I )   J U L Y , 1 9 4 3   -   I N I T I A T I O N

Like Brockman and MacRupert, Peter also had to undergo an intiation ritual in order to be allowed to enter the Buryat kingdom. (see plate 24) In Peter’s, however, this ritual took on a completely different character. Rather than having a single dose of epena powder blow up his nasal passages, Peter was forced to spend a week in a Buryat “leaf pit” - not only would this make him “a man”, it would also cure him of his recurrent nightmares, he was told. It is not hard to guess the old shaman’s motives for doing this; Peter’s spectacular visions and nightmares, probably caused by the terrible bout of typhus he contracted in the gulag, would have made him an ideal candidate to become a shaman himself - and in the Buryat’s world view, the use of such blatant trickery to help a man accept the gift of vision would have been considered acceptable and even commonplace.

The following entry was made by Peter after a particularly long and arduous session in the leaf-pit: “Again the leaf-pit, they pour the rustling pitchy green blackness upon me, intense medicinal smell, until my melon-head is split, scraped clean, methalent lung-burn leaves crawling, spinning, and scratching, foggy raindrops falling, spreading through the leafmass until my body begins to advent the wisdom of an oak, regrets of a birch, joy of a pine, these early arbourescent manifestations stretching into the dark deep, heavy with the listening silence of the terror itself. Now born of the terror itself, the terror of things becoming things born into the terror of the dark deep, a leafman forms deep in the leafmass and is as yet hidden within it, stealthily moving, swimming through, indistinguishable from, the pitchy green blackness of the leafmass except for low rustles, the low rustles of a leafman moving through a leafmass heavy with the terror of being born into the listening silence of the dark deep. Jealousy of an elm, fatigue of an ash, dissolution of a yew, evaporation, desiccation contracting through the leafmass, melon-head closed, rotten, aching exhaustion of a man looking down into the empty leaf-pit.”