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Greek shaman

Greek shaman

Dodds’s hypothesis — developed in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) — that the archaic Greek world absorbed, through Scythian contact at the Black Sea and through the semi-legendary figures Abaris and Aristeas, a recognizable stratum of shamanistic belief and practice: the separable soul capable of ecstatic flight, the culture-hero who travels between the worlds, the unitary function of philosopher-magician-healer-poet not yet differentiated. The hypothesis is speculative by Dodds’s own admission and has been contested since; it remains the most psychologically fertile single chapter in the book.

Empedocles is Dodds’s paradigm:

If I am right, Empedocles’ [figure] represents not a new but a very old type of personality, the shaman who combines the still undifferentiated functions of magician and naturalist, poet and philosopher, preacher, healer, and public counsellor. After him these functions fell apart. (Dodds 1951)

The Greek shaman, on Dodds’s reading, is the transmission vector by which puritan-psychology — the doctrine of the body as prison, the soul as occult self — enters the Greek stream. Bremmer later refined the comparative-anthropological apparatus on which Dodds drew; the core insight survives: the Orphic-Pythagorean doctrine of the exiled soul is intelligible as cultural transmission from a shamanistic substrate, not as an endogenous Greek invention.

For the Seba tradition, the Greek shaman is the philological counterpart to Jung’s intuition that individuation is continuous with the initiatic patterns Eliade would later catalogue. The figure in whom philosopher and magician are not yet separate is a figure the modern division of labor has erased and whom depth psychology, at its deepest reach, is recovering.

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