Shapeshifting: Solaris and True Alienation
In Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name, Solaris is an alien planet that “materializes physical simulacra” — any members aboard the space station slowly circling the planet will begin to have interactions with figures from their pasts, those figures that left the greatest impact on their psyches. The ocean itself manifests many forms that fall under different categorization, such as mimoids, symmetriads, etc., which arise mostly as singular architectural feats and ever-evolving foamy, stretchy-then-solid, growing-and-shrinking structures that can be many miles in dimension; those that study these phenomena are called solaricists. The study of Solaris developed from a more esoteric theorization of what the ocean actually “is”:
“For some time one popular view, eagerly disseminated by the press, was that the thinking ocean covering the whole of Solaris was a gigantic brain more advanced by millions of years than our own civilization, that it was some kind of “cosmic yogi,” a sage, omniscience incarnate, which had long ago grasped the futility of all action and for this reason was simply maintaining a categorical silence towards us.” (Lem)
This evolved into a decidedly scientific investigation of how Solaris ‘works,’but no matter how many studies were done and how much a desire for First Contact might’ve been present aboard, the ocean didn’t attempt to reveal anything about itself — to the crew, it seemingly only sought to essentially conduct psychological experiments on them by creating “empty” doppelgängers of critical figures from their pasts who cannot die.
The book centers around Kris Kelvin, an at times neurotic, at times deeply detached psychologist. In his youth, he knew and was in a relationship with a young woman named Harey, who ultimately ended up killing herself after Kris ended their relationship and implied she was weak. Once Kris begins seeing, speaking and interacting with the simulacra of Harey, he questions his own sanity, and conducts experiments to prove to himself that he is sane — and when in the lab, realizes the other crew members have done the same. We never learn the details of the other crews simulacras beyond an interaction in the beginning of Kris’ stay, and fleeting glimpses of identifiers — but it is implied that they’re haunting enough to drive the crew to madness and suicide, such as in the case of Gibarian, a former professor of Kris’ and fellow crew member who committed suicide right before Kris arrived on the station.
Harey is Kris’ appointed simulacra, or shapeshifter, if you will. What is a shapeshifter? Basically an entity with the ability to change into a different shape or form; It can be the act of a human turning into an animal (commonly seen in creatures such as werewolves, vampires and the like); an animal shapeshifting into a person; a person into a plant or object; and on, including gods turning into clouds, gods turning other gods into any myriad of animals or objects, etc. Shapeshifting is key in shamanic practice and totemism, and entails transformation into a different f o r m, precipitated by an altered state of consciousness within the shaman, aided by substances, rhythmic driving, and the like:
“[S]hamanism and hypnosis … use … the same dissociative state of consciousness, which in shamanism is referred to as the shamanic journey, or ecstatic flight, and in hypnosis is called the hypnotic trance, or simply trance. Neurophysiological and empirical evidence support the view that the shamanic journey achieved without the use of hallucinogenic substances, that is, with the aid of musical instrumentation, chanting, and similar phenomena, elicits the same EEG profile as the hypnotic trance state. In addition, experiential phenomena characteristic of the shaman’s ecstatic flight, such as shapeshifting, contact with imaginal agents, and the like, can likewise be achieved in hypnotic trance” (Walter).
For this entry, shapeshifting is one conscious entity shifting into another entity who is, by necessity, conscious to some degree. We find shapeshifters from stories that span the world and millennia — such as the character of Merlin from Arthurian Legend:
“In the Arthurian cycle, the wizard Merlin enchanted Uther Pendragon, making him look like the husband of Igraine so that she would gladly sleep with him. Merlin knew through augury that this mating would conceive the child who would later become King Arthur. One tool for accomplishing such shapeshifting was the spell known as fith-fath, used to transform one object into another and also to confer invisibility.” (472, Walter)
(I just really enjoy the word fith-fath)
In the Cherokee tradition, there’s the story of the “Stone Coat,” a monster covered with scaly armor from head to toe who could take human form; Stone Coat ate the livers of his victims while in the shape of an old woman, after puncturing their skulls with a crooked finger (136, Young). Stone Coat took the form of an orphan, who then ate other children’s livers, and was subsequently banned from town. Knowing Stone Coat is approaching, 7 menstruating women lay along the path in wait — he vomits blood crossing them, and, knowing he is dying, asks the people to build a fire and burn him. As he burned, he sang songs, songs that eventually became traditional Cherokee songs; “His death, he said, would unleash disease in the world, but the songs he taught them would cure it.”
In the case of Old Norse, with regards to Berserkers, shapeshifting more closely approximates a shared state of consciousness generated among animal cultists, leading to murder and rape under the influence of rage:
“It is proposed by some authors that the berserkers drew their power from the bear and were devoted to the bear cult, which was once widespread across the northern hemisphere … To “go berserk” was to “hamask”, which translates as “change form”, in this case, as with the sense “enter a state of wild fury.”
In Asia, the kitsune (🇯🇵), huli jing (🇨🇳), or kumiho (🇰🇷) are mythical foxes with 9 tails, that are at least 1,000-years old and have attained the boon of shapeshifting. These creatures are known for turning into young women who eat the hearts or livers of young men. In Korea, the kumiho is always malignant, while the Japanese and Chinese variants are morally ambiguous. Across cultures, if a kitsune can last 1,000 days without killing or eating a human, they can become fully human.
There are myriad reasons why Solaris is a unique shapeshifter experience, considering shapeshifting so often relies on either mythical entities with mythical powers, or altered states. With Solaris, we have an “entity” who can never be perceived directly, and we never learn how Solaris does what it does — Lem intentionally chose an ocean as to avoid personification and thus satisfaction of “First Contact.” Solaris creates an experience of True Alienation — because Solaris can “[see] into the deepest recesses of human minds and then [bring] their dreams to life,” but the observer knows that wish-fulfillment is impossible, making the experience of Solaris a deeply disturbing one which highlights the limits of our physical systems and of our human comprehension.
We never come to understand the intent of the manifestations that haunt the crew observing Solaris, though later in the book, Kris ventures out onto the planet itself for the first time ever, after Harey has finally died indefinitely of her own accord; This experience changes his perception of the planet itself, realizing it is actually slightly timid, if not a bit naive, observing and reacting to new information, interacting momentarily with Kris’ hand. In the absence of understanding, there was forgiveness of the planet itself, and the psychological torment endured by Kris and the simulacras.
Often, whether in literature about shamanic rituals or on galaxy-🧠 backwater forums, you will find discussion of shapeshifting paired with possession. Shapeshifting and possession are parallel phenomena, though possession is internal. Harey is both real and not real simultaneously; Harey knows she is and knows she isn’t; and Harey can never be far away from Kris, at least in the beginning. If Kris is not visible to Harey, she will enter a fugue state until she is reunited with Kris again, at times causing herself fatal physical harm to remove obstacles to him — this possession “reveals” Harey to truly be Solaris itself, her body receiving a hard reset via near-death experiences.
In the beginning of the novel, Harey has a truly amnesiac response to notions of “the past” — she quickly creates an excuse for her behavior or her origins whenever she materializes on the station. As time goes on, Harey noticeably becomes perturbed by her inability to know herself and comes to realize that she is not “Harey”at all. As opposed to following the natural progression of a developing consciousness, arguably going from tabula rasa “nothing” to “something,” Harey goes from believing she is “something” to knowing she is “nothing,” a figment created by the parsed memories of another living being, in a way mirroring terrestrial Harey’s timeline.
Solaris functions as the embodiment of what Rudolf Otto called the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans; the numinous, the unknown. Under electron microscope examination, blood samples from simulacras are devoid of electrons, instead being composed of neutrinos, and a specialized machine is ultimately needed to kill Harey at the end of the book because of this. Nothing like Solaris has ever been seen before, let alone conceived of by human minds, and when 106 members of the space station die in one freak accident while exploring a spontaneous formation on Solaris long before Kris ever arrives, humans subject it to nukes in “retaliation”. Humans had a stronger desire to destroy the unknown than to allow the unknown to exist at all. But Solaris was seemingly unscathed, and afterwards, public interest in Solaris waned, and the simulacras began to appear onboard the station.
What makes the unknown of Solaris more exaggerated is its observation, even experimentation, on the crew. It is always learning about You — You cannot learn about It. And we can never know if it is learning from its experimenting, if its experimenting is leading to something, some conclusion, at all. It becomes a true black mirror, reflecting back at the crew that which has psychically harmed or affected them the most to try to understand that hurt, because hurt sticks the most :’ ).
Very often in shapeshifter stories, the concluding action is to kill the shapeshifter because it is deemed malevolent. Shapeshifting is obscure, it is dark, and it is unknowable except to those shapeshifters with access to it. Shapeshifting physicalizes the Shadow, and conceptualizes the existential chicken-and-egg of knowing decay, death and rebirth are inevitable, just maybe not in the ways we’d hoped — bask in the Shadow and temper the compulsion to kill the darkness.
Bibliography:
Lem, Stanisław. “Solaris,” Walker, 1964.
Walter, Mariko, and Eva Jane Neumann. “Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture,” ABC-CLIO, 2004.
Young, William A. “Quest for Harmony: Native American Spiritual Traditions,” Hackett Pub. Co., 2006.
& Wikipedia lul
