ABSTRACT
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 seventeenthcentury 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 Shirokogoroffexpresses 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:
Shamanism, Spirit-Possession and Ecstasy
Mircea Eliade argues that: ‘The specific element of shamanism is not the incorporation of spirits by the shaman, but the ecstasy provoked by the ascension to the sky or by the descent to Hell: the incorporation of spirits and possession by them are universally distributed phenomena, but they do not necessarily belong to shamanism in the strict sense.’ While we must welcome Eliade’s recognition of the link between shamanism and ecstasy, which we shall develop here, it will be clear that his attempt to distinguish between shamanism and possession does not accord with the Tungus primary evidence. This, however, has not deterred the ingenious Belgian structural anthropologist, Luc de Heusch, from taking this supposed distinction between shamanism and possession and making it the corner-stone of his ambitious, formalist theory of religion. Shamanism, de Heusch maintains, is the ascent of man to the gods, possession the reverse. As an ‘ascensual metaphysic’ the first is, naturally, the opposite of the second which is an ‘incarnation’. Where, in the former, man ascends, in the latter the spirits descend. Possession, moreover, according to de Heusch, can itself be divided into two types. The first, characterised as ‘inauthentic’ assumes the form of an undesired illness, a malign demonic assault which must be treated by the expulsion or exorcism of the intrusive demons. The second, a sublime religious experience, is in
contrast a ‘joyous Dionysian epiphany’. This highly prized state of exaltation is cultivated in what becomes a ‘sacred theatre’.
