Here There be Dragons.

That’s an acceptable slogan if all you need is something to decorate the empty corners of your map, but it doesn’t answer the question of what lies beyond. And I’ve got a few dragons in my account of the cycle of visions that I’ve never managed to either work past or confront head on.

One of those involves what happens in the second half of every “romantic break,” when what started off as an opening to fresh possibilities collapses into paranoid hysteria and draconian repression. I’ve always skirted around the weirder aspects of that transition or treated it as a momentary aberration. But in fact it’s a crucial episode in every cycle — and there’s no way to get from the experiences of the first proto-shamans to the birth of the spirit vision without passing through it.

What makes it so hard to describe is that the shamans weren’t just visionaries and storytellers. They were also magicians with the power to alter the reality of those around them. They told stories that combined the stuff of everyday life with the wild, hallucinatory experiences of the mythic realm. They invented new words to describe beings and concepts that had never before been named. And they began to work magic.

Like all magicians since, they often relied on trickery to convince their fellows that they had supernatural powers. That was essential to arts such as healing that were based on suggestion. But sometimes they started to believe in their own tricks. And there were other occasions when their efforts were rewarded with genuinely anomalous events that they themselves could not foresee or control.

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