselves depicted.
Another dramatic vision quest area marked by outstanding rock art panels is Grapevine Canyon, at the foot of Newberry Peak (aka Dead Mountain) near Laughlin in southern Nevada. It was known to the Indians as Avikwa’ame, Spirit Mountain. It was said to be the home of Masthamho, the creator, and was one end of a pilgrimage route that ran south along the Colorado River Valley to Pilot Knob, near Yuma.
Scattered throughout a ridge of low hills at Three Rivers, another noted rock art locale near Alamogorda in New Mexico, are a number of 1,000-year-old vision quest sites. They are merely cleared areas, their only real distinguishing feature being the visionary carvings on the rock surfaces surrounding the cleared patches of ground. These spots overlook the vast Tularosa Basin (where the first atom bomb was tested). And the very remote Pony Hills, also in New Mexico, near the desert border with Mexico, similarly sport shamanic rock art. The vision quest sites were located around spring-fed rock pools, and it is at these that the rock art is most concentrated. The images depict a variety of spirit forms, and also tiny carved footprints – the trail of Water Baby spirits trekking from one pool to another (see FT188:44–45). There are also some panels showing shamanic rituals taking place, along with bear paw-prints – the sign of bear shamans (they felt transformed into bears, their power animals, during entranced visionary states).
Some rock art is engraved on isolated rocks and boulders, and these often prove to be "ringing rocks" – natural musical boulders that emit drum- or bell-like tones when struck with a small rock. An example is a white granite boulder in the Cheyenne River Valley in North Dakota. This is indented with cupules and incised with markings and is known as the Writing Rock. It is close to a spring and has panoramic views – a typical vision quest location. Writing Rock is set within a natural amphitheatre with exceptional acoustics, and the pounding of the rock would probably have been heard all over the valley.
ABOVE: Rock markings of tiny footprints, representing the tracks of spirit helpers running between rock pools in the Pony Hills, New Mexico, a haunt of Mimbres Indian shamans 1,000 years ago.
In addition to all these various physical signs of vision quest locations, ethnological investigations have also allowed modern researchers to identify some major vision quest foci. One of these is Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, sacred to numerous Indian tribes and a pilgrimage site for the Sioux, who prefer it to be known as Bear’s Lodge (Mato Tipila). This dramatic, flat-topped volcanic plug, its vertical, deeply grooved sides rising almost 1,000ft (300m) above the surrounding landscape, became known to moviegoers worldwide as the site of the encounter between humans and extraterrestrials in Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Indians go there for religious purposes, but they are unhappy about the thousands of climbers every year who scramble up the butte’s sides making a noise hammering in their pitons and calling to one another. There has also been a problem with the removal of prayer bundles from Devil’s Tower, and Indians resent being photographed by tourists when they are praying.
Another vision-questing focus is the peak of Ninaistakis ("the Chief Mountain") in Glacier National Park in the Montana Rockies, hard by the border with Canada. This peak is sacred to the Blackfoot Indians and other Indian peoples of the region, and is considered home to the Thunderbird spirit. Many vision-questing sites surround it on neighbouring ridges and mountaintops, while some are located near its summit. It is a distinctive landmark, looking from some angles like a chief’s ceremonial headdress, and when the wind blows at the appropriate velocity it "sings" as air is funnelled through fissures and rocky spires on its summit.
Unfortunately, Ninaistakis is threatened by tourism, forestry, gas exploration and other depredations of modern civilisation. In 1992, an earthquake shook the mountain and this, combined with heavy rains, caused a major rock fall and mudslide on the north face, the largest example of natural damage on the mountain in a thousand years. Blackfoot Elders view this with concern, feeling that it results from inappropriate activities on the sacred mountain.
ABOVE: Rock markings depicting bighorn (mountain) sheep also in Grapevine Canyon. Bighorn sheep were perceived as being the spirit helpers of rain shamans.
Another known major vision-questing location in the same state is the Sweetgrass Hills, sacred to the Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Salish, and Chippewa Cree Indians. These distinctive hills rising above the surrounding prairie contain not only many vision quest sites, but also gold, and there has been a struggle to prevent the issuance of prospecting permits. To the Indians, it is the sweetgrass that is valuable, and that is collected and distributed widely for ceremonial purposes. It is thought that sacred observances at Sweetgrass Hills go back to very ancient times.
Between the Worlds
The traditional vision quest is the enactment of the liminal: its wilderness location, its frequent status as a rite of passage, and the trance state of consciousness that was sought put the vision seeker between the human world and the world of nature – the wilderness peopled by visionary or hallucinatory beings. It was a culturally choreographed exposure to the unconscious mind. Now, when people enter trance inadvertently, when dozing or while driving a car at night, they do so without social or cultural structures. Because we have little cultural awareness of varying states of consciousness, most of us simply do not understand just how powerful and convincing the productions of the unconscious mind can be, and they are frequently taken as literally real. Thus, people believe they have actually met aliens or have even been abducted by them. Perhaps only those who have encountered entities produced in lucid dreaming, hallucinogenic drug visions, or fairly uncommon sleep disorders such as Isolated Sleep Paralysis and certain kinds of narcolepsy can fully appreciate that human consciousness can conjure up beings that look, sound and even feel completely solid and real to the person experiencing them. The "aliens" lie within us all; those belonging to the Indian vision-questers were spirits of nature, while ours are entities that are not of this Earth. It is a progression that marks our cultural alienation.
In the vision quest, the outer wilderness of nature mirrors the inner wilderness of mind; the visionary animal spirits are the go-betweens. Such disciplined contact with wilderness can teach even we so-sophisticated moderns much about consciousness. We need to know wild nature because we also are a product of nature and have that same essential wilderness within us – both the outer and inner forms of wilderness are reciprocal; each patterns the other. Our unconscious mind is wild nature. We enter wild nature when we dream. And we all have to wander into wild nature alone at death, which is surely the ultimate vision quest.
THE VOICES OF VISIONS
It is thought that some ceremonial Indian chants and songs may have derived from vision quests, and this is certainly the case with some of the songs received during visions experienced by leading figures in the late 19th century 'Ghost Dance' period, the doomed movement that tried to cast off the yoke of the white man by re-invigorating American Indian peoples’ spiritual life. This movement used the mind-altering peyote cactus as its sacrament: it is said that a well-known song, 'Heyowiniho', came to Ghost Dance prophet John Wilson when he heard the Sun rising during a peyote ceremony while intoxicated by the cactus. This synæsthetic auditory hallucination is curiously similar to the visionary poet William Blake’s experience in which he described a sunrise as sounding to him like the singing of an angelic throng.
VISIONARY VARIATIONS
Vision-questing occurred under various guises in many places other than the Americas. Pagan Celtic seers, for example, would wrap themselves in animal skins and seek prophetic dreams at certain locations like waterfalls or springs; special dreaming was developed into a fine art by the ancient Greeks, who had temples for the purpose (see FT178:30–35). Even Buddha, Christ and the Prophet Mohammed all reportedly retreated alone into nature in order to achieve their definitive spiritual orientation. The archaic Siberians also had a vision quest tradition, which was probably the precursor of the American Indian practice.
JAPASA’S STORY
First-hand experiences of traditional vision-questing were not very often directly recorded, but Japasa, an elder of the Dunne-za people of north-eastern British Columbia, recounted a childhood vision quest a week before he died, which ethnologist Robin Ridington heard straight from the old man’s lips. Japasa had been only nine years old when he had his first vision quest. He was alone in the wild on a rainy night and became cold and wet. But a pair of silver foxes appeared to him and protected him. They brought him food when they fed their pups, and taught him a song; even after the vision quest, they continued to protect Japasa and his father – they were spirit helpers. During the same vision quest, the wind appeared to Japasa as a person, and the spirit told the child, "See, you are dry now. I’m your friend." Japasa claimed that ever afterwards he was able to call the rain and the wind, and also make them go away. In other words, he became a weather shaman.
WILDERNESS PSYCHOLOGY
In recent years, non-traditional forms of vision-questing have become quite popular in self-development circles. Experts take people out into remote places and show them how to experience contact with the wilderness and the recesses of their minds as one interlinked activity. One proponent of this movement is Steven Foster. In his 1992 book Vision Quest, written with Meredith Little, he describes his own early experiences in the desert. He recalls "the awesome trumpet sound of the loneliness of the wilderness – the sound of silence" and learned that nature would speak to him only when he silenced his inner dialogue. He saw "many powerful teachings" when his eyes were not governed by his preconceptions. When he came back from this initial wilderness experience he felt profoundly different, and had made the critical realisation that the outer and inner journeys of the vision quest are deeply and mysteriously interactive. Foster asserts that in a vision quest the wilderness invades the body; it lets the quester’s noise finally run down and disperse, and his or her field of view enlarges both physically and metaphorically as time and space dilate beyond the pale of civilisation. In these conditions dreams can occur while the quester’s eyes are open.
End
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