3/28/2012 (Sacramento)

The poison is in the remedy. You are vaccinated against the bacterium by getting the bacterium (cf. Derrida). Getting hiwey lak is 'being lucky in love'. The troubadours were imbued with negative theology. This is the only way forward, not the empiricism of progress. The difference lies in that there is an empirical thing, something empirical, an object that is an atom, whereas in the via negativa, there is no progress, no going forward, Beckett's 'I must go on, I can't go on'. There is only a to-and-fro, a back-and-forth, like a rocking chair or a porch glider. There is the object and the ghost of an object. Sartre spurned that construction of NOUN + of + NOUN, especially 'consciousness of + OBJECT. There is no genitive construction, the possession of something, something inside something, a Venn diagram of a circle inside a circle. There is no hallucination of something, a pink elephant in the room. Seeing the elephant is finding gold and not 'but it could be fool's gold--the fool's gold and the gold are the same thing but mutually exclusive of each other. The Maidu conceived of the country as swarming with supernaturals called kakeni. I knew an Englishman, Oxford educated, who converted to Catholicism after he observed pygmies in Africa being constrained from taking certain actions because of the votives of their gods to whom they had to pay homage first, at the opportune time before they could act. Jesus gave that all up. He had himself nailed to the tree. Are we that different from the pygmies today, or the Maidu? 

yompa: poison used by sucking doctors and gamblers. If the owner of yompa walked around the victim and let him smell it, the affect was said to have been weakening. Yompa is composed, at least in part, of sila, or the "pain" extracted by shamans. It is different from deer liver poison that is envenomed by the bite of a rattlesnake and placed either on arrow points in war or in victims' food, always with fatal results.

The budding shaman has, at the lowest estimate, a borderline psychosis, possibly of the "hysterical psychosis" type, characterized by certain homosexual tendencies. By all general accounts, the same impression of misconduct is created by budding male and female shamans. This quasi-homosexual misconduct on the part of both male and female shamans may be responsible for the Mohave belief that female shamans are stronger than male ones and male transvestite shamans stronger than either male or female ones.

. . . attempts to give the shaman a clean bill of psychological health is both culturally and psychiatrically fallacious.

. . . she was a venereal disease specialist and was therefore automatically expected to be 'lucky in love' . . . attributable to the lesbian transvestite's ability to get wives, take them away from men. 

PSYCHIC EQUATIONS

white alien = oedipal love object

oedipal love object = many anonymous men

Mohaves believed hiwey lak was transmitted by saliva. According to the Mastamho myth, saliva was the way in which venereal disease, i.e., chiefly hiku:pk (gonorrhea, granuloma inguinale and syphilis), was to be transmitted in times to come.

Ahma Huma:re treated only hiwey lak and considered it as venereal disease without eruptions and viewed hiwey lak as a broadly sexual rather than a specifically venereal disease; therefore, there is the connection between hiwey lak and obstetrics--ghost pregnancy (pseudo-cyesis).

(Why did Wovoka want to bring the ghosts of the dead back, dance them back? Especially when, as the Mohaves believed, ghosts are aliens (whites)? Are there two types of ghosts, just as, according to the Mohaves, there is a distinction between the Ancient Ones and the gods?)