Medicine Man

The shaman or medicine man is mainly concerned with the fate of the individual soul, its preparation for death, its protection after death, and its protection against states of possession by ghosts and demons… He can do this because during his own initiation he has suffered such states of possession and found ways of curing himself. The initiation experience of such shamans and medicine men coincides with what we now call the process of individuation.

Von Franz identifies the medicine man’s authority as grounded in his own initiatory suffering and self-cure, and explicitly equates that initiatory experience with the individuation process — making the medicine man the prehistoric prototype of the analytical psychotherapist.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the primitive magician, the medicine man, or the shaman is not only a sick man; he is, above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.

Eliade establishes the defining paradox of the medicine man: the very psychological disturbance that marks his vocation is the material he must master, and his authority derives entirely from having achieved that self-mastery.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In every primitive tribe we find the medicine man in the center of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least that h

Campbell, citing Róheim, presents the provocative thesis that the medicine man’s centrality in primitive society is inseparable from his psychopathological character — a claim that frames the depth-psychological debate about whether healers are distinguished from the disturbed by degree or by kind.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

An effort was made to evade the unavoidable tragedy of the king having to die from time to time by doubling the power, that is, by having a medicine man and a king. The medicine man is not so much involved in the earthly activities of organization, for his task is to cope with the immediacy of the religious experience.

Von Franz theorizes the structural division between king and medicine man as a socio-religious solution to the problem of power and renewal, with the medicine man holding the living interface with numinous experience while the king administers collective order.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The archaic doctor was the medicine man… medicine men were always regarded as powerful figures who did not hesitate to resort to any means in order to retain this power. The medicine man’s power, and lust for power, was linked to the fact that he was not only a doctor but a priest in contact with higher forces.

Guggenbuhl-Craig grounds the analysis of power in the helping professions in the archaic medicine man, whose dual role as healer and priest made the conflation of healing authority with domination a structural temptation from the very beginning.

Guggenbuhl-Craig, Adolf, Power in the Helping Professions, 1971thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The candidate returns to life, but for some time behaves like a lunatic. The Iruntarinia, which are invisible to other human beings except medicine men, then carry him to his village… he learns the secrets of the profession from other medicine men, especially the use of the fragments of quartz that the Iruntarinia placed in his body.

Eliade documents the concrete initiatory procedure by which a medicine man is made among the Aranda — involving symbolic death, dismemberment, organ replacement, and a period of apparent madness — underscoring that the role is constituted through ordeal rather than merely assumed.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

One who wishes to become a medicine man lights a fire and burns fat, thus attracting two spirits called Minnungarra. These approach and encourage the candidate, assuring him that they will not completely kill him. First of all they make him insensible, and in the usual way cut him open and take out all his organs, which are then replaced.

Eliade provides another ethnographic instance of the initiatory death-and-restoration template that defines the medicine man’s vocation, reinforcing the cross-cultural consistency of symbolic dismemberment as a precondition for healing authority.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The whole group ceases to carry on the magical rite, which becomes the province of a class of medicine-men; the specialized Kouretes, as we have seen, supplant the whole body of Kouroi. Finally the power is lodged in an individual, a head medicine-man, a king whose functions are at first rather magical than political.

Harrison traces the historical-social evolution from collective magical participation to the specialized medicine man and eventually to the sacred king, locating the medicine man as the pivotal transitional figure in the differentiation of religious from political authority.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the next evening a medicine man hid on the path which led out of the wood, and waited for the monster with his bow and arrow. When darkness fell it came, uttering cries… Then the medicine man shot it between the eyes with his arrow and the monster fell to the ground dead.

Von Franz uses a fairy-tale/mythic narrative to illustrate the medicine man’s specific social function as the one equipped — by virtue of his initiated status — to confront and neutralize demonic forces that threaten the community.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

One must be wounded to become a healer. This is the local image of a universal mythological motif, which is described in Eliade’s book about the initiation of medicine men and shamans. Nobody becomes either one or the other without first having been wounded.

Von Franz, drawing on Eliade, articulates the wounded-healer principle as the universal precondition for the medicine man’s role, linking archaic initiatory wounding to both mythological motifs and the psychology of the analyst.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Nobody becomes either one or the other without first having been wounded: either cut open

In a parallel formulation, von Franz reiterates that the medicine man’s authority is inseparable from the wound — physical, psychic, or symbolic — that initiates his vocation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

There are still Bantu tribes where there is a constant power struggle between the smith of the village and the medicine man. Those two still fight each other for power… the smith still has the role of the older medicine man and therefore is still sought after and partly looked up to by people who want magical help.

Von Franz documents the historically attested rivalry between smith and medicine man in Bantu cultures, using it to illuminate the broader question of how spiritual leadership and technical mastery competed and intersected in archaic societies.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Mythical heroes and medicine men ascend to these celestial beings by using, among other things, the rainbow.

Eliade places medicine men within the cosmological framework of axis mundi symbolism, identifying their ascent via the rainbow as an expression of their mediating role between earthly and celestial planes.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Eliade has stressed the discipline and skill of the ‘professional’ shaman, whose formative crisis can be likened to the initiation into other religious vocations. He feels that the shaman was separated from the group by ‘the intensity of his religious experience.’

McNiff, via Eliade, argues against reductive psychopathological readings of the medicine man/shaman, insisting on the professional discipline and religious intensity that distinguish the genuine healer from the merely disturbed.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Perceiving the shaman as an archetypal figure offers us something distinctly different. This perspective does not in… Shaman has become a cross-cultural term that gives a common name to indigenous healers throughout the world.

McNiff proposes that the medicine man/shaman is most productively understood not as a literal cultural role to be imitated but as an archetypal figure whose significance for depth psychology and art therapy is precisely its universality.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

if he knows someone who is supposed to be a shaman or a medicine man, or a priest, then he goes to him and accepts his interpretation, or he can remain independent and build up his own interpretation.

Von Franz briefly positions the medicine man as the traditional interpretive authority for dream and visionary experience in primitive communities, contrasting this with the modern possibility of autonomous self-interpretation.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The medicine man of the Semang is called hala or halak, a term also e

Eliade notes the ethnographic nomenclature for the medicine man among the Semang, situating the role within Southeast Asian shamanic traditions as part of his comparative global survey.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →