the slightest bit sad. I didnât mind. In fact, I quite liked it, because it was one of the ultimately safe love affairs, like my other grand passions for Rupert Brooke, Michel de Montaigne, Dafydd ap Gwilym and (life-long) Shakespeare. The thing about love is this: I love being in love. I love loving people and animals, words, flowers and jokes. I love the way love courses through the spirit, how it brightens everything around you, how it inspirits you, lifts the drooping head of aquilegia, raises the downcast expression, brings more colours to the rainbow. This is what manic depression does, too. In the throes of it, I feel an incandescent sensitivity by which everything is only too much alive and calling. My nerves are exposed: the world is ferociously present. In love with mania as I was, falling in love with a person was something of a misattribution.
Various anthropologists have argued that, although our societyinterprets certain psychological conditions as a medical issue, other cultures have construed exactly the same states of mind as shamanic, divinely inspired wisdom, and those possessed of such insight may be honoured. Professor of psychiatry Richard Warner, noting the work of Mircea Eliade and Black Elk, describes how âIn non-industrial cultures throughout the world, the hallucinations and altered states of consciousness produced by psychosis, fasting, sleep deprivation, social isolation and contemplation and hallucinogenic drug use are often a prerequisite for gaining shamanic power.â As Mircea Eliade writes, mental illness reveals a shamanic vocation, and shamanic initiation is equivalent to the cure: âThe famous Yakut shaman Tüspüt (that is, âfallen from the skyâ) had been ill at the age of twenty; he began to sing, and felt better . . . he needed to shamanize; if he went for a long time without doing so, he did not feel well.â (An Icarus, by any other name, would fly as high and fall as steeply.)
Dr Orhan Ãztürk, a Turkish psychiatrist, writes: âA person may be hallucinated or delusional, but as long as he is not destructive or very unstable he may not be considered insane . . . Such a person may sometimes be considered to have a supernatural capacity for communication with the spirit world and may therefore be regarded with reverence and awe.â
The medieval historian Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) describes a phenomenon which would most likely be understood as mental illness today but which in his own time was taken as prophecy:
Among the Welsh there are certain individuals called Awenyddion who behave as if they are possessed . . . When you consult them about some problem, they immediately go into a trance and lose control of their senses . . . if you listen carefully to what they sayyou will receive the solution to your problem . . . They seem to receive this gift of divination through visions which they see in their dreams. Some of them have the impression that honey or sugary milk is being smeared on their mouths; others say that a sheet of paper with words written on it is pressed against their lips.
American anthropologist Ruth Benedict describes how Siberian shamans âare individuals who by submission to the will of the spirits have been cured of a grievous illness . . . Some, during the period of the call, are violently insane for several years; others irresponsible to the point where they have to be constantly watched lest they wander off in the snow and freeze to death . . . It is the shamanistic practice which constitutes their cure.â
In the time of Plato and Socrates, the gods were thought to communicate with poets and priests through inspired madness and enthusiasm; the passion of the god within, en-theos. âMadness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human,â according to Socrates, in Phaedrus : far from being stigmatizing, âMadness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which