Summary

Walser slowly begins to remember things, but they mean nothing to him, having no context in his present world. Instead, they seem to be mere delusions. The villagers, however, treat him kindly as he babbles away in foreign languages, as they assume him to be a hallucination.

The Shaman and his tribe are illiterate, but not unintelligent. Theirs is the knowledge of the land, and how to navigate it and use it to their purposes. The Shaman is the most knowledgeable of them all. His knowledge is both concrete and abstract, and in his tribal system, these were often one and the same. It is the Shaman’s job to explain unexplainable phenomena, to put the mysteries of nature in their rightful place, and to use his necromantic powers for practical purposes. His visions are the tribe’s reality, a shared gnosis.

The tribe is...