spirit communication
Shamanic divination — the practice by which the shaman consults spirits, ancestral powers, or cosmic forces to obtain knowledge unavailable through ordinary perception — occupies a structurally significant place in the depth-psychology corpus, principally through Mircea Eliade’s foundational phenomenology of the séance. Eliade demonstrates that divination is not an incidental feature of shamanism but one of its constitutive functions: the shaman is, by definition, a master of the hidden, whose commerce with spirits yields oracular knowledge, diagnoses of illness, and revelation of cosmic will. The corpus traces specific techniques — oracular bones, drumming-as-summons, trance-induced soul-flight, ventriloqual spirit-voices, dialogue reproduced in song — across Siberian, Arctic, Central Asian, Norse, Tibetan, and Oceanic traditions, showing both the structural unity and the regional variation of the practice. Beyond Eliade, the passages suggest tensions between authenticity and simulation (Bogoras’s ventriloquism hypothesis), between archaic ecstatic forms and their later ritualized degradations, and between the epistemological status of spirit-knowledge and its psychological reinterpretation. Campbell extends the divinatory register into mythology and cosmology, while Abram locates a cognate function in the animate-landscape hermeneutics of oral peoples. The term thus serves as a crossing point between archaic religious practice, depth-psychological theory of the unconscious, and philosophy of perception.
the shaman is also employed as a master of divination. This is practiced either by oracular bones or by a shamanic séance. This gift comes to him from his relations with the spirits.
Eliade identifies divination as a core shamanic office, explicitly grounded in the shaman’s ongoing relationship with spirits and performed through two complementary modes: material oracular technique and full trance séance.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
In his song he reproduces his dialogue with the spirits, and its intensity follows the dramatic interest of the conversation.
Eliade’s eyewitness-sourced account of the Samoyed séance demonstrates that shamanic divination proceeds through a ritually enacted dialogue with spirits, rendered audible to the community through song.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
Through the shaman’s voice the spirits of the dead converse with the audience. If the séances abound in parapsychological phenomena, the shamanic trance proper has become increasingly rare.
Eliade, drawing on Bogoras, documents the séance as a medium for spirit-communication while registering both its parapsychological claims and its historical decline into simulation.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
The Lapp shamans also use their drums in divination. The Tungus practice a sort of limited divination, which consists in throwing the shamanic drumstick into the air; its position after falling answers the question asked.
Eliade catalogues cross-cultural instrumental techniques — drum and drumstick — through which shamanic divination operates, underscoring the material mediation of spirit-inquiry across Siberian and Arctic traditions.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis
To identify the author of the trouble, the shaman incarnates his familiar spirit and pretends to sleep (a poor imitation of the shamanic trance) or attempts to evoke and embody the spirit that is troubling the patient.
Eliade traces the divinatory function within healing séances among Tungus groups, showing how spirit-identification constitutes both diagnosis and the opening of curative action.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
This rope, which in those days connected earth with heaven and by which the dead ascended to the celestial dwelling of the dMu gods, was replaced, among other Bon priests, by the rope of divination.
Eliade identifies in Tibetan Bon tradition a mythological substitution in which the primordial sky-rope linking worlds is ritually replaced by a rope of divination, revealing divination’s cosmological function as restored axis mundi.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
invocations of the spirits; the drum — which, it has been noted, bore drawings similar to those on Altaic drums — played a great part in producing the trance. On divination by means of the drum, see ibid., pp. 148–49.
Eliade documents the drum as the primary shamanic instrument for spirit-invocation and trance-induction, noting comparative pictographic evidence and cross-referencing Scandinavian and Lapp divination practices.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
it is the shaman’s visionary power, which is able to penetrate both the past and the future. The shaman, furthermore, has bird and animal familiars who assist him in his task.
Campbell, citing Ksenofontov, frames shamanic divination as a specific visionary faculty — temporal penetration of past and future — supported by animal familiar spirits summoned at séances.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
Odin is also the institutor of necromancy. On his horse Sleipnir, he enters Hel and bids… The Valkyries are psychopomps and sometimes play the role of the ‘celestial wives’ or ‘spirit wives’ of the Siberian shamans.
Eliade situates Norse necromancy within the comparative shamanic framework, treating Odin’s descent to Hel and the Valkyries as mythological cognates of Siberian spirit-communication and soul-retrieval.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
It is to this Kingdom of Shadows that the shaman descends to seek the patient’s soul. But he goes there on another occasion too: to ‘steal’ a soul from there and cause it to be born here on earth.
Eliade’s account of Yukagir cosmology demonstrates that shamanic soul-flight to the realm of the dead functions as both retrieval and fertility divination, the shaman acting as negotiator between living and ancestral domains.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
Later this undulating garment was stolen by the jackal, an animal whose movements, ever since, have disclosed the prophetic speech of the world to seers and diviners.
Abram’s phenomenological reading of Dogon cosmology presents divination as the recovery of a primordial animate language dispersed through the natural world, offering a perceptual-ecological counterpart to Eliade’s ecstatic model.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
uses the ‘language of the spirits’ during séances; and the shamanic chants of the Dusun (North Borneo) are in secret language. According to Carib tradition, the first pzaz [shaman] was a man who, hearing a song rise from a stream, dived boldly in.
Eliade documents the role of secret or spirit-language in shamanic séances globally, framing the acquisition of spirit-speech as the founding act of divinatory practice.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
The I Ching is the classic, channel or loom of I… a way of dealing with trouble. It articulates possible responses to fate, necessity or calamity — that which ‘crosses’ your path.
Ritsema and Karcher present the I Ching as a divinatory system oriented toward fate and psyche, providing a comparative East Asian framework for understanding divination as articulation of the unforeseen rather than shamanic spirit-consultation proper.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994aside
A revelation of the invisible in an intelligible form leads us to the astrologer. How can the invisible and unbelievable planetary tra[jectories speak to us]… we need instruction in the art of seeing.
Hillman gestures toward a depth-psychological continuity between archaic divinatory sight and modern symbolic interpretation, suggesting that the divinatory impulse survives in any discipline that renders invisible psychic forces intelligible.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside