The following excerpt is from the same lady of the spherical soul and the giant with the leopard skin: At first, many tiger faces. Panthers and all kinds of cats. Black and yellow. Then >the< tiger. The largest and strongest of all. I know (for I read his thought) that I must follow him. I see the plateau. He walks with resolution in a straight line. I follow; but on reaching the edge and perceiving the brightness I cannot follow him. The dream vanishes. But above the luminescence rises a statue of the Virgin with the child in her arms, and ascends from the hole into the sky. At a still later stage she is able to follow the tiger further to the end of the plateau and look into the abyss which is Hell. It is round and in it is fluid fire, or fluid gold. People swim in it. The tiger wants me to go there. I don't know how to descend. I grasp the tiger's tail and he jumps. Because of his musculature the jump is graceful and slow. The tiger swims in the liquid fire as I sit on his back. I then suddenly see my tiger is eating up a woman. But no. It is not the tiger. It is an animal with a crocodile's head and the body of a fatter, larger animal with four feet (though these were not seen). All kinds of lizards and frogs begin to appear now. And the pond gradually turns into a greenish swamp of stagnant waters, though full of life: primitive forms of life, such as algae, anemones, and micro-organisms. It is a prehistoric pond. A shore appears, not with sand but vegetation. Some dinosaurs are seen in the distance. I rise on the tiger on the shore. The serpent follows us. It catches up with us. I stay aside and let the tiger take care of her. But the serpent is strong and my tiger is in danger. I decide to take part in the fight. The serpent notices my intention, lets the tiger loose and prepares to attack us. I hold its head and press on its sides so that it will open its mouth. it has an iron-piece inside, like the bit of a horse. I press on the ends of this bit and the serpent dies or disintegrates, it falls into pieces as if it were a mechanical serpent. I go onwards with the tiger. I walk next to him, my arm over his neck. We climb the high mountain. There is a zig-zag path between high bushes. We arrive. There is a crater. We wait for some time and there begins an enormous eruption. The tiger tells me I must throw myself into this crater. I am sad to leave my companion but I know that this last journey I must travel. I throw myself into the fire that comes out of the crater. I ascend with the flames towards the sky and fly onwards. ... one more example from another person: I wasn't a fish anymore, but a big cat, a tiger. I walked, though, feeling the same freedom I had experienced as a bird and a fish, freedom of movement, flexibility, grace. I moved as a tiger in the jungle, joyously, feeling the ground under my feet, feeling my power; my chest grew larger. I then approached an animal, any animal. I only saw its neck, and then experienced what a tiger feels when looking at its prey. This may be enough to show how the tiger by no means stands for mere hostility, but for a fluid synthesis of aggression and grace and a full acceptance of the life-impulse beyond moral judgment. Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? and what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Excerpts from the essay "Psychological Aspects of the Yagé Experience in an Experimental Setting" (experiment done with thirty-five volunteers in Santiago, Chile), by Claudio Naranjo, M.D. published in "Hallucinogens and Shamanism", edited by Michael J. Harner, Oxford University Press, 1973 (ISBN 0-19-501649-1), except the poem which is by William Blake, issued A.D. 1794. Dreamtigers In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger: not the jaguar, the spotted "tiger" of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of vegetation that float down the Paraná, but that striped, Asiatic, royal tiger, that can be faced only by a man of war, on a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages of the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations: I who cannot rightly recall the brow or the smile of a woman.) Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger. Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird. A short story by Jorge Luis Borges (Translated by Mildred Boyer) The Other Tiger And the craft that createth a semblance Morris: Sigurd The Volsung (1876) I think of a tiger. The gloom here makes The vast and busy Library seem lofty And pushes the shelves back; Strong, innocent, covered with blood and new, It will move through its forest and its morning And will print its tracks on the muddy Margins of a river whose name it does not know (In its world there are no names nor past Nor time to come, only the fixed moment) And will overleap barbarous distances And will scent out of the plaited maze Of all the scents the scent of dawn And the delighting scent of the deer. Between the stripes of the bamboo I decipher Its stripes and have the feel of the bony structure That quivers under the glowing skin. In vain do the curving seas intervene And the deserts of the planet; From this house in a far-off port In South America, I pursue and dream you, O tiger on the Ganges' banks. In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect That the tiger invoked in my verse Is a ghost of a tiger, a symbol, A series of literary tropes And memories from the encyclopaedia And not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel That, under the sun or the varying moon, In Sumatra or Bengal goes on fulfilling Its round of love, of idleness and death. To the symbolic tiger I have opposed The real thing, with its warm blood, that decimates the tribe of buffaloes And today, the third of August, '59, Stretches on the grass a deliberate Shadow, but already the fact of naming it And conjecturing its circumstance Makes it a figment of art and no creature Living among those that walk the earth. We shall seek a third tiger. This Will be like those others a shape Of my dreaming, a system of words A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger That, beyond the mythologies, Is treading the earth. I know well enough That something lays on me this quest Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on Seeking through the afternoon time The other tiger, that which is not in verse. A poem by Jorge Luis Borges. (Translated by Harold Morland)