Roy wrote:

>Severen Schafer is advertised to be on the faculty of the Paris School of
>Medicine. He appears to be highly respected in the instincto community
>(people tend to recommend his book at a "first read" to people interested anopsology.)
>If he is on the medical teaching faculty, his academic credentials are
>are most probably also impeccable. I really enjoyed reading his book, and
>got a lot more out of it than Guy-Claude's Manger Vrai. Therefore I would be very
>interested if anybody has any evidence to refute Severen's claim on raw eggs.

Hi Roy! I found out from a fellow veg-rawer that Severen is dead for a few
years now. Heart failure. Melisa and I spent many hours talking with him
when we went to Paris in 1988 (or was it 89?). He taught General Semantics
at the med school, and did translation work as well, since the teaching
wasn't full-time. He was not instincto, though implies (lies?) it in the
book. He told me he was 100% for a time when researching the book. Folks at
the Chateau quipped, "Maybe for a couple days. Maybe." Indeed, he asked us
to bring him some Skippy Chunky peanut butter which he was unable to get
easily in Paris at the time! And we brought him some snickers bars from a
Minnesota women who had been to the Chateau earlier. He had a petty big pot
belly at the time.

I got the definite feeling he wasn't respected much by the French instincto
community, for the basic reason that he wasn't willing (able?) to eat
instincto. Further, many feel he didn't give Guy-Claude his due in his book
(whereas Guy-Claude never gives much credit to NH which was taught in Paris
and was not unkown at all; many of the instincto theories are NH verbatum
or a logical extension of them). He expressed frustration that they were on
his case about not being "pure". He claimed that he didn't want it to
become his whole life. Paraphrasing, "What, and live at the Chateau and
have that be everything in my life?! That's not for me." Understand that
Severen was a cafe sort of guy, a seriously capable intellectual. He was at
his prime when bullshitting over coffee and a cigarette. He knew his health
was going downhill and made his choices, like we all do.

As for the merits of his book, they should be judged on their own. His
training in General Semantics and apparently native talent for clear
thought, surely helped him to see that instinctos were on to something and
though the book seems very simply written he worked years on it. The
simplicity is really clarity, in my opinion (check out the writing of Neil
Postman to sample another writer well-versed in General Semantics). I can't
imagine a better first book in English to be written by anyone else,
instincto or not. He was very taken aback when he learned that a couple of
instinctos in Africa had trouble with malaria ("...and I wrote they
wouldn't!"). The book more or less flopped and his plans for an instincto
center near Acupulco (sp?) were never realized. (I understand he didn't
much impress the folks he was talking to about this project at the
Pottinger-Price foundation with his nicotine addiction.:() Perhaps he
would've shaped up if the book had led to something, but I doubt it. When
it went "backordered" (as opposed to out of print which Celestial Arts
promised not to do for 30 years!) he was even more bummed, but he gave it a
good shot. Lucky for many of us that he did.

He was the first to bring instincto, Primal, and General Semantics
together, to see that they will probably be right up their with quantum,
relativity, DNA, etc among the big ideas of this century. (He pretty much
"flunked" out of Primal Therapy too, or so he said.)

Have I burst many bubbles regarding Severen, today? ;)

Cheers,
Kirt