Worldwide Investigation of Indigenous
Beliefs and Shamanism
By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
Shamanism existed among nearly all documented
hunter-gatherers, whereby an important question arises for today's spiritual
seeker: how is it that New Age spiritual teachers claim that they know what
shamanism is and how to easily do it, while not mentioning all the debates and
conflicting opinions of scholars and specialist sources?
Thus there is chaos in the understanding
of what shamanism is: for example, most authors dealing with the subject never
give any definitions...Those who define the subject differ widely. One example
is the called New Age shamans, where some will see for instance, Michael
Harner's teachings as based on cultural appropriation and a misrepresentation
of the various cultures by which he claims to have been inspired. Geary Hobson
sees the New Age use of the term "shamanism" as a cultural appropriation
of Native American culture by white people who have distanced themselves from
their history. Critics such as Noel and Wallis believe Harner's work, in
particular, laid the foundations for massive exploitation of indigenous
cultures by "plastic shamans" and other cultural appropriators.
Whereby one should ad that while Harner (2004) the past some years has been one
of the more famous would-be shamans, there are dozens of others with every year
being added to by many more 'would be new age' shamans whereby the name has
become no more than a catchword.
Hence if a person or author claims to
represent shamanism to others, then he has a responsibility to account for how
his observations are filtered, his interpretations construed, and account for
why others experience the same subject differently. Otherwise, history may
repeat an error that has been uncritically accepted as a fact, leaving no
empirical clue about the experience named.
Introduction
of Indigenous World Beliefs and Shamanism
SOUTH ASIA, THE HIMALAYAS, AND TIBET
Update: Taking Aeroflot via Siberia to N. America's Indigenous Practices
A Closing Note on South American Indigenous Practices
"The Reindeer People," covers
the history and biology of reindeer, nomadism, Shamanism, community in its
various political forms, the breakup of the Soviet Union and its consequences
for those who live at the margins.
Always on the move, the Eveny use their
reindeer not only as pack animals; they ride them. Another reindeer-herding
people, the Sami, are Europe's last remaining indigenous population. Although
many Sami traditions are based on nomadism, only about 10 percent of the Sami
now engage in reindeer husbandry.
From Russia with Eurasian Shamanism:
Shamanism sometimes also called animism,
is a global phenomenon and the problem is the poverty of English, and probably
most European languages, in describing it. For example Chinese still has
well-defined terms for various kinds of soul or spirit within humans: the shen, zhi, hun,
po, yi, etc). Uralic
archaeology is rich in shamanic art centered around the Mistress or Mother of
Nature, plus stone altars/censers which turn up in Kazakhstan, and so on.
As an introduction I should mention that
in English there are also still major problems with this field of research in
part due to the reliance on the faulty theories of Mirceau
Eliade and his followers. In fact that even ‘Traditionalism’ might have been an
influence also on Eliade’s later work was indicated by N. J. Girardot. Now a
professor of religion, he read the proofs of a book Eliade had written and
remarked: "Every other paragraph seemed to use the word `primordial' or
some classic Eliadean variant. I went through the
proofs in a frenzy to purge myself once and for all of the contamination of
primordiality!" (N.J. Girardot, "Smiles and Whispers," in
Changing Religious Worlds, ed. Rennie, p. 157). The Traditionalist movement (a
religion) as a whole has never been systematically surveyed before, but a good
introduction can be found in the biography of René Guénon
by Mark Sedgwick: “Against The Modern World”, 2004.
There are also a number of other
problems for example that Eliade worked from secondary sources, thus never even
met a living shaman. But especially there is his attitude towards women.
For example in spite of the written
historical record of women shamans in Siberia, he almost leaves these entirely
out of his sweeping synthesis nevertheless considered a major source for the
study of Shamanism in academia today.
Some of the sources Eliade relied on
then again where like Geza Rbheim, in his discussion
of the Hungarian shaman, or tdltos, a term he
translated as "male sorcerer," Rbheim
actually mentioned two women tdltoses, but he covered
this apparent contradiction by saying that they were "witches" who
were "just pretending to be healers" (in "Hungarian
shamanism," Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences 3,1951: 131-169). The
approving quotation of Roheim can be found in Eliade, Shamanism, 224-225.
But earlier published observation of
Hungarian shamans indicated that tdltoses were both
men and women. And according to local oral tradition, the original shaman,
named Rasdi, was a woman. Moreover, archaeologists have found many early female
burials with shamanic materials in present-day Hungary. For example in Tekla
Dömötör, "The problem of the Hungarian female tdltos,"
in Shamanism in Eurasia, ed. Mihâly Hoppâl (Budapest: Akadémiai
Kiad6, 1984); Mihâly Hoppâl,
"The role of shamanism in Hungarian ethnic identity," Danubian Historical Studies 1 (1987): 34-43; Izabella Horvâth, "A comparative study of the shamanistic
motifs in Hungarian and Turkic folk tales," in Shamanism in Performing
Arts, eds. Tae-gon Kim and Mihâly Hoppâl
(Budapest: Akadémiai Kiad6, 1995), 159-170; Lâszlo Kürti, "Eroticism, sexuality, and gender
reversal in Hungarian culture," in Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures,
ed. S. P Ramet (London: Routledge, 1996).
But those facts do not fit comfortably
with Rôheim's Freudian theory about the phallic
nature of shamanic "ecstatic soul flight." To quote him: "A
flying dream is an erection dream, and in these dreams the body represents the
penis. Our hypothetical conclusion would be that the flying dream is the
nucleus of shamanism, italics in the original.
Following Rôheim's
lead, Eliade limited shamanism to "soul flight"-which he regarded as
not only transcendent but also phallic.
Most students of shamanism have followed
Mircea Eliade in focusing their attention on masculine shamanic
paths-dismemberment, evisceration, and symbolic death leading to rebirth-as
necessary to shamanic initiation. Thus the anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, claimed that the only path to
"rebirth" as a shaman was a single enormous ejaculation, followed by
a symbolic death, dismemberment, and skeletalization-the
masculine tradition.
Eliade also separated Shamanism from
"possession," which he considered immanent and assigned to women,
whom he felt were not really shamans (Eliade, Shamanism, 4-6). Some studies
suggested that mediums and shamans are found in different types of societies;
Erika Bourguignon, Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social
Change, 1973, and Michael Winkelman, Shamans, Priests, and Witches: A
Cross-Cultural Study of Magico-Religious Practitioners, 1992.
The gendering of this difference began
in the 1940s when ethnographers began to discuss the idea that ritualized
possession states were a way for women to achieve social prestige. See Raymond
Prince, "Foreword," in Case Studies in Spirit Possession, eds.
Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977),
xi. The British anthropologist loan Lewis in his influential book Ecstatic
Religion (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971) described what he saw as a worldwide
pattern of possession cults as a form of indirect social and religious protest
by women.
As Wolfgang Jilek has remarked,
"the possession state has been reserved for non-Western cultures and for
cases not approved by Christian authorities" which is "an arbitrary
convention indicative of Euro-centric bias." See his Indian Healing:
Shamanic Ceremonialism in the Pacific Northwest Today (Surry, BC: Hancock
House, 1982).
Thus Eliade went out of his way to deny
shamanic status to women. He glibly referred to the Mapuche women shamans of
Chile as "sorceresses," saying they were evil persons who viciously
attacked others by projecting injurious objects into their bodies. The
predominance of female shamans in Korea he considered as "deterioration in
traditional shamanism." And he said that ancient Chinese women shamans
were "possessed persons of a rudimentary type" (Eliade, Shamanism:
Archaic Technique of Ecstasy, 1964, 4, 124, 301, 363, 453, 455, 465).
A Korean scholar has noted that Eliade's
mistaken impression of Korean shamanism was partly due to his reliance on a
single work by C. Hentze (Hungyoun Cho, "An
archetypal myth and its reality in Korean shamanism," in Re-Discovery of
Shamanic Heritage, eds. Mihâly Hoppâl
and Gâbor Kosa, 2002), 255-263).
Early sources on Chinese shamanism
include Jan Jacob Marie de Groot, The Religious System of China (Leiden, 1939),
6:1203; Han-yi Feng and John Schryock,
"The black magic in China known as ku,"
Journal of the American Oriental Society 5 (1935): 1-30; Eduard Erkes,
"Der Schamanistische Ursprung des Chinesischen Ahnenkultis," Sinologica 2 (1950): 258-262. An early Chinese book, Yijing, links the word for shaman, wu,
with a feminine trigram meaning "dui, the fertile marsh, the youngest
daughter, the shamaness." From this and other
sources it is clear that beginning as early as 1500 BCE, the shamans, called wu regardless of sex, were mostly women.
One of the authors he cited was Jan
Jacob Marie de Groot. But de Groot, perhaps the most authoritative source on
ancient Chinese religion at the time, had actually noted that women shamans
predominated in early Chinese shamanism and that they were considered great
healers. See Early sources on Chinese shamanism include Jan Jacob Marie de
Groot, The Religious System of China (Leiden, 1939), 6:1203; Han-yi Feng and John Schryock,
"The black magic in China known as ku,"
Journal of the American Oriental Society 5 (1935): 1-30; Eduard Erkes,
"Der Schamanistische Ursprung des Chinesischen Ahnenkultis," Sinologica 2 (1950): 258-262. An early Chinese book, Yijing, links the word for shaman, wu,
with a feminine trigram meaning "dui, the fertile marsh, the youngest
daughter, the shamaness.” From this and other sources
it is clear that beginning as early as 1500 BCE, the shamans, called wu regardless of sex, were mostly women.
Eliade's dismissal of women shamans
extended to Japan where he described the rituals practiced by women as merely
"techniques of possession by ghosts," making the shamans sound like
spiritualists (Eliade, "Recent works on shamanism: A review article,"
History ofReligions 1 ,1961).
Yet again, the primary sources he used,
together with more recent information, reveal that the earliest and most
powerful shamans in Japan were women. Great women shamans (miko)
who were possessed by heavenly deities had pivotal ritual and political roles
in society from the fourth through the tenth century. Only later, under
Buddhist influence, did the miko lose their political
status and be nfluence, did the miko
lose their political status and become relegated to the "folk"
tradition.
Eliade's work on shamanism was so
persuasive, even though it was not accurate, because of the times in which he
lived and wrote. However his erasure of women from important religious
roles was not even remarked upon for forty years. See Carol Christ,
"Mircea Eliade and the feminist paradigm shift," Journal of Feminist
Studies in Religion 7 (1991): 75-94; Rosalind Shaw, "Feminist anthropology
and the gendering of religious studies," in Religion and Gender, ed.
Ursula King (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
According to Eliade, possession involves
a lack of control over the spirits, and shamanism requires control, so
possession could not possibly be a legitimate part of shamanism. The lack of
control was subsequently described as "feminine in character"-a
device women use to gain attention and achieve social prestige. The American
anthropologist Michael Harner elaborated on Eliade's ideas when he stated that
trance mediumship, or what is now dubbed "channeling," involves a
lack of control over the spirits that enter one's body.
Ironically, even some feminist authors
have embraced the idea that male shamans engage in ecstatic out-of-body soul
flights and female mediums are possessed by alien spirits. Susan Sered, in her
otherwise excellent book Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated
by Women (1994), described soul flight as a masculine adventure. She argued
that religious specialists in what she called "female-dominated
religions" consistently chose possession rather than ecstatic soul flight.
Her ideas presuppose a sexual separation of the ways in which ecstasy is
experienced by men and women. According to her essentialist scheme, there is a
purely masculine pole that involves leaving one's body, and a purely feminine
pole that involves sharing one's body. See Susan Sered, Priestess, Mother,
Sacred Sister (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 186-187.
This dichotomy between transcendence, as
beyond experience, outside oneself, and thereby unknowable, and its opposite,
immanence, that which is experiential, present, or indwelling in form, is from
the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Sered does not include shamanism in her category
of "religions dominated by women." The ethnographic literature is
studded with mantras to the prominence of women worldwide in so-called
"possession cults." See Ian Hogbin, Law and Order in Polynesia
(London: Christopher's, 1934), who notes how women are mediums consulted for
diseases ascribed to possession by the spirits of ancestors. Reo Fortune, Manus
Religion (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1953), 95, asserted
that among the Manus of New Guinea, while women may be spiritually
disenfranchised with the paternal Sir Ghost cult, they are spiritually
enfranchised in possession cults.
The actual situation is far more
complex. In Southeast Asia there are traditions in which out-of-body soul
flight is considered a feminine action, while possession is considered
masculine. In Sumatra, among the Rejang, young fertile women make soul journeys
to the spirit world of their ancestors, while young men serve as mediums
possessed by spirits. Mature women and men are able to combine soul journeying
with spirit possession; over the years of their practice they, eventually learn
how to imaginatively shape-shift between genders.
Eliade's trivializing approach to women
shamans unfortunately influenced many other scholars who, unlike him, actually
met living practitioners. Among them was Ake Hultkrantz,
a Swedish historian of religion who conducted field research with the Shoshoni
during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In reporting on the "medicine
men" he met in Wyoming, he remarked casually, "There are also
medicine women who have passed the menopause, but they are few, and their
powers are not as great as the powers of their male colleagues.”
He then went on to generalize the
statement to other tribes. He wrote that "in Puget Sound (and perhaps
elsewhere) female shamans are rare, and their powers are inferior to those of
male shamans." And he asserted that "among the Eskimos some women
occasionally perform as shamans, but it is testified that only with difficulty
do they achieve the same magical effects as their male colleagues." In
each of these cases he offered no convincing evidence but only his preconceived
opinion. (See Ake Hultkrantz, Shamanic Healing and
Ritual Drama, 1992, 65).
This statement about the lack of women
shamans among Great Basin peoples is contradicted by the ethnographic work of
Willard Park among the Northern Paiutes, Shamanism in Western North America: A
Study in Cultural Relationships (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1938). Park spent three summers gathering data on shamanism. One of his key
informants was the famous shaman Rosie Plummer and her daughter, Daisy Lopez,
who was undergoing shamanic apprenticeship at the time. Park also stated,
"The shaman's calling is open to both sexes among nearly all of the tribes
west of the Rocky Mountains" (p. 88). For a sensitive discussion of the
possible reasons for male bias in describing aboriginal healing in Canada see
James Waldram, 'D. 'Ann Herring, and T Kue Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada:
Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives (Toronto: University of Torontô Press, 1995).
In fact other ethnographers working in
these areas had discovered an equal proportion of female and male healing
shamans: a missionary who lived with indigenous Puget Sound people for many
years noted that there were prominent women shamans among the Klallams. He
added that all along the Northwest Coast, visionary power is given at birth to
women rather than to men.See Donald Callaway, Joel Janetski, and Omer Stewart, "Ute," in Handbook of
North American Indians, vol. 11: Great Basin, ed. Warren L. D'Azevedo
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1986); Robert Ruby and John Brown,
Myron Eells and the Puget Sound Indians (Seattle: Superior Publishing, 1976);
Pamela Amoss, Coast Salish Spirit Dancing: The Survival of an Ancestral
Religion (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978); Sam Gill and Irene
Sullivan, Dictionary of Native American Mythology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
There are in fact material records
of Haida women shamans dating all the way back to the seventeenth century. It
consists of dozens of shale carvings of women dressed in shamanic clothing and
performing in séances. An illustration shows front and back views of a woman
wearing a shaman's outfit. She has feathers tattooed on her right cheek and a
labret, worn by members of important clans, inserted in her lower lip. Her
apron and long mantle are painted with the stylized faces of her clan's power
animals. In each hand she holds a type of rattle that is filled with pebbles
and produces clacking noises when shaken.
Icelandic Arctic explorer and
ethnographer Vilhjalmur Stefansson reported that some of the greatest Inuit
shamans he knew were women. Other scholars have noted that women shamans
performed differently than men but nonetheless enjoyed similar social status,
prestige, and power. Danish scholar Therkel Mathiassen observed that all senior
Inuit men and women were shamans.
Yet then in 1994 again, the historian of
religion Robert Torrance ignored early studies of women shamans in northern
California. He simply decreed that these women's shamanic practices were less
important and powerful than those of men. Without carefully reading biographies
and ethnographic sketches of women shamans, or undertaking any new field
research, he belittled and trivialized this feminine tradition by labeling it
"passive shamanism" (Robert Torrance asserted that among the Eskimo
in Siberia, "The female shaman was the exception." See Torrance, The
Spiritual Quest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, 173).
And he described it as "a static,
closed, or repetitive religion" in which a transcendent quest was not even
possible. See Alfred Kroeber, "The Yurok religion," in Handbook of
the Indians of California, ed. Alfred Kroeber (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1925), 53-75.
Thus Eliade's ideas and attitudes
continue to linger on.
Enter the World of Indigenous Beliefs and Shamanic
Practices:
Introduction of Indigenous World Beliefs and
Shamanism
The more traditional Taiwanese shamans
have a broad range of functions, ranging from exorcism to providing counseling
on fengshui.In Singapore, the determination of who
will become a shaman by the year, month, day, and hour of birth is important in
both Nong shamanism and in the practice of spirit mediumship. Although shamans,
called bi in the Qiang language (duangong in
Mandarin), may be either male or female, female shamans are rare.
Our Field Trip Starts in China, Click to Enter:
Shamans on Cheju Island contrast sharply
with this type; there the office of a shaman, a shimban,
is inherited within certain lineages and is not a matter of divine election. A
similar type of hereditary shaman, known as a tangol,
is encountered in the southern regions of the peninsula. Hereditary shamans,
especially the shimban of Cheju Island, cater to a
particular village and its shrine, whereas a mudang gathers a group of personal
followers. Among the Ainu of the far north of Japan, both the way of becoming a
shaman and the terms used are so different from the rest of Japan that some
have seen the elements of Eurasian shamanism as most significant here, as well
as in Tsugaru.
Most of the languages of mainland
Southeast Asia belong to several large families or groupings, including Tibeto-Burmese, Mon-Khmer, Tai-Kadai, and Vietnamese-Muong.
The languages of insular Southeast Asia (along with some of those of the
mainland) all belong to the great Austronesian family. The deities worshipped
by the Maori are found among other Polynesian tribal
groups, and in contrast to Australian Aboriginals, their traditional religion
was polytheistic, not totemic. Membership in the Maori
tribe is by tradition based on common ancestry, and this basis is reflected in
the Maori worldview, which connects everything
through ancestors. On Taiwan when Puyuma shamanism
was shaped by hunting, it shared features with Siberian shamanism as observed
in the nineteenth century; the current form is closer to the possession cult
that characterizes Korean shamanism.
Among the Hausa, Muslim and non-Muslim
practices sometimes intermingle and are sometimes in opposition. In the Gungawa section of the Hausa region, shamanic mediums,
often benign or trickster figures, are held in high repute, while at the same
time displays of power by any of them are frowned upon.Among
the Asante, the okomfo or priest is possessed by
spirits of nature who impart the knowledge for the okomfo
to cure illnesses and assist people in other ways. Similarly, in Cape Nguni,
the healer-diviners are called to their professions by the ancestors. More
women than men become mediums in this region of Africa.
SOUTH ASIA, THE HIMALAYAS, AND TIBET
Most of the languages of mainland Southeast
Asia belong to several large families or groupings, including Tibeto-Burmese, Mon-Khmer, Tai-Kadai, and Vietnamese-Muong.
The languages of insular Southeast Asia (along with some of those of the
mainland) all belong to the great Austronesian family, which, though spread
throughout most of the Pacific Islands, is also of Asian origin.
We next Move on and
Visit Borneo, Click to Enter:
Update: Case
Study: After Castaneda, Huechol Alias Wixarika Shamanism
Around the time the last book by Carlos
Castaneda appeared during his lifetime, several others had started to produce
similar items like for example Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner, Victor Sanchez
The Toltec Path pictured above to the right of Castaneda’s book published that
year 2001, or three years earlier already The Mists of Dragon Lore! Yet
although Carlos Castaneda as sis known invented Don Juan, and his research on
the Yaqui Indian Shamanism was bogus. It did however move some to do real field
research during the 1980-90’s of which the following is a conclusive overview:
Update: Taking
Aeroflot via Siberia to N. America's Indigenous Practices
A Closing Note on South American Indigenous
Practices
The Malaysian government has sought to promote the Islamicization of indigenous minorities, although this
effort has generally been resisted by the Orang Asli in the Malay Peninsular
and by the various Dayak and other indigenous non-Muslim groups in Malaysian
Borneo. Malaysian Borneo however has also seen many conversions to
Christianity.
For updates
click homepage here