shamans

shamans Ethnologists since the nineteenth century have sometimes used the terms ‘shaman’, ‘medicine man’, ‘sorceror’, and ‘magician’ interchangeably to designate individuals, found in all ‘primitive’ societies, who possess magico–religious powers. ‘Shamanism’ has been used to describe a wide variety of practices and beliefs observable in many geographic areas, such as North and Central Asia, the Americas, Indonesia, and Oceania. By extension, the same term is applied in studying the religious history of ‘civilized’ societies such as the Indian, Germanic, and Chinese, all of which have ‘mystical’ or ‘magical’ elements. Yet it is misleading to identify shamanism simply with the ‘primitive elements’ within a religion, for it is a clearly defined and symbolically sophisticated religious phenomenon in itself.

In the strict sense, shamanism is a religious phenomenon of Siberia and Central Asia, where the religious life of society centred on this figure. The word comes to us through Russian, from the Tungusic saman. Shamanism can best be defined as a technique of ecstasy, in which the soul of the shaman leaves the body and journeys through the spirit world. In their trances, shamans are able to communicate with the dead, and with demons, nature spirits, and the elements, without becoming subject to them. They speak secret or otherworldly languages, and, in the soul's ‘magical flight’, they can travel immense distances, ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld. Shamans cure illnesses, accompany the dead to the next world, and serve as mediators between people and the gods. They form a small mystical elite which directs the community's religious life and guards its ‘soul’.

Shamans are of the elect, and have access to a region of the sacred inaccessible to other members of the community. They are persons who stand out in their respective societies by virtue of characteristics that, in modern Europe, represent the signs of a vocation or a religious crisis. They are recruited either by hereditary transmission of shamanic profession, or by spontaneous vocation (‘calling’ or ‘election’). They are taught by ecstatic means, through dreams or trances, or by masters who instruct them in shamanic techniques, mythology, genealogy, secret languages, and the names and functions of spirits.

Initiation may take the form of a public ritual or a private dream or experience. One of the commonest forms of election is when the shaman encounters a divine or semidivine being who appears in a dream, sickness or other circumstance, tells him that he has been ‘chosen’, and incites him to follow a new rule of life. Sometimes the shaman's relation to the initiatory spirit is sexual, and the spirit becomes the shaman's celestial spouse. The spirits associated with a shaman vary in relation and familiarity to him: some are ‘helpers’ or ‘familiars’, whom he controls; others are ‘tutelary’, and teach him; still others are the divine or semidivine beings he conjures during seances.

The secret languages of a shaman are used to communicate with spirits and animal spirits: they are learned from a teacher or through his own efforts, i.e. directly from the spirits. A language often originates in animal or bird cries. The shaman's costume varies widely, and often incorporates animal symbolism (e.g. the feathers of birds, essential for the flight of the soul). The shamanic experience does not take place while shaman is in his everyday, profane dress, but only when he dons his sacred wardrobe.

The shaman is indispensable in any ceremony concerning the experiences of the human soul (which is, for example, inclined to forsake the body in illness). This is why, all through Asia and North America and elsewhere as well (e.g. in Indonesia), the shaman performs the function of doctor and healer. Disease is generally attributed to the soul's having strayed away or been stolen (by the spirits of recently dead people), and treatment consists principally of finding it, capturing it, and forcing it to return to the patient's body. It is the shaman who announces the diagnosis, searches for and finds the patient's fugitive soul, and makes it return to animate the body.

The origin of sickness can also be the intrusion of a magical object into the patient's body or his ‘possession’ by evil spirits: the cure then consists of extracting the harmful object or expelling the demons. This may be accomplished by the shaman ‘sucking’ or seeming to pull out the object, such as a stone or an animal bone, from the afflicted part of the patient, thus removing the cause of the illness.

Shamans are known to possess unusual physical endurance, demonstrated in heavy masturbation, and insensitivity to fire and to knife cuts, and they also perform bodily feats such as escaping from tied ropes. Yet their principal gifts are those of the spirit, which include divination and clairvoyance. The shaman is a healer and a seer because he commands the techniques of ecstasy: his soul can safely abandon his body and roam vast distances before returning to his body, ascend to the sky and descend to the underworld. He knows the roads of extraterrestrial regions: sanctified by initiation, instructed by tutelary spirits, and protected by guardian spirits, he is the only human being able to challenge the dangers of these regions, and venture into a mystical geography.

Certain currents in modern medicine have initiated a renewal of focus on the powers of the imagination to heal the ailments of the body. Traditional shamans are thought to perform cures ‘through the mind’, by various ritualized, symbolic actions designed to dispel sickness by mimetic means. Thus, techniques and phenomona in contemporary medicine such as hypnosis, autogenics, placebo response, and imaging, which stress the effects of mental or emotional states on physical illness or well-being, are occasionally referred to as a twentieth-century Western form of ‘shamanism’.

Natsu Hattori

Bibliography

Achterberg, J. (1985). Imagery in healing: shamanism and modern medicine. New Science Library, Boston.
Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy. (trans. W. R. Trask ). Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

See also healing; magic; possession.