Andamese Teaching: From Kill or Be Killed to Communicate or Be Killed

Talking History - A Lakota Storyteller

"Myths and legends were told...usually at night around the village fire and the telling was reserved to the "dreamers" or medicine-men, the Oko-jumu...There were three ways a man, and much more rarely a woman, could become an Oko-jumu. One was by "dying" and then coming back to life, for example by fainting or by having an epileptic fit and then recovering. Another way was to be "kept" in the jungle by spirits: if a person showed no fear of spirits, it was believed that they would refrain from killing but they could still keep their victim in the jungle for a while. Yet another way was by talking to the spirits in a dream. The spirits were the dead and any contact with them either killed a person or made him or her into an Oko-jumu." George Weber. The Andamese. Chapter 23: Myths and Legends.

This study, originally from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, is especially pertinent to the study of rites of initiation, where the primary function of this social form of belonging, not only within the human group, but with humankind's higher spiritual faculties in cohesion with subtle ecological presence. This gives us insight into the source of human knowledge, as an intergenerational narrative, and even represents the role of conflict transformation and the relegation of the aggressive principle in human nature from a kill or be killed to a communicate or be killed.

For a comparative study between the Lakota and Andamese peoples with relation to the role of dreams in the making of traditional storytellers, read From Social function to Pedagogical Function on Mythic Dreams.

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Tramping through the corridor of my grandparents in the Hampton hills of New York, the beige linoleum lies dirtied with a score of recent visitors, and the angel light of the winter’s day breathes with an icicle heart onto the feet of the whitened doorstop. With a running muck of puppies, my father swings the door open and shoots me out into the dizzying cacophony of wild dogs, huge and menacing. Their growling eyes bear down with starving, cannibalistic teeth.

Ceremonial Orgies by Dog-eaters by Anonymous

As my father quickens back through the warm house, the slow-motion snow gathers under my frosted eyelids, as I work myself back up to my feet in the subzero temperatures, at eye-level with a host of swarming canines, wild and diseased. I notice the back leg of one dog’s been bitten clean to the bone. Their wounded sting of necessity chokes my well-wishing brain into a heady daze of a feral calling.

Gypsy dog-killers by Anonymous

And in the mind of my love, a dream of lightening news props up our necks to an after-life view. Our grandfather, recently deceased, visits us. He’s traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles away across the entire scope of the prairies, a young man of excellent hue, whose eyes invigorate the humble walls of our sleepy apartment. Again in his prime, he offers a blessing of material coordination with our passionate, creative hearts. An ingeniously crafted wooden box, shaped of his exceptional Norwegian whittling hand I presume, is handed over, as a gift, to us.

The Willow flute by Christian Skredsvig

Within the glorious arboreal artwork, two handcrafted wooden flutes of a celestial order are presented hearteningly. They appear as long bamboo flutes, however with a sound equal to a half-Shakuhachi, half-recorder timbre. We play them with delight, and upon sounding the first note, the golden presence of our late grandfather vanishes in a heartbeat of silence; a gift from the prime centre of our earliest known life.

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Drift of a fist to the sky
In the activist’s pause
Before standing unannounced
At the gates of eternal misery
Where strife finds embittered ground
And the inglorious suffering breeds childless offspring
Mourning for ancestral greed
Sprouting from a native gourd
With cracked shell
Lying abandoned and weakened at the skin
With taught shell-string clacking
With fortune’s boisterous western noise
Shrinking into the mist
Without echo
From musician’s deep sleep
Over the ancient soundscapes passing
Through electric wilderness
To heart

excerpt from "Ancient Soundscapes, Scholarly Jazzdoms"