Demystifying Shamans and Their World: A Multidisciplinary Study

By Adam J. Rock and Stanley Krippner

Shamanism can be described as a group of techniques by which its practitioners enter the “spirit world,” purportedly obtaining information that is used to help and to heal members of their social group. Despite a resurgence of interest in shamanism and shamanic states of consciousness, these phenomena are neither well-defined nor sufficiently understood. This multi-disciplinary study draws on the fields of psychology, philosophy and anthropology with the aim of demystifying shamanism. The authors analyse conflicting perspectives regarding shamanism, the epistemology of shamanic states of consciousness, and the nature of the mental imagery encountered during these states.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Oct 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781845403324

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DEMYSTIFYING SHAMANS AND THEIR WORLD

A Multidisciplinary Study

Adam J. Rock & Stanley Krippner

Copyright © Adam J. Rock & Stanley Krippner, 2011

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic

PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic

Philosophy Documentation Center

PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA

Digital version converted and published in 2011 by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to Jürgen Kremer, Stephen Brown, Rosemary Coffey, Steve Hart, and Cheryl Fracasso for their editorial assistance, and the Saybrook University Chair for the Study of Consciousness for its support in the preparation of this book.

Permissions

Portions of this book were originally published as articles in American Psychologist (2002, vol. 57, pp. 962–977), International Journal of Transpersonal Studies (2008, vol. 27, pp. 12–19), Journal of Consciousness Studies (2000, vol. 7, pp. 93–118), Journal of Shamanic Practice (2009, vol. 2, 33–40), Transpersonal Psychology Review (2008, vol. 12, pp. 23–31), North American Journal of Psychology (2007, vol. 9, pp. 485–500), Psi Research (1984, vol. 3, pp. 4–16), and Journal of Scientific Exploration (2008, vol. 22, pp. 215–226).

Permission to reprint has been granted by the publishers.

This book is dedicated to

Michael and Sandra Harner

and to shamans past, present and future

Michael Harner, Ph.D. is an anthropologist and founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, an international nonprofit organisation dedicated to preserving shamanic knowledge.

Sandra Harner, Ph.D. served as co-founder and Vice President of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and also serves on its international teaching faculty.

Both of these visionaries recognised the importance of preserving shamanic traditions and adapting them to help contemporary people face the ecological and existential crises of the 21st century.

Preface: Why Attention Must Be Paid To Shamanism

Albert Einstein once wrote, The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. Einstein’s comments certainly apply to scholarly studies of shamanism, a composite of spiritual practices and rituals found worldwide. After reviewing the literature on this topic, Narby and Huxley (2001) concluded, Even after five hundred years of reports on shamanism, its core remains a mystery. One thing that has changed…, however, is the gaze of the observers. It has opened up. And understanding is starting to flower (p. 8).

Much of the mystery surrounding the phenomenon of shamanism is perhaps attributable to the fact that it emerged during a time of preliteracy. Thus little is known about its origins. Although the term shaman is of uncertain derivation, it is often traced to the language of the Tungus reindeer herders of Siberia, where the word šaman translates into one who is excited, moved, or raised (Casanowicz, 1924; Lewis, 1990, pp. 10–12). An alternative translation for the Tungus word is inner heat, and an alternative etymology is the Sanskrit word saman or song (Hoppal, 1987). Each of these terms applies to the activities of shamans, past and present, who enter what is sometimes described as an ecstatic state in order to engage in spiritual rituals and psychological practices for the benefit of their community (Hoppal, 1987, pp. 91–92; Krippner, 1992).

When Eliade (1989) called shamans technicians of ecstasy, he used the term ecstasy to describe a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld (p. 5). However, not all shamans undertake this type of ecstatic journey; in many cases, the shaman might incorporate a spirit, an animal ally, or some other discarnate entity in order to obtain information of value to his or her social group (Peters & Price-Williams, 1980). Voluntary incorporation is not to be confused with involuntary possession. A member of the shaman’s community might be possessed by a demon or malicious spirit, and this condition might require shamanic intervention of one type of another. However, shamans are in control of whatever agency they incorporate, even if it is a demon they have tricked into leaving the body of its victim in favour of that of the shaman, who eventually disposes of it in one way or another. This process usually involves a struggle that is far from ecstatic. Neither is the dark night of the soul experienced as being ecstatic, even though it is part of many shamanic initiations. Hence, technicians of ecstasy is far from inclusive as a term that describes shamans.

The adaptive character of shamanism is confirmed by its appearance around the world, not only in hunter-gatherer and fishing societies, but in more centralised societies as well. A hallmark of shamanism is its ubiquity, even though its cultural diversity is obvious to anyone who makes a serious study of the topic. Shamans are labelled differently in different cultures, and their roles have evolved in tandem with the needs of those cultures. Eliade provided a list of what he considered universal functions of shamans, but Heinze (1991) found many exceptions. Contrary to Eliade, she identified shamans who did not claim to control animals, to have immunity to fire, to have experienced dismemberment, or to have had a near-fatal illness that constituted a shamanic call. Heinze did find a universal response to community needs among the shamans she interviewed, and these needs often required mediation between the living and the dead, between the sacred and the profane, between the upper world and the lower world, and even between shamans’ own masculine and feminine attributes. Wearing clothes of the opposite gender is a common practice in many shamanic traditions; indeed, it was a custom that alarmed European visitors to Siberia and the Americas because it violated their conventional gender boundaries. Furthermore, shamans often play the role of tricksters who violate borders and cross limits in order to challenge a person, a family, or a community for a variety of reasons, among them to force their onlookers to conceptualise problems in novel ways. Indeed, it is noteworthy that shamanism is currently attracting increasing interest as an alternative or complementary therapeutic technique in the disciplines of psychotherapy and medicine (Bittman et al., 2001).

Winkelman (2010) maintained that shamanism has emerged worldwide and has survived because it involves adaptive potentials derived from the structure of the brain and the evolution of consciousness (p. 4). Nonetheless, Hubbard (2003) pointed out that mainstream science has tended to dismiss shamanism as manifesting psychopathology, charlatanism, or both. Indeed, the present book was born of the conviction that attention must be paid to shamanism because it is a worthwhile academic study. Consequently, this in no sense is a book that belittles shamans or their contributions. In addition, it is our contention that, in order for academics to grasp the nature of shamanic phenomena, there are useful research strategies, such as those exemplified by this book. Each chapter in this book whittles away at one or more shamanic mysteries by placing shamanic imagery, shamanic journeying, shamanic incorporation, shamanic healing, and so on into terms more understandable from a multidisciplinary perspective. However, we must emphasise that our aim is not to reduce the authority and utility of these phenomena; we are merely recasting them.

Although so-called neo-shamanism is becoming faddish in the West (Taylor & Piedilato, 2002), indigenous shamans are becoming increasingly endangered (Walsh, 1990a, p. 267). It is crucial to learn what shamanism has to offer the social and behavioural sciences before archival research in libraries replaces field research as the best available method for investigating these prototypical psychologists.

Introduction: An Overview of the Chapters

In Chapter 1 we attempt to demonstrate that Western perspectives on shamanism have changed and clashed over the centuries. This chapter presents points and counterpoints regarding what might be termed the demonic model, the charlatan model, the mental illness model, the soul flight model, the decadent and crude technology model, and the deconstructionist model of shamanism. Indeed, Western interpretations of shamanism often reveal more about the observer than they do about the observed. In addressing this challenge, we note that the study of shamanism could make contributions to cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, psychological therapy, and ecological psychology.

In Chapter 2 we contend that the shamans’ epistemology, or ways of knowing, depended on deliberately altering their awareness and/or heightening their perception to contact spiritual entities in upper worlds, lower worlds, and middle earth (i.e., ordinary reality). For the shaman, the totality of inner and outer reality is fundamentally an immense signal system, and the shaman’s entries into so-called shamanic states of consciousness were the first steps toward deciphering this signal system. We point out that Homo sapiens was probably unique among early humans in the ability to symbolise, mythologize, and, eventually, to shamanize. This species’ eventual domination may have been due to its ability to take sensorimotor activity and use it as a bridge to produce narratives that facilitated human survival. Shamanic technologies, essential for the dramatic production and ritual performance of myths and other narratives, interacted with shamanic epistemology, reinforcing its basic assumptions about reality.

Chapter 3 features a critical examination of the term shamanic states of consciousness. We argue that affixing the qualifier shamanic states to the noun consciousness results in a theoretical confusion of consciousness and its content; that is, consciousness is mistaken for the content of consciousness. We refer to this fallacy as the consciousness/content fallacy. We argue that this fallacy can be avoided if one replaces shamanic states of consciousness with shamanic patterns of phenomenal properties, an extrapolation of the term phenomenal field. Implications of the consciousness/content fallacy for states of consciousness studies are also considered. Thus it would follow that shamans could be defined as socially designated practitioners who are capable of shifting their patterns of phenomenal properties to obtain information not ordinarily available to other members of their community, using that information to help and to heal community members as well as the community as a whole. We consider this definition operational because it describes shamans in terms that can be observed and, to some extent, measured. One can identify the social group that selected its shamanic practitioners, one can describe the shaman’s phenomenal shifts (preferably using the shaman as informant), one can record the information provided by the shaman, and one can observe and measure the effects it appears to have on the well-being of both an individual and a group.

Chapter 4 presents two contemporary templates that can be used for cross-cultural comparisons of healing systems. We have chosen one North American and one Asian system, comparing them with each other as well as with Western biomedicine. The differences in theory and practice are obvious, but, at a more subtle level, one can see some commonalities, especially in terms of how the outcome depends, in part, upon the effectiveness of the placebo response and the dynamics of the client-practitioner relationship. As was the case with the dream model, these two healing models allow for a full description of indigenous healing systems, with no compromise being necessary to force native beliefs and customs into a Western conceptual box.

Chapter 5 describes a 10-facet model that has been, and can be, applied for the cross-cultural study of shamanic dream systems. While this model was originally used to compare Western systems such as those used by Freudians and Jungians, its application to indigenous North and South American dream systems yielded instances of complexity and sophistication that are helpful in comprehending why dream reports play a vital role in many of these cultures.

In Chapter 6 we argue that attempts to elucidate the kinds of thing or things to which the term shamanic journeying image is referentially linked must grapple with two related questions: What is the fundamental nature of shamanic journeying images? And how might the origin of a shamanic journeying image be found? The first question is ontological, concerned with the nature and essence of shamanic journeying images. In contrast, the second is epistemological and methodological, concerned with how to acquire knowledge of shamanic journeying images. We demonstrate how inductive and deductive reasoning, the private language argument, and reification render problematic the resolution of both questions.

In Chapter 7 we propose criteria pertaining to four necessary conditions for a visual mental image to qualify as a shamanic journeying image. Subsequently, we demonstrate how these necessary conditions may be used to extrapolate a scoring system that allows one to test empirically, via falsification, a visual mental image’s ostensible shamanic status. If this approach is found useful for identifying the status of shamanic imagery, it could be applied to other shamanic experiences and behaviours.

The aim of Chapter 8 is to examine the relationship between the shaman’s conscious experiences and the spirit world. We point out that numerous scholars have suggested that shamans are realists in the sense that they conceptualise their multi-layered universe (e.g., upper, middle, and lower worlds) as real, objective, and independent of the perceiver. We contend, however, that previous research has neglected to analyse the logical coherence of a realist interpretation of these shamanic nonphysical worlds (NPWs). We address this lacuna first by determining which variant of realism is most consistent with the shaman’s purported views concerning the ontological status of the aforementioned NPWs. Subsequently, we consider shamanic journeying imagery with regards to the key definitional elements of the term mental image. Finally, we formulate three premises pertaining to shamanic journeying imagery and NPWs with the aim of assessing the logical coherence of the shaman’s realist ontology. We conclude that, if shamanic journeying images constitute mental images, then this does not necessarily preclude shamanic NPWs from existing independently of the percipient’s mind-body configuration(s).

The shaman often plays a trickster role, and there are numerous accounts of shamanism that are filled with alleged phenomena that cross the boundaries of what mainstream science knows about time, space, and energy. Are these phenomena the trickster’s sleight-of-hand at play? Or could at least some of them resemble the reported anomalies studied by parapsychologists? Chapter 9 describes various research methods that can be used to verify or falsify claims that at first glance appear to be impossible manifestations but that deserve serious consideration because they are so frequently cited.

Chapter 10 surveys the Western encounter with shamanism, allowing us to revisit each of the preceding nine chapters, pointing out their points of congruence with those of other investigators. As psychologists, we have emphasised psychological writings, but we do not deny the importance of other scholars who have attempted to demystify shamanism. Walsh (2007) has pointed out that most scientific studies of shamanism have been by anthropologists … who have braved everything from arctic winters to tropical jungles to observe native shamans at work. However, Walsh continues, several other disciplines, and especially psychology, can complement and enrich anthropological contributions. And of course, the study of shamanism also has much to contribute to psychology (p. 7). In the spirit of Walsh’s assessment, we invite scholars from scores of disciplines to join this quest; there are enough mysteries to intrigue us all!

Chapter One: Shamanism and Shamans: Points and Counterpoints

Recent developments in qualitative research and the innovative use of conventional investigative methods have provided the tools to bring both rigour and creativity to the disciplined examination of shamans, their behaviour, and their experiences. However, a review of Western psychological perspectives on shamans reveals several conflicting perspectives. This chapter focuses on these controversies.

The term shaman is a social construct, one that has been described, not unfairly, as a made-up, modern, Western category (Taussig, 1989, p. 57). Kremer (1996) also commented on the historical happenstance that led to the generalised use of what was originally a Tungus term. This appellation describes a particular type of practitioner who attends to the psychological and spiritual needs of a community that has granted that practitioner privileged status. Shamans claim to engage in specialised activities that enable them to access valuable information that is not ordinarily available to other members of their community (Krippner, 2000). Hence, shamanism can be described as a body of techniques and activities that supposedly enable its practitioners to access information that is not ordinarily attainable by members of the social group that gave them privileged status. These practitioners use this information in attempts to meet the needs of this group and its members.

Contemporary shamanic practitioners exist at the nomadic-pastoral, horticultural-agricultural, and state levels of societies. There are many types of shamans. For example, among the Cuna Indians of Panama, the abisua shaman heals by singing, the inaduledi specialises in herbal cures, and the nele focuses on diagnosis. The Rarimuri Indians of northern Mexico are nominally Roman Catholic, but continue to perform their traditional shamanic rituals, especially in times of sickness and social emergency. The most revered practitioners are the si’paaame or raspers, who conduct nightlong rituals in which they ingest peyote and play a percussion instrument that is rasped back and forth with another stick atop an inverted gourd that serves as a resonator. The ouiruame, or medicine makers, are thought to travel to distant parts of the universe in their dreams; they track lost souls and attempt to maintain balance in their community. The waniame are called upon when a man or woman is the victim of a sukuruame or sorcerer, and proceed to suck out the rock, maggot, or other intrusive object from the victim’s body. The saweame may or may not be a shaman, but he is the master chanter and is called upon when a ritual requires him to chant and use his sacred rattles (Levi, 2004).

Shamanic Roles

Winkelman’s (1992) seminal cross-cultural study focused on 47 societies’ magico-religious practitioners who claim to interact with non-ordinary dimensions of human existence. This interaction involves special knowledge of purported spirit entities and how to relate to them, as well as special powers that supposedly allow these practitioners to influence the course of nature or human affairs. Winkelman coded each type of practitioner separately on such characteristics as the type of magical or religious activity performed; the technology used; the mind-altering procedures used (if any); the practitioner’s cosmology and worldview; and each practitioner’s perceived power, psychological characteristics, socioeconomic status, and political role.

Winkelman’s (1992) statistical analysis yielded four practitioner groups: (a) the shaman complex (shamans, shaman-healers, and healers); (b) priests and priestesses; (c) diviners, seers, and mediums; (d) malevolent practitioners (witches and sorcerers). Shamans were most often present at the hunter-gatherer level. Priests and priestesses were most present in horticultural/agricultural communities, and diviners and malevolent practitioners were observed in state-level societies.

Most diviners report that they are conduits for a spirit’s power and claim not to exercise personal volition once they have incorporated these spirit entities. When shamans interact with spirits, the shamans are almost always dominant; if the shamans suspend volition, it is only temporary. For example, shamans surrender volition during some Native American ritual dances when there is an intense perceptual flooding. Nonetheless, shamans purportedly know how to enter and exit this type of intense experience (Winkelman, 2010). The distinction between voluntary shamanic (or mediumistic) incorporation and involuntary possession is a common one; Bourguignon (1976) added trance without possession or incorporation to describe other shamanic modifications of consciousness.

Shamanic Selection and Training

Shamans enter their profession in a number of ways, depending on the traditions of their community. Some shamans inherit the role (Larsen, 1976, p. 59). Others may display particular bodily signs, behaviours, or experiences that might constitute a call to shamanize (Heinze, 1991, pp. 146–156). In some cases, the call arrives late in life, giving meritorious individuals opportunities to continue their civil service; conversely, an individual’s training may begin at birth. The training mentor may be an experienced shaman or a spirit entity. The skills to be learned vary, but they usually include diagnosing and treating illness, contacting and working with benevolent spirit entities, appeasing or fighting malevolent spirit entities, supervising sacred rituals, interpreting dreams, assimilating herbal knowledge, predicting the weather, and mastering their self-regulation of bodily functions and attentional states.

The Demonic Model

Point

The European states that sent explorers to the Western hemisphere were, for the most part, the same states that were executing tens of thousands of putative witches and sorcerers. The practice of shamanism was already historically remote (except for inaccessible regions and remnants carried on in secret). The torture of the accused yielded confessions that they had made pacts with the devil, had desecrated sacred Christian ceremonies, or had consorted with spirits. Many chroniclers were Christian clergy who, therefore, described shamans as devil worshippers (Narby & Huxley, 2001).

A 16th century account by the Spanish navigator and historian, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1535/2001), described revered old men, held in high esteem, who used tobacco in order to worship the Devil (pp. 11–12). The first person to introduce tobacco to France was a French priest, Andre Thevet (1557/2001). He described a group of venerable Brazilian practitioners called the pajé, portraying them as witches who adore the Devil (pp. 13, 15). The pajé, he wrote, use certain ceremonies and diabolical invocations and invoke the evil spirit in order to cure fevers, determine the answers to very important community problems, and learn the most secret things of nature (pp. 13–15).

Another French priest, Antoine Biet (1664/2001), observed the rigorous training program undergone by indigenous practitioners, or piayes. To