Image: Marianne LaRochelle Photography
Model: Sara Mononen
"In the time of the Great Raven even the invisible was visible. And it continually transformed itself. Animals, at that time, were not necessarily animals. They might happen to be animals, but sometimes they were humans, gods, lords of a species, demons, ancestors. And humans weren’t necessarily humans but could also be the transient form of something else. There were no tricks for recognizing those that appeared. They had to be already known, as one knows a friend or an adversary. Everything, from spiders to the dead, occurred within a single flow of forms. It was the realm of metamorphosis.
The change was continual, as later happened only in the cavity of the mind. Things, animals, humans: distinctions never clear cut, always temporary. When a vast part of what existed withdrew into the invisible, this didn’t mean it stopped happening. But it became easier to think it wasn’t happening.
How could the invisible return to being visible?
By animating the drum.
The stretched skin of a dead animal was the steed, it was the journey, the gilded whirlwind. It led to the place where the grasses roar, where the rushes moan, where not even a needle could pierce the gray thickness."
Excerpt from the book The Celestial Hunter by Roberto Calasso (2020)