ABSTRACT
The anthropologist Mircea Eliade provides a detailed description of shamanistic practices. The shaman is also a magician and medicine man; he is believed to cure like all doctors, and to perform miracles of the fakir type, like all magicians, whether primitive or modern. Supernatural beings help the shaman to diagnose illness, heal, and cast out evil spirits. The sacred journey, real or metaphoric, is the means by which the medieval religious woman and the shaman replicate sacred events of their cultures. Female visionary writers, like female shamans, are conscious of their positions as women in societies which assign them functions different from those of men. The shaman is a creative artist who receives the capacity to heal as a function of a relationship with a higher power. Marguerite d’Oingt, St. Bridget, and Margery Kempe, like many of the women of the period, found special protection under the cloak of the Virgin.
