ABSTRACT

A discourse on violence animates and permeates shamanic worldviews, ideology and practices. This chapter explores the structural and systemic dimensions of violence in shamanic cultures from the Himalaya, as expressed through myths and folk tales. It presents a story collected by Hitchcock and analysed by Iltis which illustrates the underlying role violence has in actually making processes of creation and transformation possible and it is about the first Shaman and the Nine Witch Sisters, and it was collected in an area inhabited mainly by Chetri and Magar in Nepal. To become a shaman, one has to die, more or less metaphorically. Insanity, hallucinations, visions of death, dialogs with ancestors and abduction by powerful beings of the forests are the most common paths a shaman has to deal with before they can claim to be a full-fledged shaman. In Nepal and Sikkim, another set of initiations is characterised by the direct intervention of the ban jhankri, the forest shaman.