Matteo Guarnaccia

For anyone who follows the affairs of Italian-made counterculture, Matteo Guarnaccia needs no introduction. Active since the early Seventies with the magazine Insekten Sekte, he has, more than most, helped not only to spread but also to reshape the perception of psychedelic culture in Italy: among his many works in this vein, at the very least his 1996 “Almanacco psichedelico” deserves a mention. Guarnaccia's latest effort is called “Sciamani” (2014, Shake Edizioni), a text that, with a certain documentary rigor but also a good deal of irony, tells us about shamanic culture while brushing up against music, film, literature, sociology and the history of religions. But more than a book, “Sciamani” is a one-of-a-kind object in which meaning is conveyed through the combination of text, photographs and drawings, to the point of taking shape as a genuine narrative object, a psychedelic narrative object that can be read and decoded through a number of different interpretive keys. To quote the back cover: “…This labyrinthine and magical book is an expedition through time and space, among mythical Amazonian tribes, Siberian reindeer herders, Dadaism and alien abductions, Santa Clauses, subversive philosophies, sacred poisons, anarchic plants and talking animals…” We interviewed Matteo Guarnaccia for a wide-ranging chat about the subject matter of the book. Enjoy the read.

Why a book about shamans?
I was interested in highlighting their ability to act as connectors between worlds, their controlled madness placed at the service of the community, their functional anarchy. Beyond the clichés, without special effects, in order to understand just how much they are an inescapable part of our history. Having operated continuously for millennia, they were fought by organized religions and by real socialism. The market has trivialized them, turning them into a kind of picturesque new age entrepreneurs who run self-consoling workshops for frustrated executives. That's how it appears on the surface, but things are a bit different…

It seems to me that this ghettoization was also carried out against scholars regarded as custodians of tradition and therefore, broadly speaking, anti-progressive — I'm thinking, for instance, of Elémire Zolla…
After the French Revolution, along with the dirty water (superstition), the baby was also thrown out (sapiential tradition). People thought that rulers and compasses would be enough to sketch the face of beauty, but things aren't that simple. Freelance practitioners of spirituality, all those who refused to serve consensual reality and its demented idea of "progress," were marginalized (sometimes abruptly and violently — think of the Zen monks persecuted by the Red Guards in Maoist China). Zolla was one of the last great sages, an illuminated and curious mind, attentive to the subtle, elusive connections between culture and evolution. Right and left aren't sufficient categories for existential inquiry — there's also above and below, a bit further on, a bit closer…

Coming back to “Sciamani”, it strikes me less as a book than as a narrative object, something transmedial, halfway between essay and story. How much of this structure was planned, and how much was spontaneous?
It's the fruit of accumulations, stratifications, an alchemical process that has temporarily condensed into this form. Shamanic iconography has been put to various uses, especially in psychedelic music. What's the relationship between the two? Psychedelic culture, understood as a movement of research that began in the late Fifties, started venturing into territories that it only later recognized as shared with other experiences — like the shamanic one. The music scene in particular, after the Doors of Perception swung open, felt the need to send signals of psychic complicity to self-taught travelers, to debutant entronauts, and it immediately began working in sync with visual artists. Album covers and concert posters did an excellent job of mapping out certain areas of the Elsewhere. I'm thinking of figures like Rick Griffin, Moscoso or Mati Klarwein.

Who are the modern shamans?
They're artists, cartoon characters and jesters in disguise, performers, musicians (rock'n'roll has produced quite a few), gardeners — and even a few cats — who keep weaving and interlacing stories as if nothing were happening. They've given up the stage costume, the exotic, the picturesque, in order to move like fish through the ocean. They're here, and they keep leaving little traces around to signal to our numbed senses that there are many ways out of the world.

Do you mean shamanism as an abandonment of rationality? Is that enough?
I mean a considered, conscious use of rationality, as the Buddhists say: once you've crossed the river, there's no point dragging the boat along with you. Pagan thought is shrewd enough to know where fiction begins and where it ends. We can't say the same of the world of finance.

Speaking of rationality and shamanism, Zolla wrote about Ernesto De Martino: "De Martino thinks that in the past the desire to fly, to become invisible, really were parapsychologically exact facts, therefore historically achievable, and that it is as a result of these parapsychologically and historically achievable facts that humanity came to believe in the possibility of magical flight and ascension." Do you side with De Martino or with Zolla, who instead traced everything back to the historical/symbolic dimension and stated: "I don't dismiss parapsychological reality, but faced with an enormous body of evidence concerning ascension or levitation, as a historian I'm obliged to interpret it and to say what it means for Inuit society that the shaman claims to rise to the sky. I want to establish the historical reality: that whole people believes in the shaman's ascension; they don't ask themselves whether the ascension is real, it's enough for them to believe in the ecstasy."
In 1969 Inuit shamans were not remotely impressed to learn that American astronauts had gone to the moon, because they had already been doing that "for a very long time." The power to become invisible, to fly, depends on not ruling out the possibility, on admitting these occurrences into the realm of the credible. In every culture the matter presents itself in these terms; the accounts and testimonies of flying figures are striking and abundant. Sadhus and flying carpets, ascensions and levitations, stones of invisibility, identifications with the flight of birds: the list is very long. It's flying — in the aerodynamic sense of the term — or simply knowing how to see from above, or letting yourself be seen from below. In the Christian Gnostic tradition, the story of Simon Magus is very telling: he flies during a public demonstration of flight before the emperor Nero, but falls due to the intervention of his Christian opponents' prayers/formulas. So suspension of judgment is mandatory. The problem isn't "whether" but "how."

In the book you quote a passage from the Chukchi people according to which "woman is a shaman by nature." Can you explain this statement to our readers?
Woman already holds the power within herself. She needs neither practice nor study. She possesses it inherently: it's she who governs life, who feels the world. In spite of paranoid patriarchal monotheisms, the Goddess reigns through ecstasy, the passing of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the wisdom of plants, the creativity of poets, food for the body and for the spirit. It's not without reason that the alchemists described the Work as "women's work," as easy as household chores. The process of transformation/evolution is evident and plain to see in the female body. The shaman observes, studies and metabolizes this power, signaling his closeness to the feminine side through symbolic accessories that enhance his stage costume. His mobile textile theater cannot be considered complete without embroidered or appliquéd stylized breasts and bellies. He wears his hair long, speaks in a woman's words, but without falling into the banality of sexual cross-dressing. Just as he can become a bird or a tiger, he can become a woman. I really like the lists you put together at the end about shamanic things.

If you had to name some shamanic musicians, who would you pick? I don't know, it's easy for me to start with John Coltrane, Jim Morrison, Julian Cope…
The ones you mention are perfect… I could add, in no particular order, Stravinsky, Jimi Hendrix, Terry Riley, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith (only one woman? you see how what we were saying earlier comes back around in this field too?) — musicians who brought back to the psychosonic table the triad "danger, delight, transformation." Demonstrations of when music stops being mere entertainment, a soundtrack, and beyond making feet move, backsides shake and hands clap, sets the psyche in motion.

To close, a personal question: after “Sciamani”, what are your next projects?
To carry on with the much-discussed Bouvard and Pécuchet method: pile things up and copy them out, copy again and shift things around, apparently at random. Pairing objects and purposes with divine incongruity, giving rise to destabilizing and delightful misuses, enjoyable and not yet forbidden. …une folle enterprise où le sabotage se confonde avec l'archéologie… I'm working on a couple of historical essays for the coming year, a collaboration with a modern dance company, and a solo show in Naples next November.

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