The Eagle's Gift
deMille, Richard
this time discovering unplumbed depths of his own prior experience in Mexico, unsuspected compartments on the "left side" of his mind, where lurk eschatological lessons long before taught...
...for awareness is the Eagle's food...
...For Loyali'sts: fear of being "betrayed" by Britain and of losing their cultural heritage as well as political power...
...Don Juan calls his disciples together to announce his imminent departure from this world, but Carlos forgets the announcement in that "other momentous event of jumping to certain death and not dying...
...Nonetheless--not because It loves Its creatures but because It values awareness--the Eagle has granted one gift to living things: the power to disobey the summons at death and thereby to preserve awareness beyond death...
...The first seers were made by the Eagle, Which put them into the world to recruit, train, and lead other seers "to freedom" -- that is, out of this inferior realm, up to a higher and better place...
...All of us who write or speak on Northern Ireland run the risk of misleading others by referring to "nationalists" and "loyalists" (or whatever other political terms are used) by religious affiliation, "Catholic" and "Protestant" --too often giving the impression that bad religion is still basic to the conflict...
...It is frankly nationalist, stating that British withdrawal is essential to a political solution, but it also goes far to destroy the IrishAmerican myth of the Provisional IRA "political patriot...
...In general, they confirm his factual account and .most of his evaluations...
...According to one of those lessons, now remembered: The power that governs the destiny of all living things is called the Eagle, not because it is an eagle or has anything to do with an eagle, but because it appears to the seer as an immeasurable jet-black eagle, standing erect as an eagle stands, its height reaching to infinity...
...Presently Carlos is resurrected as an amnesiac...
...therefore, it seems unreal...
...Be that as it may, Jack Holland succeeds admirably in describing the conflicting emotions that have pervaded Northern Ireland during the recent past, as civic events flow on and violence besets the communities...
...Holland's book with some close friends, north and south, of various ideologies, whose experience and judgment I trust...
...I began this review in Washington in March, then asked the book-review editor to let me finish it after visiting Ireland-Northern Ireland April 1-9, so am continuing it on April 11 in D. C. My idea was to check out my opinions of Mr...
...When they die, their awareness floats to the Eagle's beak, there to be eaten...
...There is nothing here to gratify an interest in Indians, Mexico, anthropology, healing, or drama...
...For Nationalists: anger, despair, frustration at the twin evils of political disfranchisement and juridical mistreatment...
...Quite so...
...Jack Holland shows again and again how brutal the Provies have been, and how they have disregarded the nationalist people more and more...
...bizarre,-but tedious labyrinth wherein Castaneda cultists will gleefully lose their minds and the general reader will quickly lose the thread...
...The immediate context of this review is the Fermanagh election April 9, in which Harry West of the official Unionist Commonweal: 312...
...All living things belong to the Eagle, their creator and reason for living...
...instead one endures an allegorical ordeal, where metaphor piles on metaphor, contrivance on contrivance, emblem on icon without relief...
...this time discovering unplumbed depths of his own prior experience in Mexico, unsuspected compartments on the "left side" of his mind, where lurk eschatological lessons long before taught by don Juan, but then quite forgotten on don Juan's command...
...The don Juan books have lately turned into a morbid magic theater, where entrance is not for everybody...
...The author begins thus...
...This sixth book is an intricate, mysterious...
...TOO LONg A SACRIFICE Jack Holland Dodd, Mead, 510.95, 217 pp...
...Much of the naffation is mere synopsis, devoid of action or feeling..In vain one looks for sex, love,human relations, or normal emotions...
...What I am describing," writes Castaneda, "is alien to us...
...Every cycle of seers leaves a redemptor behind to begin a new cycle, each cycle guided by the Rule of the Eagle...
...In a nutshell, gnosticism: This world is to work one's way out of...
...Since this aquiline Moloch governs all creatures equally, men cannot pray tO It for grace or favor...
...It !s up to the seers to follow the Rule, which is not a story but a map...
...for" the human part of the Eagle is too insignificant to move the whole...
...His seers possess free will to disobey the Eagle's summons...
...He is more careful later, but I fear the unwary reader will have a skewed mind-set...
...Gangster" is his word for them since 1975...
...The Eagle does not care about man's actions and yet It has provided man with a passageway to freedom...
...From the moment a warrior understands the nature of awareness, don Juan tells Carlos, he ceases to be a person, and the human condition is no longer a part ofhis view...
...David J. Bowman I N my judgment, this is one of the best popular books for Americans since Gary McEoin's Northern Ireland: Prisoner of History in 1974...
...Just before being eaten by the Eagle, awareness passes through a momentary purgatory...
...they enter a condition known as "glory...
...they struggle with a problem not of evil but of error...
...Himself an obvious apostate, he calls his witches "little sisters," finds in don Juan a perfect being, sees in the Eagle a faint An ever more important book reflection of man...
...Veteran Juanists will no doubt cherish Castaneda's solemn instructions for would-be lucid dreamers, his recapitulation of lxtlan's ethics disguised as an exegesis of stalking, his sly allusions to currently fashionable wonders: Atlantis, pyramid power, parallel universes, right-brain function, shared dreams, sensory deprivation, altered states, elephant man, astrological character types, Ouspensky's wheel of fortune, Gurdjieff's planets, cosmic anatomy, and the god who has forgotten his divinity: Indeed, Castaneda is a fountain of allusions...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 10
