All along the northern seaboard of Europe, the story is told of the young man who sees a flock of seals swimming towards a deserted shore under a full moon. They step out of their animal skins to reveal themselves as beautiful young women. As they dance naked on the sand, the young man steals one of the skins, preventing its owner from resuming her seal form. He marries her and they have children, but she constantly searches for the seal skin her husband has hidden.

"One hot day," a Scottish version from North Uist tells us, "her human child comes to her, saying "O Mother, is this not a strange thing I have found in the old barley-kist, a thing softer than mist to my touch." It is her lost skin. Quickly, deftly, the seal woman puts it on and takes the straight track to the shore. “And, with a dip down and a keck up she went, lilting her sea-joy in the cool sea water." 1

Stories of skin-shedding are both very old and very widespread. In West Africa, for instance, the Toradjas believe that crocodiles take off their skins when ashore and assume human shape. 2 The Dowayos of the Cameroons believe the reverse; sorcerers take off their skins at night to become leopards. In Norse mythology, the hero Sigmund and his nephew Sinfiotl find two wolf-skins in the forest and, putting them on, become wolves whose adventures seem to constitute an initiation for Sinfiotl. Skin-shedding is a variation on shape-shifting. It is a vivid metaphor for our two-fold nature: body and soul, matter and mind, natural and supernatural. It tells us that, on our islands of consciousness, we are human; but in the oceanic unconscious, we may be seals or crocodiles. Awake we are human, asleep we are wolves in the forest of dreams.

Skin-shedding reminds us that there is only the softest, mistiest skin between this world and the Otherworld. The pioneering anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, was greatly exercised by the beliefs of the Trobriand Islanders concerning skin-shedding, notably in connection with witches. They were called yoyova in everyday life, but they became mulukwansi when they actively practised witchcraft. He established that they cast off their bodies – literally “peeled off their skins” – which remained sleeping in their beds while the naked witches flew off. Malinowski wanted to know, more precisely, was it the witches themselves who flew away, or was it their ‘emanations’?

What exactly is the mulukwansi that flies through the air as a firefly or a shooting star? Who is it that stays behind? 3 He never received definite replies to these questions; it seems as if the Trobriand Islanders believe that the 'skin' stands for the body which is left behind while the 'soul' takes flight. But in Africa, the Ba-suto assert that a witch in flight simply goes in his or her entirety, both body and soul. The Thonga, however, say that the noyi (witch) is only part of the personality: "When he flies away, his 'shadow' remains behind him, lying down on the mat. But it is not truly the body which remains; it appears as such only to the stupid uninitiated. In reality what remains is a wild beast, the one with which the noyi has chosen to identify himself.” 4

It is universally believed that witches fly, as do their counterparts, the witch-doctors or shamans who fly into the Otherworld to retrieve souls that have wandered off from their owners or been abducted by malignant spirits or witches. Beliefs about what actually flies, though, vary widely; and so anthropologists, irritated by the lack of clarity in the matter, tend to believe tribal, pre-literate, traditional cultures are confused about witchcraft. But it may be that they are less confused than unconcerned.

The question of whether witches fly bodily or not doesn’t worry pagan cultures. It was raised by Christianity and, more particularly, by the earliest Christian writer St Paul. He seemed confused when he wrote of his own ecstasy: "I was caught up even to the third heaven, whether in the body, I know not, or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth."5 Ever since, Western culture has been in two minds about any alleged instance of flight. Just as the mediæval inquisitors were divided over the problem of whether witches physically flew to their Sabbats or whether they were simply deluded, so in recent times the debate rages as to whether alleged alien abductees are bodily flown, floated or beamed up into spacecraft… or is it 'all in their minds'?

There is a third, rather disreputable solution propounded by esoteric and occult traditions; we posses another body, called 'subtle' or 'astral,' which, like a soul or like the vehicle of the soul, can leave the physical body either spontaneously – at moments of shock, for example – or at will, after suitable magical or shamanic initiation.

However I would prefer to take a different tack and grapple with what seems to me to be the most misleading feature of Western culture’s world-view: its literalism and its identification of the physical with the literal. This distinction is so alien to our way of thought that I can hardly grasp it myself. But I will try to illustrate what I mean by further contrasts between our viewpoint and that of traditional cultures who, I think, are nearer the truth in their apparent confusion than we are in our rigidly dualistic habits of thought.

The same 'confusion' over the flight of witches surrounds stories of abduction. Although the Seal Woman was, in a sense, abducted by a human, the reverse is usually the case; humans are abducted by otherworldly beings which every culture recognizes (or, in our case, used to recognize more widely). They look different to each society, but they have some constant characteristics: they are elusive shape-shifters, always ambiguous, notably part-material, part-immaterial, as well as being sometimes benign and, at other times, dangerous and malevolent. Following the ancient Greeks, I call them daimons.6

Modern daimons include the little grey aliens – less fashionable now than ten years ago – who snatch people from their cars or beds. Except that, sometimes, it seems the abductees were taken out of their bodies, as if in a waking dream. In other words, we encounter the same ambiguities as did Malinowski. All cultures recognise daimons who abduct us – from the kwei-shins in China and the djinn in Arabia, to the Yunw Tsunsdi of the Cherokees. In Newfoundland, the daimons were called the 'Good People' – fairies who seem to have come over with the Irish immigrants – famous for abducting young people while out picking berries. The abductees would be discovered later in a state of dishevelment, bruised and amnesiac, very like many of the victims of alien abduction.7 And like the UFO abductees, the berry-pickers only began to remember after a while what happened to them… the unearthly music that lured them, the ghastly dance they were swept up in. Others returned after a longer time, hardly recognisable or terribly aged, scared or simple-minded.

In Ireland, those abducted by the Sidhe were sometimes allowed to return their villages after seven years, or multiples of seven. But they were only sent back when their years on earth had run out – "old spent men and women," writes Lady Gregory in Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), "thought to have been dead a long time, given back to die and be buried on the face of the earth." We may wonder what kind of actuality these abductions have; but, that they do have a reality cannot be doubted from the many descriptions of "tradition-bearers weeping, sometimes after the passage of many years, as they narrated memorates [ie. remembered events] dealing with the abduction of their children or other relatives."8

Sometimes the Sidhe do not, as it were, take the whole person but only their essence, or soul, perhaps by a 'touch' or 'stroke'. From that moment on, the victim begins to waste away from this world. They are said to be 'away' or a 'changeling'. What remains, says Lady Gregory, is "a body in their likeness, or the likeness of a body." It may be a 'log' that is left in their bed, or a broomstick, or even a heap of shavings. But this was also said of the mediæval witches; that when they flew off to their Sabbats, they placed a stick or log in their beds to fool their spouses… or else what remained appeared to their spouses to be a stick. Again, we note the ambiguity about what has flown off or been abducted, and what is left behind.

Without a soul, a person is no more recognisable than the 'log' left behind by the Sidhe. In the case of zombies of Haiti, instead of their souls being taken while their bodies are left behind, their souls remain behind (in a sorcerer’s jar) while their bodies are abducted into the Otherworld of the 'slave camps'. When they return they are recognised by strangers who believe they are dead relatives; whether they are truly lost relatives seems not to matter (no one, except Western materialistic rationalists, expects a zombie to look like the person they were before their soul was stolen).9

This reverses European folklore in which it is the abductees who become strangers, mere 'likenesses' which are barely recognised by their relatives. Such reversals show how the archetypal motif of abduction by daimons, or daimonic humans, occurs in different permutations: sometimes the soul alone is taken into the Otherworld; sometimes only the body (zombies); sometimes both. We should not, in other words, regard the physical, literally, as an absolute barrier. All cultures other than ours regard the body as quasi-spiritual, just as the soul is quasi-material.

We are fluid organisms whose reality is partly physical, yes, but primarily psychic – soul has priority. In this, we are like the Seal Woman; her skin does not represent exclusively either her soul or her body. She is fully herself both with it and without it, but in the first case a seal and, in the second, a woman. We are not, it seems, so much dual beings as single beings with dual aspects, differing according to whatever element we are in – that is, differing according to whatever perspective we take.

In this world, we may regard ourselves from a primarily physical point of view, just as in the Otherworld we are seen as primarily immaterial. But really we are primarily daimonic; and, as shamans, visionaries, poets and so on have always attested, we can move between worlds at will, providing only we do not get stuck in a fixed, literal view of ourselves as one thing or another.

As if things were not complicated enough, traditional cultures usually allow for (at least) two souls. In ancient Greece, they were called thymos and psyche; in Egypt, ka and ba; in China, hun and p'o. The first of these souls is what we call, for want of a better word, the ego. 10 The second soul – which in tribal cultures is variously called the shadow-soul, death-soul, image-soul or dream-soul – is equivalent to the 'soul' in Western culture. This dream-soul, like an ego, enables us to say 'I', but it is not the conscious, waking, rational ego; it is an irrational, dreaming ego of the unconscious. We all know it from dreams when, clothed in its 'subtle body'; it flies through strange landscapes or shape-shifts – as when it is now the observer, now the observed.

However, the rational, waking ego is so forcefully developed in Westerners that it is always liable to traduce the dream-soul, carrying over into dreams and visions that daylight perspective which is inappropriate to the twilight Otherworld. The hallmark of this perspective is its literalism; thus, when the rational ego encounters daimons, it is terrified and tries to lash out or flee – only to find that it cannot move because literal, muscular action has no power to move the dream-soul.

There is no space, here, to go into the historical origins of this rational literalising ego; suffice to say, it appeared in 17th century Europe with the likes of Descartes, Hobbes, Mersenne and Galileo. One of its main effects was the unwitting drive to literalise the attributes which traditionally belonged to visionaries and shamans – that is, to turn magic into technology. The ability to fly, to cause harm or to communicate over long distances, to see into an Otherworld of 'little people', all these powers were made literal by aircraft, guns, telephones and television respectively. The old sacred 'light of nature' which lit our visions in the deepest darkness – which brought enlightenment – was literalised by profane electricity and the light bulb.11

Thus even the sense that our bodies are literally real is a construct of the literalising ego. No other culture, as we have seen, believes so adamantly in the literal reality of our physical reality. Nor, however, do they regard it as entirely metaphorical – they see the physical world as both literal and metaphorical. Or, more correctly, they do not make this distinction in the first place (it is a distinction only made possible by literalism). We, meanwhile, have come to believe – most eccentrically – that when we physically die, we cease to exist.

Initiations – the rites of death and rebirth – are designed precisely to destroy the rational ego’s literalistic perspective and to show us that physical death is not literal death, but the beginning of a new perspective on life. We picture this as the life of the soul clothed in its shape-changing body, simply because we cannot imagine life separately from some sort of bodily life. But even the 'subtle' body is no more literal than the physical body (a point on which some esoteric doctrines go wrong).

If it were possible, by a prolonged effort of imagination perhaps, to de-literalise the physical body, it ought to be possible to contravene what we call physical laws. And, indeed, this is not unheard of. Shamans, fakirs, mediums, mystics have been rumoured – often witnessed – to perform all sorts of impossibilities, such as burying themselves for days on end or levitating. St Teresa of Avila, swept up into the air while praying, would cry: "Put me down, God!" Zen masters would find such an exhibition in poor taste. So far de-literalised that they can, famously, walk on water, they nevertheless do not often bother to.