Laurens van der Post & the Wilderness Self

By David Harrison
 

Laurens van der Post is the foremost expert on the culture of southern Africa’s Bushmen. He lived with them for years, and discovered in them a way of life that was, to his mind, the model for human life on earth. The Bushmen lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in complete harmony with nature, a relationship based upon an acceptance of— and perfect adaptation to— the harshness of their environment in the Kalahari Desert. Typically, the Bushmen’s only possessions were a bow and arrow for hunting, tools for making rock art, and a handful of ostrich shells for gathering water.

In his beautiful book A Mantis Carol, van der Post recounts his travels in the U.S. spreading the word about the Bushmen and their godhead, the Praying Mantis. The book focuses on his unlikely meeting with a woman who grew up knowing a Bushman circus performer in New York City. Along the way, van der Post expostulates a theory of the Bushmen (and their almost total eradication by whites and blacks alike in southern Africa) as a metaphor for a crucial part of ourselves he calls our “aboriginal spirit,” an aspect of soul that has been, if not eradicated, then at least grossly neglected, in “the slanted, one-sided age” of modern “civilization.”

Van der Post claims that there is “a great divide” in the human spirit between what he calls “the hunter” and “the husbandman.” The husbandman is the farmer, the settler, the manipulator of nature, the property owner, the possessor, the civilized self, the tamed self. In other words, the representative of the prevailing values imbedded in much of western civilization. The hunter is the Bushman, the nomad, the respectful co-inhabitant of nature, spiritual, communal. In terms of western values, the hunter is the outcast, the rejected, the despised. Van der Post alternately calls the part of the psyche in tune with the hunter the “natural self,” the “instinctual self,” and the “true self,” before settling finally on the “wilderness self.”

Van der Post says that if the reconciliation of these two parts of ourselves is not “effected wholly and with equal honor and respect, human life [will] be torn further apart than ever between two partial and self-canceling expressions of itself.” This, to him, is “the most urgent, the truly realistic task which contemporary man face[s].”

Van der Post recognizes that we have a long way to travel in this task. He recounts the words of his friend who had grown up with the Bushman in New York City:

"A lot of what we call civilized is not living but mere existence, ‘tame' to the point of deadliness. Just because you are not tame doesn’t mean you need to be tamed. We have become specialists in taming human beings, particularly children, and educating them out of being their natural selves."

While van der Post does not specifically make reference to rites of passage in these discussions, he sets a goal before us, and gives us a context in which to operate. As we move through life’s transitions, or help guide others through their own, we must be on the lookout for the hunter, and listen for the voice of the wilderness self that is constantly threatened with silence by civilization, conformity, tameness. We must do our best to reconcile the wilderness self with the civilized self, the hunter with the husbandman, the true self with the tamed self. This is the pursuit of wholeness, of connection, of identity, that was at the heart of so many traditional rites of passage. And until we can rediscover the value of these connections, and enact them in some meaningful way in our lives, van der Post has this warning for us: “we [will] remain as disastrously at war with ourselves as we ha[ve] been with the world without.”

How can we actually effect this reconciliation? Van der Post says it is a matter of recognizing the inherent beauty of nature, the benignity of the universe that we are all a part of. Van der Post calls this beauty and benignity “love,” and does his best not to slip into a sentimental usage of the word. He says that the sooner we recognize this “love,” and extend “our wilderness selves this same kind of love, the sooner [will] begin the arrest of the impersonal, the conformist, the approximate, the paralyzing generalization, the dispirited fragmentation” embodied in life in the modern era.

In case we are not yet convinced, van der Post adds this final thought on the wilderness self: “There is no greater beauty possible in nature or in life than that of the rejected and the despised, rediscovered and redeemed through love.”

Joanne Lauck on the wilderness self:

"Laurens van der Post talks about what he calls the wilderness self. The wilderness self is the alienated self, the insect self, the despised self. It is the self that we hoped science could do away with because it’s messy. It’s everything we’ve been taught is distasteful. You don’t find those responses, those aversions, in a child until they’re about three or four, when they pick them up from adults. Van der Post says that this instinctual self needs to be in control of our psyche because it is lined up with our blueprint, and it is deeply connected to nature. In terms of insects, Mantis represents the instinctual self. It is the god inside, the co-creator come to earth."
 

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