All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World Read online

  ALL KINDS OF MAGIC

  A Quest for Meaning in a Material World

  Piers Moore Ede

  Piers Moore Ede has worked as a farmer, boat driver, surfing instructor, poetry teacher and baker. He has travelled widely, and contributed to many literary, travel and environmental publications including the Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, Ecologist, Traveller and Earth Island Journal. He is the author of Honey and Dust, winner of a D.H. Lawrence Prize for Travel Writing.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  At the Back of the Wardrobe

  The Miracle of the Buddha Tree

  Sadhus: the Sky-clad Ones

  Varanasi: the Fortune Teller of the Ghats

  Oracles in the Land of the Snows

  In the Footsteps of Paul Brunton: the Cave of Sri Ramana Maharshi

  The Deepam Festival

  Mata-ji: the Divine Mother

  Black Magic

  Amongst the Sufis

  In Search of the Whirling Dervishes

  Konya: Birthplace of Rumi

  The Way of the Shaman

  Barcelona: La Purga

  Festival of the Flying Monks

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Imprint page

  For my parents

  All kinds of magic are out of date and done away with, except in India, where nothing changes in spite of the shiny, top-scum stuff that people call ‘civilization’.

  (Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills)

  Prologue

  From the parapet, I looked down on to a vast plain, ringed at its far edge by mountains. There were no animals, only a few stunted trees. In this low-oxygen world, there wasn’t even enough moisture in the air for snow to fall. Sheltered from the rain-bearing clouds of the Indian monsoon by the Great Himalaya, only a portion of Ladakh receives snowfall. Today it was minus fifteen, so cold it burned.

  On the edge of the plain, a lone monk ascended the zigzag path. He walked methodically, hands clasped behind his back. I imagined him chanting, as monks are trained to do, a mantra to keep his mind empty. Om Mane Padme Hum. Om Mane Padme Hum. Om Mane Padme Hum.

  Behind me, the long rumbling blast of the zangstung, an eight-foot-long copper horn, told me something was happening. Turning, I saw that the crowd – hundreds of villagers who had flocked here for this winter festival – had fallen still, and were looking fretfully up at the highest parapet of the monastery. They wore long homespun robes of maroon and ochre, some of the women sporting turquoise and coral headdresses known as peraks. Eyes blinked fast in the Himalayan light. Dark skin, deeply wrinkled from altitude, faces frowning in apprehension.

  ‘Soon, the oracles will come,’ whispered a Ladakhi child to her mother in front of me. She crouched fearfully in her mother’s skirts, pink cheeks sucking in air.

  These oracles were the reason I was here. For hundreds of years, monks that live in this remote Shangri-La have maintained a practice which may come from shamanism, the tradition of lhabas: oracles who enter trance states to commune with spirits and demons. There are many oracles in Ladakh, both villagers and monks, but none are considered as powerful as the ones I was about to see. For the previous three months, the two monks who provide the vehicle for the spirits had meditated silently in a remote cave. Once a day a meal was left outside the cave mouth and, for a time, the monks uncrossed their legs to eat and perform ablutions. Then they began again. Any less discipline than this, it is claimed, and they may lack the strength to carry the spirits. Failure can result in madness or physical collapse, perhaps even death.

  But in these states, the Ladakhis believe, great knowledge and wisdom can be found. The oracles come into contact with the chos skyong, a group of deities assigned to protect Tibetan Buddhists against adversaries. They can be wrathful and assume a terrifying disposition. But if the medium is able to placate the deity, and the right offerings are made, he may learn things outside the human order entirely: the method to win battles and triumph over enemies, the ability to cure the most serious diseases, even knowledge of the future.

  Much of this information came to me through a young monk, Khedup, who’d approached me that morning, beaming behind his hand-cut John Lennon glasses. He was studying to be an amchi, a traditional Tibetan doctor, but said that in order to gain entrance to the famous medical college in Darjeeling, he must first practise his English. It was good fortune for both of us, for without Khedup I would have understood little of all this. Tibetan Buddhism is, at best, a highly esoteric religion. But of its oracles, even less is known. Like the miraculous saints of the Catholic tradition, opinions about them remain divided, the modernists embarrassed by this link to a mystic past.

  ‘Why are the villagers so nervous?’ I asked Khedup.

  ‘Oracles are very powerful,’ he said, scanning the monastery parapet again, as more zangstung lowed their eerie notes. ‘They are like wild animals, but with the strength of ten men. No one can control them. But there is one more thing people fear,’ he added. ‘When the oracles first appear today, if they are wearing a red ribbon on their heads it will mean something very bad for us in the coming year. A warning.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Famine or war. Perhaps some natural disaster. The oracles see things beyond our own sight.’

  Above us, the final horn blast died out. In a second, the entire courtyard of Matho monastery had fallen silent; not a single cough. Hundreds of villagers peered upwards, some of them shielding their eyes with weathered hands.

  The oracles had arrived.

  At the Back of the Wardrobe

  As a child, I was fascinated by magic. Wardrobes whose backs invited access to Narnia. Arabian carpets which flew. Magi who could summon storms with a gesture of their hands. In old houses I would knock, occasionally, upon the backs of old wardrobes, anxious for the crunch of snow under my feet.

  Aged seven, all of that changed. ‘Knowledge,’ as Francis Bacon once said, ‘is power’ – or at least that was the way my mother had intended it. She’d told me about Father Christmas in case I found out inadvertently at school, believing that the truth would come better from her than in the schoolyard. In my case, however, the overwhelming feeling was one of disempowerment, loss of possibility, a kind of grave disappointment. It wasn’t the deception that bothered me so much as the fact that, without magic, the world was suddenly intensely mundane. Behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz was just a man moving levers, and it made me feel – for want of a better metaphor – like a priest disillusioned of his faith.

  By my twenties, I’d come to accept the muted normality of things. In the wake of magic there were job ladders to climb, health insurance forms, the myriad distractions of city life. I put my shoulder to the wheel like everyone else, and yet even as I went through the motions, something was whispering in the back of my mind: a gnawing hunger for more. There was nothing I could put my faith in amongst all this. Nothing that provided significance and meaning. I was part of a generation sated by more material wealth than any before us in history, yet I felt a starving of the spirit.

  For a long time I disregarded this feeling, or merely tried to blot it out through ever more elaborate mechanisms of escape. I travelled as much as possible, always convinced that the truly unique place was around the corner. I was that quintessential late-twentieth-century vagrant: arriving on one tiny atoll after another, looking for the lost Eden that would match the one
I had in my head.

  Music was another distraction. I collected records obsessively, and spent a good portion of my time in private communion with the recordings of long-dead jazz musicians. Somehow, the notes had the capacity to lift me up beyond the ordinary world, to a place where I was no longer hungry. Books and films also had this power and I sucked them in voraciously, finding temporary reprieve from my restlessness in one kind of narrative or another. But when the book ended, or the song, there was my mind again, never satisfied with the moment.

  After I survived a major hit-and-run accident at the age of twenty-five, the restlessness became something more serious. Having stared death in the face, I found the futility of my daily existence unbearable. Unable to find purpose in anything, I spiralled into a depression that left me cut off from friends and family, unable to enjoy the tastes of food or to feel any hope for the future. For months I scarcely left the house, numbing reality with whatever tools I had available. I felt like a spectre trapped in a human body: a ray of sunlight could pass right through me.

  Finally, it was a strange series of events that set me on the path to recovery. I went to work on a farm in Italy, and spent several months learning how to keep bees. This experience had a profound effect on me. As well as quietening a troubled mind, it allowed a renewed sense of wonder to take root. Peering into the teeming ecosystems of the hive, I found myself falling in love with life again. Back in England, I conceived of the journey that I would later record in a book entitled Honey and Dust : a search for wild honey and the tribes who still hunted it. For a year I travelled in search of sweetness, finding, in each spoonful, a new lease of life.

  But if Honey and Dust began with a search for the simple product of the honey bee, it ended with a different question in mind. As my mind began to heal itself and I weaned myself off the deadening antidepressants, I wondered what it was that had brought me so close to the edge. The accident provided a convenient excuse but it seemed clear that all of this had been building for a long time. Neither did I suppose that I was alone in my existential dilemmas. Amongst my friends in London, a huge proportion seemed to be battling demons of one kind or another, taking pills to bring them up or down, for sleep or wakefulness. With the Office for National Statistics now suggesting one in four British adults will experience a mental health problem in any given year, it seems that many of us are leading lives of quiet desperation.

  But why are so many of us struggling to lead happy, fulfilled lives? Despite all the advances of our civilisation, something elemental seems to have fallen through the cracks: a simple contentment. Environmental writer Gregg Easterbrook phrased it perfectly when he wrote: ‘capitalism renders its chosen covetous, insecure, unfulfilled, constantly twitching . . . Materialist obsession has performed the amazing feat of making unprecedented abundance unsatisfactory to its beneficiaries.’

  It was in India – a country that has yet to reap many of the benefits of twenty-first-century materialism – that I was struck by a revelation of sorts. En route for the Annapurna foothills, I had my first experience of a country which seemed, to use an unavoidable word, ‘magical’. Despite enormous poverty and social problems, the Indians seemed to have an awareness of their place in the scheme of things very different from our own. Although anxious neither to idealise the East nor demonise the West, I couldn’t help but see a thread of meaning in Indian life, long since exorcised from my own culture. It was the meaning provided by religion, and it was evident in a thousand sparkling details on any given day: a rickshaw wallah touching his statue of Ganesh before a journey, a smouldering incense stick or the Muslim call to prayer, echoing through the dawn. Despite having been an atheist for as long as I can remember, I found this intensely moving.

  Clearly, when one describes India as ‘magical’, it means something other than any reference to the supernatural. Perhaps closer to what was meant by German theologian Rudolf Otto when he coined the word ‘numinous’. For Otto, the word suggested divine majesty, the intense feeling of unknowingly knowing that there is something which cannot be seen; it alludes to the holy and the transcendent. More than any specific religious connotation, it was this which made me feel so alive in India. Inside my rational, empirically driven culture nothing was allowed a significance beyond itself. But in India, the opposite felt true. Everything, both animate and inanimate, was filled with a living spirit.

  When I returned to London, this memory of the numinous stayed with me. Like nowhere I’d ever been, India seemed to shine in my mind’s eye as somewhere alive with possibility. It was, in many ways, the very feeling I’d had as a child, believing in a more literal kind of magic. It was what I felt peering into the seamless unity of the beehive, or in the long wailing tones of a jazz solo. It was what I felt standing on the banks of the Ganges, the water lit up by devotional oil lamps, each one of them glinting with light.

  That feeling, it seemed clear, was one of the richest, most compelling in all human experience. And yet to actively seek it out seemed close to impossible. Was it magic I was interested in finding, or mystical experience? What was it about these moments of heightened awareness which seemed to give my life a significance beyond itself?

  Despite these uncertainties, a journey was already plotting itself on the maps within me. I would return to India, to seek out in its burning ghats (cremation grounds) and mountain villages, some understanding of what the numinous really was. I would look for mystics, who hold there to be a fundamental unity beneath the surface of day-to-day phenomena. I would find oracles, shamans and the itinerant sadhus for whom the material world is nothing more than an illusion. Perhaps I would even find the supernatural itself, that most ancient lure for Westerners heading East. Despite the much vaunted economic miracles of the new India, could it be possible that a different kind of magic remained?

  This rather unconventional journey, I was forced to admit, was as much in revolt against something as in search of something else. I wished to leave behind me the reductive materialism that now governs Western life. For Francis Crick, the molecular biologist who co-discovered the DNA molecule, ‘ “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ This seemed to me to be the kind of notion that

  was not only pushing our society to the brink but was sending so many others, like myself, to yoga classes and t’ai chi centres, in the hope of uncovering some essential meaning.

  Perhaps, too, it was pushing others elsewhere: towards fundamentalism, with its own remedies against the fear and uncertainty of the modern world; towards the cult of personality in which we idealise ‘celebrities’ whose lives seem to have some importance denied our own. At the heart of our alienation lurks a deep yearning for fulfilment, a basic human need for coherence. In my own life that coherence had generally eluded me, but now I was going out to find it.

  It was approaching autumn when I packed my small bag for departure. Sodden ochre leaves clogged the gutters along the Caledonian Road. En route for the train, I passed two women carrying yoga bags beneath their arms and I wondered how many other people, even now, were stretched out on yoga mats across Britain, and whether, if enough of us reached for these states of consciousness, we might begin to turn the tide against the spiritual vacuum which seemed to lie at the heart of Western life.

  My own small journey would be to follow this river to its source. It would be a journey concerned less with facts than with feelings, less with proof than wonder. I would follow the clues wherever they took me, seek out anyone who might help me draw the veil aside. But for now I was at the journey’s beginning: standing outside the old wardrobe, a child again, willing it to let me in.

  The Miracle of the Buddha Tree

  Just after dawn, the first passengers on the train began to wake. Beneath me, Mr Gulparna, retired auditor, stretched out first one pyjama-covered leg from his lower bunk, t
hen a second. I watched him blearily through a half-closed eye as he enacted five half-hearted attempts to touch his toes, then five slightly more spirited knee bends. Stretches completed, and just a little out of breath, he gathered his metal beaker, Neem powder for the gums, an enormous crimson comb and a tall bottle of cologne. Tucking all this beneath his arms, he pushed the curtain aside and went to queue for the bathroom.

  I drifted back into sleep, coming awake again as the familiar refrain ‘Chai, chai’ echoed down the corridor. The morning’s first tea seller had boarded the train, and grateful passengers were sitting up in their bunks, reaching into trouser pockets for three rupees, then tilting back the first important chai to jostle away the cobwebs of sleep.

  Someone opened a window and a blast of cold air testified that we had come north.

  I was on my way to Darjeeling, where, so the rumour had it, a miracle was under way. On the top of a blustery hill a tree had assumed the perfect form of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha himself. As if from the pages of some dime-store novel, a drunk had been sleeping it off in the bushes when he opened his eyes, stared in disbelief at the form of the pine tree in front of him, then ran into town proclaiming that he had witnessed a true miracle. Whether he had thrown away his grog wasn’t mentioned but it had, in any case, reached the pages of several newspapers.

  Like the thousands of seekers before me, a miracle seemed to me entirely in keeping with my expectations of India. Even now, as the country reached the height of an economic boom begun in the early 1990s, we arrived in our droves seeking some antidote to the pressures of Western life. Despite the protests of a slew of Orientalist scholars who claim that we have fashioned the East to our own liking, the image seemed impossible to shrug off. Even the latest slogan of the tourist board, ‘Incredible India’, seemed designed to emphasise the notion that here we would find things too extraordinary and improbable to be believed.