Ban jhakri: "Ban jhakri teacher, like the ban jhakri yeti, is a forest dweller. Both are considered ban manchem or wild men, and also spirits and deities. Both have conical heads and hair covering every part of their bodies except hands and face. Both are unclad and demand their abductees be naked. Ban jhakri teachers are small (three to five feet), always male, and have big ears. When seated, their tangled hair completely covers their bodies. Extraordinarily long hair is also a feature of the ancient Tibetan Black Bön shamans." L.G. Peters, "The 'Calling', the Yeti, and the Ban Jhakri ('Forest Shaman') in Nepalese Shamanism." The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology Vol. 29, No. 1. (1997) p.51-2.

Aura: "(Walter) Benjamin raises his conceptual image of the aura to its greatest power, partly by deliberately confusing 'aura' with 'aureole,' a wholly unrelated word (except by punning). The aureole is the bright ring seen around a misty sun or moon, or else the halo of god, angel, or saint. The word is a form of the Latin for 'gold,' aurum, and ought to be very different from Benjamin's aura, which, as I once wrote, 'is properly an invisible breath, or emanation; an air, as of nobility, characterizing person or thing; a breeze that precedes the start of a nervous breakdown or disorder.
"That primary sense of 'aura,' I suspect, Benjamin took from Freud's account of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which he compounded with Paul Valéy's idea that in the crisis of European culture the norm for lyric poetry had become the shock experience. Brilliantly carrying Freud and Valéry back to Baudelaire, Benjamin found the trope of shock and catastrophe in the aura: 'To perceive the aura as an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return." H. Bloom,"On The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910—1940." Bookforum. November, 1994.

her husband: "A tale of the animal paramour, whether groom or bride, is usually a tragic romance. All animal paramour tales are about an encounter with someone or something profoundly different from oneself. The difference in kind between the two partners in tales of animal brides or grooms is a symbol, and amplification, of the difference in gender, a barrier between human beings that renders communication both more difficult and more intriguing." B. Sax, The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature. Blacksburg, VA., 1998. p.22.

lying latent: P. Cox, "Adam Ate From the Animal Tree: A Bestial Poetry of Soul." Dionysus V. (1981). "'There is your Big Man standing there, ever waiting, ever present, like the coming of a new day,'" Oglala Lakota Medicine Man Pete Catches told (Peter) Mathiessen. 'He is both spirit and real being, but he can also guide through the forest, like a moose with big antlers, as though the trees weren't there...I know him as my brother...'" H. Franzono, "Sasquatch and Native Americans." www.ncf.carleton. ca/~bz050/HomePage.bfna.html; P. Mathiessen, The Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York, 1980.

A man visits the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and comes enthralled by the axolotls, "the larval stage (provided with gills) of a species of salamander of the genus Ambystoma." Slowly "the golden splendor" of their eyes draw him in, until he becomes one of them, and finds himself looking out at himself. “He returned many times, but he comes less often now. Weeks pass without his showing up. I saw him yesterday, he looked at me for a long time and left briskly. It seemed to me that he was not so much interested in us any more, that he was coming out of habit. Since the only thing I do is think, I could think about him a lot. It occurs to me that at the beginning we continued to communicate, that he felt more than ever one with the mystery which was claiming him. But the bridges were broken between him and me, because what was his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to his human life. I think that at the beginning I was capable of returning to him in a certain way --ah, only in a certain way-- and of keeping awake his desire to know us better. I am an axolotl for good now, and if I think like a man it's only because every axolotl thinks like a man inside his rosy stone semblance. I believe that all this succeeded in communicating something to him in those first days, when I was still he. And in this final solitude to which he no longer comes, I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he's making up a story, he's going to write all this about axolotls.” J. Cortázar, "Axolotl." In, End of the Game and Other Stories. New York, 1978. pp. 3-9.

progressive: M. Ripinsky-Naxon, The Nature of Shamanism. State University Press of New York. Albany, 1993. p.76. "The Micronesians have a saying: 'When you're tattooed, your bones are tattooed.' Maybe someday that's all that will remain of the human race. All the dreams, myths, and buildings will have vanished, leaving only bones, a few bearing tattoo marks to show that the people who lived on this planet also once did art." D. Thome, In, Re/Search #12. San Francisco, CA., 1989.

He took her: Adapted from a story told to Larry Peters by a forty-year-old Tamang female he met in Boudha. "During the one day she spent with the ban jhakri teacher, she learned some healing mantra but does not know how to keep the ban jhakri teacher in its 'proper place,' to 'tame' it so that it does not come to her involuntarily and make her shake out of control. Thus she has not been able to become a shaman."  L.G. Peters, "The 'Calling', the Yeti. and the Ban Jhakri ('Forest Shaman') in Nepalese Shamanism." The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology Vol. 29, No. 1. (1997) p.52.

earthly imperfection: "No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfection." N. Hawthorne, "The Birthmark." In J. McIntosh, Editor, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales. New York, 1986. p.119.

Bigfoot daughter: Female ban jhakri, the ban jhakrini, "are ferocious, bigger than the males, with long breasts slung over their napes..." L.G. Peters, "The 'Calling', the Yeti, and the Ban Jhakri ('Forest Shaman') in Nepalese Shamanism." The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology Vol. 29, No. 1. (1997) p.52.