Shamanism

Shamanism is not, as Weston La Barre comprehensively claims, the origin of religion, but rather of religions in whose decline and fall it certainly plays a highly significant role. By ‘shamanism’ we mean the religious activities of inspired priests or shamans who control cosmic spiritual forces and regularly incarnate them. The term shaman, more familiar in American and continental than in British ethnography, is generally traced to the language of the Tungus reindeer herders of the Lake Baikal region of the Soviet Union and, according to the great Russian medical ethnographer Shirokogoroff, like its Manchu cognate saman means literally ‘one who is excited, moved, or raised’. Its first appearance in a major European language seems to have been in seventeenth-century Russian. More particularly among the Tungus, a shaman is a man or woman who has acquired the power of mastering spirits and who knows how to introduce them into his body. Frequently the shaman permanently incarnates his spirits, controlling their manifestations, and going into states of trance on appropriate occasions. As Shirokogoroff expresses it, the shaman’s body is thus a ‘placing’ or receptacle for his spirits, and it is through his power over these incarnate forces that the shaman has the authority to treat and control afflictions caused by malign, pathogenic spirits in other victims. The Tungus shaman is consequently literally a ‘master’ of spirits, although, as we shall see, the spirits can, at times, overpower their tamer and controller. In this classical arctic setting, shamanism is firmly embedded in the Tungus clan structure. So the shamanistic master of spirits guarantees the well-being of his clansmen, controlling the clan’s ancestral spirits which would otherwise wreak havoc amongst his kin. These domesticated spirits can, moreover, be employed to counteract hostile alien spirits and to divine and treat local illnesses and other problems and misfortunes. Here the main diagnostic and therapeutic ritual is the public shamanistic seance in the course of which the shaman seeks to establish contact with the spirits of the upper or lower worlds. Shirokogoroff vividly describes the typical setting:

The rhythmic music and singing, and later the dancing of the shaman, gradually involve every participant more and more in a collective action. When the audience begins to repeat the refrains together with the assistants, only those who are defective fail to join the chorus. The tempo of the action increases, the shaman with a spirit is no ordinary man or relative, but is a ‘placing’ (i.e. incarnation of the spirit); the spirit acts together with the audience and this is felt by everyone. The state of many participants is now near to that of the shaman himself, and only a strong belief that when the shaman is there the spirit may only enter him, restrains the participants from being possessed in mass by the spirit. This is a very important condition of shamanizing which does not however reduce mass susceptibility to the suggestion, hallucinations, and unconscious acts produced in a state of mass ecstasy. When the shaman feels that the audience is with him and follows him he becomes still more active and this effect is transmitted to his audience. After shamanizing, the audience recollects various moments of the performance, their great psychophysiological emotion and the hallucinations of sight and hearing which they have experienced. They then have a deep satisfaction—much greater than that from emotions produced by theatrical and musical performances, literature and general artistic phenomena of the European complex, because in shamanizing the audience at the same time acts and participates.