ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 we firmly tied the rise of the soul to Pythagoras. Yet Greek tradition also knew of males from the Archaic period, who went round purifying and healing but who, reputedly, could also fly, go into trances, perform feats of bilocation and let their soul travel. This activity of the soul was considered to be so foreign to Greek culture that more than forty years ago these ‘miracle workers’ were called ‘Greek shamans’ and their psychic excursions explained from contacts with Scythians (section 2). In my The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (1983) I raised a number of objections to this shamanistic interpretation, which have been widely accepted among both classical and non-classical scholars.1 However, in 1989 the early modern historian Carlo Ginzburg dismissed my objections in his fascinating book Ecstasies; in 1993 a dissertation supervised by Walter Burkert on Scythian shamanism completely ignored the discussions about the use of the term ‘shamanism’; in 1994 Peter Kingsley severely took me to task for even questioning ‘the postulation of shamanic influences on the Greeks from the North and East’, and in 1996 shamanism once again returned as explanation for the traditions about Abaris and Aristeas (sections 2 and 3) in an authoritative new classical encyclopedia.2 Evidently, the tide is turning and the whole matter deserves to be looked at again. In this chapter, therefore, I will first sketch the historiography of the problem (section 1), then pay special attention to Meuli and Dodds, the pioneers of ‘Greek shamanism’ (section 2), thirdly look at the miracleworkers in more detail (section 3) and, finally, draw some conclusions about the postulated rise of the soul in the Archaic period (section 4).
