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Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
Eliade’s 1951 study defines the shaman as “master of ecstasy” and reconstructs the shamanic vocation across Siberian, North American, South American, Australian, and Southeast Asian cultures. The book is methodologically structural rather than ethnographic; Eliade’s claim is that beneath the cultural variations lies a single ideology of ecstatic ascent, accessible only to certain specialists, and grounded in the cosmology of the three-tiered universe connected by the axis-mundi.
The book’s most consequential move for depth psychology is the account of the shamanic initiatory crisis. Eliade describes the vocation as a “total crisis, which sometimes leads to disintegration of the personality. This psychic chaos is the sign that the profane man is undergoing dissolution and that a new personality is on the verge of birth” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957, summarizing Shamanism). The shaman-to-be is dismembered, eaten by ancestral spirits, reconstituted with new organs; the pattern repeats across unrelated cultures. Jung’s account of the ego’s death-and-rebirth in the individuation process and Neumann’s account of the centroversion crisis both find their ethnographic substrate here.
Eliade distinguishes the shamanic technique from surrounding religious activity: “what for the rest of the community remains a cosmological ideogram, for the shamans (and the heroes, etc.) becomes a mystical itinerary” (Shamanism, 1951). The cosmic pillar the tribe imagines, the shaman climbs. This distinction — ideogram held collectively versus itinerary traveled personally — prefigures the Jungian distinction between the collective unconscious that the culture holds and the individuation path that the individual walks.