Shamans

Shamans

THE NATURE AND UNIVERSALITY OF THE SHAMAN

ASPECTS OF SHAMANIC PRACTICE

VISIONARY TECHNIQUES EMPLOYED FOR SUPERNATURAL ENGAGEMENT

SHAMANISM AND HEALING: PSYCHOINTEGRATION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Shamans represent humanity’s most ancient forms of healing, spirituality, and community ritual. In Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964), Mircea Eliade characterized the shaman as someone who enters ecstasy to interact with spirits on behalf of the community. Although some have challenged his suggestion of the universality of shamanism, the cross-cultural research of Michael Winkelman has established the universal validity of the concept of the shaman, as well as the characteristics of Shamans, particularly their differences with respect to other types of magico-religious practitioners. In Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing (2000), Winkelman illustrates how the cross-cultural similarities in shamans relate to humans’ evolved psychology. Shamanism was an important evolution of human culture and consciousness and created practices to expand ancient primate activities for ritual healing and group integration.

THE NATURE AND UNIVERSALITY OF THE SHAMAN

While shamans and priests are both religious practitioners, they differ in many basic ways. Shamans enter into a direct relationship with the spiritual world, for example, while priests mediate with respect to deities. Winkelman’s research, particularly in Shamans, Priests, and Witches: A Cross-Cultural Study of Magico-Religious Practitioners (1992), provides empirical evidence for these differences: Shamans of hunter-gatherer societies reflect biological adaptations to an evolved psychology involving altered states of consciousness (ASC), while priests reflect adaptations to the social leadership needs of agricultural groups.

Unlike priests who generally acquire their positions by virtue of social position in class or kinship ranks, the shaman is thought to be chosen by the spirits. Shamans acquire their special status through experiences of the spirit world. While most people in shamanic cultures may deliberately seek contact with the spirit world in a vision quest, only a few will have the benefit of being chosen by the spirits for special experiences and powers. Spirit-world experiences occur spontaneously in illness, hallucinations, dreams, and visions, and they are further induced through vision quests involving prolonged fasts; the ingestion of emetics, tobacco, and hallucinogen drugs; and other arduous techniques that provoke profound alterations of consciousness, which are interpreted as entry into the spirit world. Ritual inductions of spirit-world experiences generally employ drums, rattles, and other percussion, as well as singing and chanting.

The universals of human culture associated with shamanism involve the use of techniques for altering consciousness to produce an experience of interacting with the spirit world. These experiences are key to providing healing and information for the community. The altered states of consciousness associated with shamanism are a human universal derived from human biology, reflecting extraordinary aspects of normal systemic reactions of the brain and nervous system in maintaining homeostasis, or internal balance (Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1992; Winkelman 2000). The psychiatrist Arnold Mandell has characterized this neurobiological transcendence in terms of activation of the serotonergic linkages between the limbic (emotional) brain and the R-Complex (behavioral) brain (1980). This activation produces strong slow-wave (theta, 3-6 cycles per second) brain discharges that induce synchronized brain waves across the levels of the brain and between the frontal hemispheres.

The particular form of altered consciousness associated with shamanism is called a soul journey, soul flight, or some other similar term referring to the departure of some aspect of the self, particularly one’s soul or spirit, from the body in order to journey to the spirit world. This shamanic soul journey is distinct from the possession experiences associated with the altered states of consciousness of more complex societies. Possession involves experiences in which a person’s sense of personal consciousness and volition is replaced by the controlling influences of a spirit entity who possesses the person’s body and controls it (Bourguignon 1976). This divine control of one’s person is not typically associated with shamanic practice. The shaman remains aware of self during the soul journey, while possessed people typically report a lack of awareness of the experience following possession. Winkelman has integrated cross-cultural and interdisciplinary explanations that suggest important influences on the nature and form of altered states of consciousness from a variety of dietary, social, political, and ritual practices. The shaman’s awareness during the soul journey reflects the active engagement in altered states through early ritual practices, while the possessed person’s sense of external dominance by the possessing entity reflects influences external to the self, such as endocrine imbalances from nutritional deficiencies and dissociate experiences induced by oppressive social conditions.

ASPECTS OF SHAMANIC PRACTICE

Shamans have additional universal characteristics that differentiate them from the priests and possessed mediums of more complex societies. Cross-culturally, shamans are characterized as charismatic leaders whose community rituals generally involve healing and divination. Other characteristics of shamans are:

• They undergo an altered state of consciousness (ASC), characterized as a “soul journey.”
• They perform rituals involving chanting, music, drumming, and dancing.
• They have had initiatory death-and-rebirth experiences and guardian spirit encounters.
• They have close relationships with animals in control of spirits and development of personal powers.
• They use therapeutic processes to recover lost souls, defined as the separation of some vital aspect of personal essence due to attacks by spirits and sorcerers.

Shamans typically engage the entire local community in all-night ceremonies. During hours of dancing, drumming, and chanting, the shaman may dramatically recount mythological histories and enact struggles in the spirit world. Shamans also have the capacity to engage in sorcery and malevolent magic to harm others.

VISIONARY TECHNIQUES EMPLOYED FOR SUPERNATURAL ENGAGEMENT

Shamans use rituals to induce the altered state of consciousness (ASC) typified in a soul journey, where a spiritual aspect departs the body and travels to the spirit world. The ASC is typically produced through drumming and dancing to the point of collapse (or deliberate repose), and it may be potentiated by dietary and sexual restrictions and medicinal plants. The overall physiological dynamics of ASC induction involve excitation until exhaustion, which induces the relaxation response, a natural recuperation process. The shaman’s ASC includes: a death-and-rebirth experience, producing a self-transformation; a flight to the lower, middle, and upper levels of the spirit world, reflecting transformations of consciousness; and personal transformation into an animal, enabling the shaman to travel and use special powers.

The shamanic ASC stimulates the reptilian and paleomammalian levels of the brain, and the associated preverbal processes. The ASC synchronizes diverse brain regions with theta brain wave discharges, which are produced by serotonergic linkages that propel these discharges from the brain stem and limbic areas into the frontal cortex. This produces an integration of lower brain processes into consciousness; an interhemispheric synchronization of the frontal cortex; and a synthesis of emotion, thought, and behavior. ASCs induce information integration, social bonding, stress reduction, and healing through enhancement of visual representation faculties. Humans have a visual symbolic system utilized in the dream mode of consciousness and illustrated in the typically visual (as opposed to verbal) material manifested in dreaming. This visual presentational symbolism (as opposed to the verbal representational system) provides a medium for manifestation of information from the preverbal levels of the unconscious. Winkelman (2000, 2002) discusses how shamanic rituals elicited and integrated this symbolic capacity to produce a new level of mental evolution underlying the development of the modern cultural capacity during the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition approximately 40,000 years ago.

Shamanism focuses on internal mental images, evoking them through ASC and ritual practices for integrating dream processes, particularly overnight ritual activities. Shamanic visions engage psychobiological communication processes that integrate unconscious psychophysio-logical information with affective and cognitive levels. Shamanic images provide analysis, synthesis, and planning through integrating the informational and personal processes associated with dreaming, a visual symbolic system of self-representations involving the paleomammalian brain. Shamanic traditions recognize this use of the dream capacity in terms such as dream time. This process engages ASC induction activities that produce theta waves and induce awareness of this emotionally salient material. This integration of normally unconscious content into conscious processes produces a sense of interconnectedness and transpersonal healing experiences.

SHAMANISM AND HEALING: PSYCHOINTEGRATION

Shamans are the preeminent healers of premodern societies. Their roles as healers include medical and psychiatric functions, addressing physical disease as well as a variety of psychological conditions. Shamanism provides mechanisms for inducing healing through systemic psychological integration using ritual, symbols, and ASC. Shamans’ practices represent the evolution of a “holistic imperative,” a drive toward more integrated levels of consciousness (Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1992). Shamanic traditions produce integrative responses that synchronize divergent aspects of human cognition and identity through several mechanisms, including: (1) using ASC, ritual, and symbols to activate synchronizing brain processes; (2) the stimulation of processes of lower-brain structures and subconscious aspects of personality and self; and (3) incorporating people into community rituals that strengthen social support and identity. These therapeutic processes still have relevance in the modern world, as evidenced by the modern resuscitation of the ancient shamanic practices.

SEE ALSO Animism; Magic; Mental Health; Mental Illness; Miracles; Purification; Religion; Rituals

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bourguignon, Erika. 1976. Possession. San Francisco: Chandler and Sharpe.

Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. New York: Bollingen Foundation.

Laughlin, Charles, Jr., John McManus, and Eugene d’Aquili. 1992. Brain, Symbol, and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mandell, Arnold. 1980. Toward a Psychobiology of Transcendence: God in the Brain. In The Psychobiology of Consciousness, eds. Julian Davidson and Richard Davidson. New York: Plenum.

Winkelman, Michael. 1986. Magico-Religious Practitioner Types and Socioeconomic Conditions. Behavior Science Research 20 (1-4): 17-46.

Winkelman, Michael. 1990. Shaman and Other “Magico-Religious” Healers: A Cross-Cultural Study of Their Origins, Nature, and Social Transformations. Ethos 18 (3): 308-352.

Winkelman, Michael. 1992. Shamans, Priests, and Witches: A Cross-Cultural Study of Magico-Religious Practitioners. Anthropological Research Paper No. 44. Tempe: Arizona State University.

Winkelman, Michael. 2000. Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.

Winkelman, Michael. 2002. Shamanism and Cognitive Evolution. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 12 (1): 71-101.

Winkelman, Michael. 2004. Shamanism As the Original Neurotheology. Zygon Journal of Religion and Science 39 (1): 193-217.

Michael Winkelman