Shamanism

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Shamanism

The term "shamanism" is of Russian-Tungusic origin. Most generally, a shaman is a man or a woman who acts as a mediator between the spirit and physical worlds. Shamanism as a religious concept and practice came under the focus of Western eyes in northern Asia and Siberia, where it had relatively precise meanings associated with "magic" and trancelike states of human ecstasy. Ecstatic states that enable mystical experience and insight are thought to be a special and definitive characteristic of shamanism.

Traditional shamans were leaders of religious groups and wielded powerful spiritual gifts, including effective utilization of sacred fire, and the practice of magical, mystical flights wherein the spirit (and sometimes the body, too) defies the known laws of physics and travels to destinations far and uncharted. In fact, the mark of a shaman vis-à-vis other spiritual mediators is that the shaman is believed to enjoy the capacity to separate his soul from his body at will, allowing the former to travel to destinations that are otherwise restricted to physically embodied visitors.

Perhaps the central distinguishing factor of shamanism is a shaman's deft relationship with the spiritual world. Counted among the types of spirits over which shamans hold dominion are spirits of the dead, demons, and spirits that are believed to be found in nature, such as those common to rivers and animals, for example. Shamans control their helping spirits, though at times they can be possessed by them. Shamans often have conflicts and bouts with their spirits. The shaman often deploys the aid of spirits in divination, clairvoyance, and prophecy (the accurate foretelling of future events, or the ability to know and articulate with accuracy past events in a person's life). Shamans rely on the aid of helping spirits to divine events—past and present—in the lives of people who seek their aid. Although not an exclusively expert province of shamanism, healing with the aid of helping spirits is also a practice that marks shamanic techniques. People seek the healing aid of shamans for ailments of all types, including physical disease, discomfort caused by curses and Witchcraft, and for familial, social, or psychological problems. Seekers also come to shamans for extra help when in need of special favors from the spirit world.

In their oracular efforts and functions as benevolent healers, shamans typically cultivate efficacious relationships with animals. In Native North American tribes of the Southwest, for example, an owl is often the embodiment of a shaman's helping spirit. In Native North American lore, an owl manifests powers of warning and protection that aid the shaman in his or her work. More generally, a shaman is marked early in his or her life by a close relationship with animals. Animals are drawn to the shaman, and even wild beasts behave as tame and nurturing friends when in the presence of a shaman. The extraordinary affection displayed by animals toward any one individual is often the sign that a person has been "called" to shamanism.

Such a calling, or the trajectory to archaic religious or sacred specialists, has been the subject of much study in the history of religions. Drawing from the work of Mircea Eliade, David Carrasco has delineated a pattern of shamanic calling and initiation that begins with: (1) a sensitive and troubled individual who (2) receives sacred knowledge through fantastic dreams and visions plus formal instructions under the (3) guidance of a great shaman, during which the initiate (4) forms relationships with helping spirits, usually in the form of animals, which enable the seeker to (5) grasp a deep truth and techniques that enable him or her to renew contact with that wisdom and (6) obtain the powers to heal varieties of sickness and to attack and kill enemies.

This pattern of initiation usually involves a great ordeal, sometimes experienced during a sickness that takes the novice to the brink of death, and introduces him or her to the terrors of finitude and spiritual forces. During this ordeal, which often includes ecstatic dreams, the hero is tested. He or she is symbolically killed and reborn into the vocation of singer, healer, and poet. This ordeal involves face-to-face encounters with terrible monsters, scenarios of chaos that may include visualizing the dismemberment and destruction of one's own body, community, and cosmos. This total crisis emerges into a new integration of the self and the acquisition of sacred knowledge that is to be used to benefit the community. This is the meaning and purpose of such religious ecstasy. Thus shamans are typically distinguished by the way they go about obtaining shamanic powers—through personal calling and experience that enable them to manipulate spiritual powers for the aid of a community.

In Native North American Indian tribes shamanic functions are common to most if not all tribal members as each seeks to cultivate special relationships to helper spirits, and with the animals. What distinguishes shamans is the intensity of shamanic powers, especially shamanic ecstasy, and the degree of their knowledge of myth and ritual. This degree of knowledge is particularly relevant in regard to rites of passage, hunting, warfare, and healing. Often a medicine man of a particular tribe displays shamanic techniques.

Euroamericans, too, have displayed shamanic tendencies, beginning particularly in the nineteenth century, with the Fox sisters in upstate New York. In 1848 the Fox sisters convinced others that they could communicate with spirits of the deceased. They staged elaborate séances in which seekers came to receive messages from beyond the grave that were communicated by a simple system of knocks. This practice of mediumship spread rapidly and gave rise to American Spiritualism. Similarly, and also in the nineteenth century, a Frenchman known as Allen Kardec developed a system for communicating with spirits and deploying them in the service of divination and healing; he elaborated this process into the religion of Spiritism. Spiritism spread throughout Latin and North America.

More recently, in 1968, anthropologist Carlos Castaneda published what he claimed to be a documentary account of his apprenticeship into shamanic techniques under the tutelage of Don Juan, a Yaqui elder and medicine man. Castaneda's work implicitly opened up Yaqui shamanism for a generation of Americans who were disenchanted with traditional Christian religions and bent on experimenting with fresh religious myths and rituals.

Since the 1980s at least this American impulse for religious seeking and experimentation has unfolded into what has been called the "New Age." New Age devotees eschew traditional Euroamerican religions in favor of practices derived from Eastern religions and from Native North Americans. A preferred religious practice of the New Age is shamanism. This penchant for shamanism is evinced by the burgeoning literature on the topic, including and especially Michael Harner's The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing (1980). If Carlos Castaneda implied that just about any American could become a shaman if he or she followed the right path, Harner promises as much to his American New Age audience. Looking to Castaneda, Harner provides a handbook of sorts, with a step-by-step guide to shamanism and healing.

Though not recognized as such, today shamanic practices are part of the everyday fabric of American life. It is hardly possible to visit any American city or small town without spotting a palm or card reader. Spiritual healing, psychic phenomena, astrology, and tarot specialties are profitable cottage industries in today's religious economy. Additionally, spiritual healing and communication with the spirit world are becoming increasingly mainstream in forms of American Christian evangelicalism. Shamanism today permeates many aspects of the collective religious imagination of American society.