…the shamans and sorcerers whom I encountered in my travels always said that their ability to heal people was a by-product of a different kind of healing. Their primary work is to heal the relation the village and the land, to balance the equilibrium between the human gang and the more-than-human field of forces. If the magician was not simultaneously doing this work of offering prayers and praises and ritual gestures to the other animals and to the powers of the earth and the sky, then he might heal someone in the community and someone else would fall sick, and then he would heal that other person, and someone else would fall sick. The source of the illness is often perceived as an imbalance within the person, but it is actually in the relation between the human village and the land that supports it, the land that yields up its food, its animals for skins for clothing, and its plants for food and medicine. Humans take so much from the land, and the magician’s task is to make sure that we humans always return something to the land so that there is a two-way flow, that the boundary between us – the human culture and the rest of nature – stays a porous boundary. The magician ensures that that boundary is a membrane through which there is this two-way flow, and that the boundary never becomes a barrier shutting out the other-than-human powers from our awareness.

~ An excerpt from ‘The Ecology of Magic’, a Scott London Interview with David Abram, anthropologist, philosopher, magician and author of The Spell of the Sensuous.

Jungle, Bali – photo by Aksenovko, bigstockphoto.com