Yapese magic
Nov. 4th, 2005 08:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersLast weekend, I drove our Yapese friends, Theo and Antonia, down to my brother's place in Corvallis, Oregon. It was a lot of fun. It's about a five hour drive from Seattle -- around four from Federal Way, where Theo and Antonia live -- and Theo and I "talked stories" the whole way down, while Antonia sat in the back and chewed betel nut and mostly kept her own counsel.
On Saturday, we all went out to Newport on the coast and went to the aquarium, the Rogue Brewpub, and the beach. On the drive over the coast range that morning, it was raining and misty in the Douglas firs and mossy oaks, and I kept thinking of the rain forest on Yap. The aquarium, with its fake tidal pools, kept reminding me of the abundant reef on Yap. It struck me that all my life I've lived around oceans and forests, temperate and tropical, trees and waves, fish and ferns. On Sunday, Lonnie, Theo, and I took a hike through McDonald Forest, which is an "experimental forest" that belongs to Oregon State University. Theo wanted to know the names of all the trees and plants. It's very strange to see him in the role of student, after listening to him reel off story after story about all the forest and sea life on Yap.
On the drive back to Washington later on Sunday, Theo and I talked about plate tectonics and oceanography and climatology. He's never gone to college, but he has read whatever he could get his hands on out on Yap. We talked about the possibility of life on Europa, and we both got pretty excited. Then we got to talking about the Yapese who have served in Iraq, and somehow this turned into a conversation about Yapese magic.
A number of years ago, before returning to Yap for the first time in 1998, I wrote a story about a guy who comes to believe that as a boy he learned how to be a sorceror on an island named Little Dog Talk. I even had the story critiqued at a Taste of Clarion workshop in Potlatch, with some particularly sharp comments -- ouch! -- by Ursula Le Guin. I never got around to revising the story, but I did have ideas about what changes to make. One change was to add a female character who had asked the protagonist for a love charm. So it was fascinating to me to learn from Theo and Antonia (who chimed in on this conversation) that the other Micronesians -- from Belau, Chuuk, Pohnpei, even Guam -- often ask the Yapese for love charms.
According to Theo, the Yapese were notorious sorcerors in the past, and all the other Micronesians feared their magic. This accords with what I've read, although Theo always makes it sound pretty dramatic. But he says that people still think the Yapese have strong magic, even though the actual practice has pretty much died out. He told a funny story about when he and Antonia were living on Guam twenty years ago, and their Yapese roommate was stringing along a Chuukese girl who wanted a love charm. It all ended in tears, because she stole a TV to pay for the magic, and then the cops showed up. Theo said that he himself was asked many times for love charms, but he's a good Catholic and always said he didn't have any magic.
There is still one guy on Yap who practices rain magic, but Theo says he's a drunk and nobody thinks his magic works anymore. He said his mother had a brother who was raised by somebody who performed rain magic, and that when this uncle got really drunk, he'd start reciting the chants he'd heard as a little boy, much to Theo's mother's distress. Theo said the chant was a litany of the whole lineage of previous sorcerors who had taught the next in line how to make the magic -- "So and so gave the power to such and such who gave the power to so and such" and on and on until the power to stop the rain was handed to the person doing the chant. All the while, the sorceror, dressed in ceremonial garb ("almost like a dancer," said Theo) would be burning some herbs in a small fire.
Theo said that he'd seen this magic apparently work in his youth, and for all he knew there was something in the smoke from the fire that caused a chemical or ionic reaction in the clouds to keep them from releasing the rain. Well, maybe, maybe not. But it was fascinating to get this glimpse into the practice of magic, because I'm very curious about Yapese magic and haven't found out much about it. Traditional Yapese culture was amazingly, even baroquely, complex compared to the other Micronesian islands -- just ask any anthropologist who has studied it. Theo has a theory about that, too, which is that people may have been living there longer than on other islands, since Yap is part of a continental plate, rather than a volcanic atoll, and thus may have been sticking out of the water longer. He thinks the Yapese had more time to develop their way of life.
Maybe, maybe not. But it was fun talking stories with Theo again, and as usual, he weaved a spell on me. It revived once again my dreams of the revised "Little Dog Talk," with a journey into deeper and deeper secrets that eventually discovers the sunken island where the people fled (pulling the island down after them) at the coming of the Europeans. (Hm, it's starting to sound like At the Mountains of Madness!) But I'm better at dreaming this stuff than writing it, alas.
On Saturday, we all went out to Newport on the coast and went to the aquarium, the Rogue Brewpub, and the beach. On the drive over the coast range that morning, it was raining and misty in the Douglas firs and mossy oaks, and I kept thinking of the rain forest on Yap. The aquarium, with its fake tidal pools, kept reminding me of the abundant reef on Yap. It struck me that all my life I've lived around oceans and forests, temperate and tropical, trees and waves, fish and ferns. On Sunday, Lonnie, Theo, and I took a hike through McDonald Forest, which is an "experimental forest" that belongs to Oregon State University. Theo wanted to know the names of all the trees and plants. It's very strange to see him in the role of student, after listening to him reel off story after story about all the forest and sea life on Yap.
On the drive back to Washington later on Sunday, Theo and I talked about plate tectonics and oceanography and climatology. He's never gone to college, but he has read whatever he could get his hands on out on Yap. We talked about the possibility of life on Europa, and we both got pretty excited. Then we got to talking about the Yapese who have served in Iraq, and somehow this turned into a conversation about Yapese magic.
A number of years ago, before returning to Yap for the first time in 1998, I wrote a story about a guy who comes to believe that as a boy he learned how to be a sorceror on an island named Little Dog Talk. I even had the story critiqued at a Taste of Clarion workshop in Potlatch, with some particularly sharp comments -- ouch! -- by Ursula Le Guin. I never got around to revising the story, but I did have ideas about what changes to make. One change was to add a female character who had asked the protagonist for a love charm. So it was fascinating to me to learn from Theo and Antonia (who chimed in on this conversation) that the other Micronesians -- from Belau, Chuuk, Pohnpei, even Guam -- often ask the Yapese for love charms.
According to Theo, the Yapese were notorious sorcerors in the past, and all the other Micronesians feared their magic. This accords with what I've read, although Theo always makes it sound pretty dramatic. But he says that people still think the Yapese have strong magic, even though the actual practice has pretty much died out. He told a funny story about when he and Antonia were living on Guam twenty years ago, and their Yapese roommate was stringing along a Chuukese girl who wanted a love charm. It all ended in tears, because she stole a TV to pay for the magic, and then the cops showed up. Theo said that he himself was asked many times for love charms, but he's a good Catholic and always said he didn't have any magic.
There is still one guy on Yap who practices rain magic, but Theo says he's a drunk and nobody thinks his magic works anymore. He said his mother had a brother who was raised by somebody who performed rain magic, and that when this uncle got really drunk, he'd start reciting the chants he'd heard as a little boy, much to Theo's mother's distress. Theo said the chant was a litany of the whole lineage of previous sorcerors who had taught the next in line how to make the magic -- "So and so gave the power to such and such who gave the power to so and such" and on and on until the power to stop the rain was handed to the person doing the chant. All the while, the sorceror, dressed in ceremonial garb ("almost like a dancer," said Theo) would be burning some herbs in a small fire.
Theo said that he'd seen this magic apparently work in his youth, and for all he knew there was something in the smoke from the fire that caused a chemical or ionic reaction in the clouds to keep them from releasing the rain. Well, maybe, maybe not. But it was fascinating to get this glimpse into the practice of magic, because I'm very curious about Yapese magic and haven't found out much about it. Traditional Yapese culture was amazingly, even baroquely, complex compared to the other Micronesian islands -- just ask any anthropologist who has studied it. Theo has a theory about that, too, which is that people may have been living there longer than on other islands, since Yap is part of a continental plate, rather than a volcanic atoll, and thus may have been sticking out of the water longer. He thinks the Yapese had more time to develop their way of life.
Maybe, maybe not. But it was fun talking stories with Theo again, and as usual, he weaved a spell on me. It revived once again my dreams of the revised "Little Dog Talk," with a journey into deeper and deeper secrets that eventually discovers the sunken island where the people fled (pulling the island down after them) at the coming of the Europeans. (Hm, it's starting to sound like At the Mountains of Madness!) But I'm better at dreaming this stuff than writing it, alas.
