“There is a pleasure sure
In being mad which none but madmen know.”
John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century
Act II, scene 1.
The Spanish Friar (1681)
This fits exactly. It's the shamans who are moving separate from everyone else, living alone, who talk with the dead, who speak in tongues, who go out with the full moon and turn into a hyena overnight, and that sort of stuff. It's the shamans who have all this metamagical thinking. When you look at traditional human society, they all have shamans. What's very clear, though, is they all have a limit on the number of shamans. That is this classic sort of balanced selection of evolution. There is a need for this subtype — but not too many.
The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic. This is not somebody babbling in tongues all the time in the middle of the hunt. This is someone babbling during the right ceremony. This is not somebody hearing voices all the time, this is somebody hearing voices only at the right point. It's a milder, more controlled version.
Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit. Shamans are not leaving fewer copies of their genes. These are some of the most powerful, honored members of society. This is where the selection is coming from. … In order to have a couple of shamans on hand in your group, you're willing to put up with the occasional third cousin who's schizophrenic.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
“There is a pleasure sure
In being mad which none but madmen know.”
John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century
Act II, scene 1.
The Spanish Friar (1681)
Carlos Castaneda book The Wheel of Time
Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from A Separate Reality (Chapter 6)
Bill Finger (1914–1974) American comic strip and comic book writer
Bill Finger as quoted by Kane, Bob; Tom Andrae (1989). Batman & Me. Forestville, California: Eclipse Books. p. 44. ISBN 1-56060-017-9.
Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXII : Traits of Friendship; Arthur to Helen
Context: I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other; besides, I like to enjoy my life at all sides and ends, which cannot be done by one that suffers himself to be the slave of a single propensity.
John Hennigan (1979) American professional wrestler
CM Punk/John Morrison contract signing http://youtube.com/watch?v=6EUO__hwKvE
“Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.”
Malcolm Forbes (1919–1990) American publisher
As quoted in Clean Your House & Everything In It (1982) by Eugenia Chapman and Jill C. Major, p. 100