Whitman’s Initiation Was Not Ecstatic Love but Violent Rape by the Numinosum, and Its Concealment Deformed American Poetry

Herrmann’s most consequential interpretive move is his insistence that the true prima materia of Whitman’s life work lies not in the celebrated Section 5 of “Song of Myself” — the passage conventionally read as a mystical union of body and soul — but in the 1847 Notebook entries documenting interpenetration by the “Fierce Wrestler.” Here Whitman records images of homosexual rape, phallic violence, and serpentine rage: “What angry snake hisses at my ear, / And what is it but my soul that hisses like an angry snake.” Herrmann reads this material through the lens of Mircea Eliade’s criteria for shamanic initiation — spontaneous vocation, ecstatic crisis, dismemberment and reconstitution — and argues that Whitman underwent a genuine initiatory transformation that was subsequently bowdlerized for public consumption. The “Fierce Wrestler” is not literary conceit but the eruption of what Herrmann, borrowing from Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, calls the deus absconditus: the hidden god whose chthonic violence is the necessary precondition for the emergence of creative Logos Spermatikos. This violence was transmogrified into the emotion of Joy by the time Whitman composed the 1855 Leaves of Grass, and Herrmann argues that this transmogrification — while producing great poetry — cost Whitman his full prophetic range. The rage and destructiveness visible in the Notebooks went underground, reappearing only partially in “Drum-Taps” and the “Calamus” cluster. Herrmann’s reading resonates powerfully with Edward Edinger’s work on the ego’s encounter with the numinosum in Ego and Archetype: what Edinger describes as the shattering inflation-alienation cycle maps precisely onto Whitman’s oscillation between grandiose identification with the American Bard persona and the hidden wound of his suppressed homoerotic violence. The homophobia of Whitman’s era forced him to wear what Herrmann calls a “shamanic mask” — bisexual in orientation, democratic in address — that systematically excluded the initiatory material that gave it power.

The Whitman–Jeffers–Everson Triad Maps the Spectrum of Shamanic Consciousness onto the Problem of Violence in America

The book’s structural genius lies in its triangulation. Herrmann does not simply argue that Whitman was a shaman; he constructs a developmental lineage — Whitman to Jeffers to Everson — in which each poet-shaman occupies a distinct position relative to the numinous factor of violence. Everson himself provides the key formulation in the recorded interviews: “The great difference being that Jeffers is more religious in his comprehension of the meaning of violence.” Whitman suppressed violence in favor of adhesive love. Jeffers, following World War I, made violence the supreme vehicle of the sacred, achieving what Everson calls “a more crystallized view” — “more forceful, more total” — but at the cost of inhumanism and the near-total rejection of the human. Everson positions himself as the “middle ground,” Whitmanesque in hope but Jeffersian in his willingness to descend into the psychoid and confront the Dark God of Eros. This triadic schema transforms what could be a monograph on Whitman into something closer to a theory of American literary shamanism. It parallels the dialectical structures found in Joseph Henderson’s Thresholds of Initiation, where initiatory consciousness must navigate between inflation and deflation, between identification with the archetype and dissolution in it. Herrmann’s Everson interviews reveal a thinker who understood this dialectic experientially: “I must have a special inside track into the psychoid; but I am not as helpless before it as aboriginal shamans were… The poet has technique. It’s the poet’s technique that saves him in there.” This is not romanticism about shamanism but a clinical observation about the ego’s survival in proximity to the archetypal unconscious — the same territory Erich Neumann mapped in The Origins and History of Consciousness when he described the hero’s capacity to withstand the uroboric pull.

The Psychoid Hypothesis Gives Herrmann’s Shamanism a Jungian Foundation That Eliade’s Phenomenology Alone Cannot Provide

Where Herrmann decisively exceeds the comparative-religion framework of Eliade is in his deployment of Jung’s psychoid concept. The psychoid — that stratum of the collective unconscious where psyche shades into matter, where archetype becomes indistinguishable from instinct — provides the ontological ground for claiming that the poet-shaman’s trance is not metaphor but function. Everson states it directly: “The shaman can penetrate into that psychoid region. His techniques have been worked out through many centuries.” And: “The Animals have a physicality, as the vehicles of the Wild, that the shaman can find useful.” Herrmann reads Whitman’s free verse itself as a shamanic technique — the American equivalent of drum and chant — designed to induce trance in both poet and reader. This is a significant theoretical claim. It links the formal innovation of vers libre to the archaic ecstatic techniques Eliade catalogued, but grounds that linkage in Jung’s model of the archetype as simultaneously psychic and physical. The vocational archetypes that Everson developed in his “Birth of a Poet” course at UC Santa Cruz — inspired by Ira Progoff’s reading of Whitman through Jung and Jan Smuts — are understood by Herrmann as constituents of the psychoid realm, structural elements of what Meister Eckhart called the Godhead. The poet who enters trance does not merely access unconscious imagery; he enters the territory where synchronicity operates, where creation is still occurring. Marie-Louise von Franz’s formulation of creatio continua as “acts of creation in time” that follow “a sporadically repeated orderedness” is the theoretical backdrop against which Herrmann situates the poet-shaman’s work.

What This Book Uniquely Illuminates

For readers formed by Jungian depth psychology, Herrmann’s contribution is irreplaceable because it does what neither literary criticism nor clinical psychology typically attempts: it reads American poetry as a living shamanic tradition with precise psychological mechanisms, grounded in the psychoid hypothesis, and measured against the poet’s capacity to hold the tension between love and violence without collapsing into either sentimentality or nihilism. No other work in the depth-psychological library connects Whitman’s suppressed Notebook material to Eliade’s initiatory criteria, triangulates it against Jeffers’ inhumanism and Everson’s mediating stance, and then anchors the entire structure in Jung’s concept of the archetype as a psychoid, non-psychic factor. It reveals what Whitman censored, what that censorship cost American consciousness, and what kind of poetic and psychological work remains necessary to complete the initiatory cycle Whitman began.