MODERN HUMANS IN SEARCH OF A SHAMANIC EXPERIENCE

“He was in the middle of an invocation. There was something in the grey gleam between darkness and light. It did not belong anywhere, it did not fit anywhere but even so it was determining. Close by and at the same time outside. Something wanted him but stayed where it was. Or rather he was sliding away from it when he moved a hand in the drenched coat, or shifted a foot, opened his eyes. It repeated itself, the moment was still there and with open eyes he penetrated into the dim light, he spread his senses further and further around him, felt how he was prepared for what he sensed to be an opening or a beginning. He was aware that something could constantly happen. Or was happening all the time indeterminate and obvious. A last crucial distance starting a little inside him and ending just outside him ” (Lundbye 1978:5). At the beginning of Vagn Lundby’s trilogy Tilbage til Anholt (“The Return to Anholt”) a nameless human being is standing in the wet dawn facing the start of a boat journey and of a spiritual search. Later the reader discovers his name to be Jonas, an urban dweller, who is travelling to an island, Anholt, in the middle of Kattegat east of Jutland in Denmark. His reason for this journey is the story of his forefather who disappeared off the coast of this island in a shipwreck. Simultaneously he is, however, undertaking a quest, a journey into non-ordinary reality in a search of a spiritual link between all beings, of a holistic understanding of the human role in the universe. He is the Old Testament Jonah who is going to be swallowed by the island, as well as modern humans isolated in their attempt to reach beyond their own limited mind into the realm of the spirit-world. He is standing in the rain waiting for the boat to take him away from the mainland 132 to an encounter with this “something ” on the island that he already wordlessly senses. He is in a shadow-land and as such he is both the observer and the observed. Something wants him and he follows