Shaman

Throughout the immense area comprising Central and North Asia, the magico-religious life of society centers on the shaman. This, of course, does not mean that he is the one and only manipulator of the sacred, nor that religious activity is completely usurped by him.

Eliade establishes the shaman as the preeminent magico-religious specialist of Central and North Asia while carefully distinguishing him from priests and other sacred functionaries.

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

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we should prefer to emphasize the ecstatic capacity of the shaman as opposed to the priest, and his positive function in comparison with the antisocial activities of the sorcerer. The shaman’s chief function is healing.

Eliade offers his definitive functional taxonomy, positioning the shaman’s ecstatic healing capacity as the criterion that distinguishes him from both priest and sorcerer.

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

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It is only this twofold initiation — ecstatic and didactic — that transforms the candidate from a possible neurotic into a shaman recognized by his particular society.

Eliade insists that the shaman’s psychic crisis acquires legitimacy only through the dual transformation of ecstatic experience and structured didactic initiation — refuting purely pathological readings.

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

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Someone who has not acceded to the depths of the unconscious and seen there ‘the ways of all spirits of sickness’ can hardly possess enough real empathy for the serious psychic suffering of his fellow human beings.

Von Franz transposes the shamanic initiatory descent into a normative criterion for psychotherapeutic competence, warning that the uninitialized practitioner inflicts rather than heals.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993thesis

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Contrary to the standardization of religious traditions maintained by priests, shamanism is tied to the particular personality of the shaman, whose techniques of transcendence relate to the unifying myths and beliefs of the community. This cultivation of individual healing styles characterizes both shamans and contemporary psychotherapists.

McNiff identifies the shaman’s personalised, non-canonical healing style as the structural homology linking indigenous practice to contemporary psychotherapeutic vocation.

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

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the artist and the shaman go to the heart of the inner storm and enact its furies in a way that benefits the individual and the community. The end result is not just emotional catharsis but deepened insight into the nature of human emotion.

McNiff argues that both artist and shaman share a transformative function that goes beyond catharsis to genuine psychological insight, positioning both as cultural healers.

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

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In the present chapter on shamanism, that is to say, we are touching lightly the problem of the mystical experience — which is not a matter of historical but of psychological import.

Campbell frames shamanism as the primary locus for interrogating the psychology of mystical experience, situating it at the intersection of the universal and the culturally particular.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959thesis

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I see the shaman as an archetypal figure, a universal aspect of art and healing that helps to deepen and expand the image of the creative arts therapist. Shaman has become a cross-cultural term that gives a common name to indigenous healers throughout the world.

McNiff explicitly reframes the shaman as a Jungian archetype rather than a literal social role, grounding his application of the term in depth-psychological rather than ethnographic categories.

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

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a future shaman must fall ill and have his body cut in pieces and his blood drunk by the evil spirits. These — which are really the souls of dead shamans — throw his head into a caldron, where it is melted with certain metal pieces that will later form part of his ritual costume.

Eliade documents the initiatory dismemberment vision among the Tungus as the experiential core of shamanic vocation, a symbolic death and reconstitution foundational to the healer’s authority.

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

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riding — as they say — on the sound of his drum, he must sail away, on the wings of trance, to whatever spiritual realm may harbor the soul in question, overwhelm the guardians of that celestial, infernal, or tramontane place, and work swiftly his shamanistic deed of rescue.

Campbell offers a vivid phenomenological account of the shamanic soul-retrieval journey, presenting drumming-induced trance as the technical vehicle for cosmological navigation.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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in every society in which they have been known, the shamans have been the particular guardians and reciters of the chants and traditions of their people. The realm of myth, from which, according to primitive belief, the whole spectacle of the world proceeds, and the realm of shamanistic trance are one and the same.

Campbell identifies the shaman as the custodian of mythological tradition, arguing that the experiential reality of trance is the epistemological source of mythic narrative.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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there is always a hysterical or hysteroid crisis, followed by a period of instruction during which the postulant is initiated by an accredited shaman. Recognition as a shaman is bestowed only by the whole community and only after the aspirant has undergone the initiatory ordeal.

Eliade underscores that community ratification is as constitutive of the shamanic role as the inner crisis, situating the figure within a social ecology of legitimacy.

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

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the essential and strictly personal function of the South American shaman remains healing. It is not always wholly magical in character. The South American shaman, too, knows the medicinal virtues of plants and animals, employs massage.

Eliade demonstrates that shamanic healing integrates empirical botanical knowledge with spiritual intervention, complicating any purely mystical reading of the role.

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

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Of greater interest to me is the idea of the shaman and how things we do today have ancient and deep roots in human experience. In the enactments of the shaman I have found evidence that art and healing are forever united in human experience.

McNiff articulates his foundational thesis that the shaman’s performative enactments constitute historical evidence for the primordial unity of art and therapeutic practice.

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

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The shaman Aua felt a celestial light in his body and brain, which, as it were, proceeded from his whole being; although unobserved by men, it was visible to all the spirits of earth, sky, and sea, and they came to him and became his helpers.

Eliade presents first-person testimony of shamanic illumination, illustrating how the acquisition of helping spirits is experienced as a transformation of the shaman’s entire perceptual being.

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

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The historical changes in the religions of Central and North Asia altered the meaning of the shaman’s ecstatic experience. Descents to the underworld, the struggle against evil spirits, but also the increasingly familiar relations with ‘spirits’ that result in their ‘embodiment’ or in the shaman’s being ‘possessed’ by ‘spirits,’ are innovations.

Eliade argues that core shamanic practices such as possession and underworld descent are historical accretions rather than primordial features, requiring a diachronic reading of the tradition.

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

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if the patient’s soul has been carried off by an evil spirit, the shaman himself is obliged to undertake the journey of recovery, which is far more difficult.

Eliade maps the graduated hierarchy of shamanic soul-retrieval missions, in which direct cosmological travel by the shaman himself constitutes the most demanding therapeutic intervention.

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

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is always by ecstatic journeys that the angakok approaches Takanakapsaluk (Mother of the Sea Beasts) in the depths of the ocean or Sila in the sky. He is, besides, a specialist in magical flight.

Eliade characterises Eskimo shamanism through the defining motif of ecstatic aerial and submarine journey, presenting magical flight as the shaman’s paradigmatic technical competence.

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

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the cause of many séances is illness, for certain spirits are believed to provoke diseases. To identify the author of the trouble, the shaman incarnates his familiar spirit and pretends to sleep.

Eliade details the diagnostic logic of Tungus séances, in which the shaman’s spirit incarnation serves as the primary instrument for identifying the spiritual aetiology of disease.

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

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one becomes what one displays. The wearers of masks are really the mythical ancestors portrayed by their masks. But the same results — that is, total transformation of the individual into something other — are to be expected from the various

Eliade elaborates the shamanic costume’s transformative logic: ritual dress effects an ontological identification with the sacred figure represented, not merely symbolic representation.

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

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The gods decided to give mankind a shaman to combat disease and death, and they sent the eagle. But men did not understand its language; besides, they had no confidence in a mere bird.

The Buryat cosmogonic myth recounted by Eliade establishes the shaman as a divine gift instituted to mediate between gods and humanity in the face of sickness and death.

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

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the séances are public, they cause a certain religious tension in the entire community, and, in the absence of other religious ceremonies, shamanic cures constitute the all-important rite.

Eliade emphasises the communal-ritual dimension of the shamanic séance, showing that healing functions simultaneously as the society’s central religious ceremony.

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

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The introversion of the shamanistic crisis and the break, temporarily, from the local system of practical life lead to a field of experience that in the — represent precisely what Bastian was referring to when he wrote of elementary ideas.

Campbell aligns the shamanic initiatory crisis with Bastian’s elementary ideas, reading the inward turn of the shamanistic crisis as the experiential source of cross-cultural psychological universals.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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The usual manner, however, in which boys and girls become seers is by being summoned through sickness, dreams, or temporary insanity. The sickness or dreams are sent by the sky-spirits or the jungle-spirits.

Eliade documents the cross-cultural pattern of illness and visionary crisis as the initiatory summons to shamanic vocation, extending the phenomenon beyond Siberia to Southeast Asia.

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

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the shaman then sprinkles the skin of the drum and, ‘coming to life,’ relates how the animal of which it was made lived in the forest.

Eliade describes the animation ritual of the shamanic drum, in which the instrument becomes a living participant in the séance — a micro-cosmos restored to its original vitality.

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

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any animal or cosmic object can become a source of power or a guardian spirit. Among the Thompson Indians, for example, water is regarded as the guardian spirit of shamans, warriors, hunters, and fishers.

Eliade illustrates the radical openness of the shaman’s spirit-world, in which any natural entity may serve as a power source, revealing the permeability of the boundary between human and non-human.

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

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Morphologically the future shaman’s initiatory ordeals are of the same order as this great class of passage rites and ceremonies for entering secret societies.

Eliade positions shamanic initiation within the broader morphological family of rites of passage, while noting the difficulty of drawing sharp distinctions between tribal, secret-society, and shamanic initiations.

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

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Erlik has become completely drunk and the shaman laboriously mimes the phases of his drunkenness. The god becomes benevolent, blesses him, promises that the cattle will multiply.

Eliade’s vivid account of the Altaic descent to Erlik’s realm reveals the shaman’s use of theatrical mimesis and ritual intoxication as negotiating strategies within the spirit world.

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

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The soul of the horse goes to the celestial smith, Boshintoi. Nine youths play the parts of Boshintoi’s nine sons, and a man, who incarnates the celestial smith himself, falls into ecstasy.

Eliade documents the convergence of smith and shaman in Buryat ritual, illustrating how the smith’s craft participates in the same ecstatic-cosmological complex as shamanic practice.

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

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Putting on his shamanic costume, the kam sits down on a bench, and while he fumigates his drum — sings: Gifts that no horse can carry, Alas, alas, alas! That no man can lift.

Eliade provides a detailed liturgical account of the Altaic shaman’s preparatory ritual, showing how costume, fumigation, and song collectively constitute the séance’s opening threshold.

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

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The shaman, furthermore, has bird and animal familiars who assist him in his task. ‘The shamans tell us,’ said Samsonov Spiridon, ‘that they have two dogs who are their invisible assistants.’

Campbell records ethnographic testimony on the shaman’s animal familiars, illustrating the concrete relational network of helping spirits that makes shamanic cosmological work possible.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside

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The protection given the Siberian shaman by his ayami resembles, as we saw, the role given to fairies and demigoddesses in the teaching and initiation of heroes.

Eliade connects the shaman’s tutelary female spirit to the broader mythological complex of the Great Mother and matriarchal religious formations, situating the figure in comparative mythological perspective.

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

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even when he takes part in sacrifices, the shaman plays more of a ‘spiritual’ role; he is concerned only with the mystical itinerary of the sacrificed animal. The reason is plain: the shaman knows the road.

Eliade defines the shaman’s role within collective sacrifice as fundamentally psychopomp in character — his authority lies not in ritual action but in knowledge of the soul’s cosmological pathways.

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

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