To achieve enlightenment, shamans teach, one must first bury oneself in the cave. In fact, they say, to open our gaze, we must close our eyes in the darkness of the earth.

The shaman, like the butoh dancer, lives straddling the world of the living and the world of the dead, sometimes exchanging favor and sometimes hostility with spirits.

Like alchemists, shamans challenge the boundaries between mortal and immortal things. Guarding the laws that govern the motions of the heavens, they plunge into what most consider “the end” or, rather, “the limit”, to return hermetic messages.

The butoh dancer, for Hijikata Tatsumi, dances like a corpse desperately holding itself up, falling and rising again trespassing between worlds, defying the rules that separate the sacred from the obscene, as in ancient Greek tragedies.

That darkness it passes through is so dark as to be luminous. It takes a journey into the body’s possibilities of connecting in, out, and beyond its own skin frame. Like the ancient ascetics of death, it sees its skeleton glowing with a golden light.