Apostles, Prophets, and Shamans
What Paul and the Acts of the Apostles narrate as a call of God belongs to a long tradition of religious intermediaries and their communities embedded in Jewish history. This Jewish tradition includes the elaborate performances of the prophet Ezekiel, who traveled in the spirit and performed the word of God in a way similar to Paul.[976] Robert Wilson in Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel analyzes the social drama of the making of a religious intermediary.[977] To illustrate the dialectical relationship between intermediary and group belief, between prophet and community in ancient Israel, he cites the example of Qaselid, a Kwakiutl healer and paradigmatic shaman.
Claude Levi-Strauss in his article “The Sorcerer and His Magic” also tells the story of Qaselid (or Quesalid).[978] Both Wilson and Levi- Strauss rely on the work of anthropologist Franz Boas, who began his research among the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island at the end of the 19th century. The case of Qaselid is useful for thinking about Paul, shamanism, and the social construction of religious experience.As applied to the story of Qaselid, a shaman is one who through access to spiritual powers is able to manipulate sickness to produce cures. The healing process involves a carefully choreographed performance by the shaman, patient, and audience to ritualize actions of unseen powers in the extraction of the sickness from the patient. This healing process is a publicly constructed “religious experience.” In some cases the patient recovers, in others the sickness proves intransigent. According to Qaselid’s narration in “I desired to learn the ways of the Shaman” reported by Boas, he began on the path toward becoming a shaman to prove that shamans were frauds and the healing performance was a sham.[979] As he progressed in his initiation, he reports that he was able to effect cures not because shamanism was real but because patients believed in his power as a shaman.
All the while, other shamans revealed to him their tricks of the trade and unmasked themselves as frauds interested only in the money of their patients. Qaselid’s account suggests the role belief plays in the ability of shamans to perpetrate fraud and create experiences of unseen agents.Because the interests of the believer and the religious intermediary are intimately linked in a social drama that creates the authority of the shaman and experiences of “transformative power,” fraud is a long-standing category for the analysis of the religious experiences associated with shamans. Fraud depends on the willingness of the believer to go along with the religious intermediary. Although there is evidence elsewhere in the material collected by Boas to suggest Qaselid had a career as a shaman, nowhere in the account “I desired to learn the ways of the Shaman” does Qaselid claim to be a genuine shaman.[980] Instead, the report reads very much as an expose of religious fraud perpetrated on those who believe by those who claim to mediate unseen powers. Qaselid presents his own cures as further evidence that shamans only pretend. His cures are not effected by anything he does but simply by the belief of the patient. The only criterion that Qaselid offers for a possibly true shaman is one who does not accept money for healing services (compare Paul, 1 Thess 2:1-10; 2 Cor 8:16-24).[981] Similar analysis of true and false prophets can be found in the writings associated with the ancient Israelite prophets to whom Wilson compares Qaselid as well as religious intermediaries roughly contemporaneous to Paul (Lucian’s account of Alexander the False Prophet is a good example).[982] Indeed, Luke Timothy Johnson dismisses certain religious experiences as fraudulent: “[O]f course, charlatanism is possible, as the ancient case of Alexander of Abunoteichos (see Lucian of Samosata, Alexander the False Prophet) and recent cases displayed regularly on television remind us. But counterfeit coinage thrives when genuine currency exists.”[983]
Although the narrative “I desired to learn the ways of the Shaman” obscures the identity of the informant, the shaman Qaselid was George Hunt.[984] Hunt had multiple identities in relation to the Kwakiutl, about whom he played such an important role as an informant for Boas.
Born to an English father and a Tlingit mother, raised in Fort Rupert, he nonetheless was involved in Kwakiutl ceremonies from the age of nine, and he married into the community at the age of eighteen.[985] Hunt gave more than one account of his path into shamanism. The narrative of fraud, belief, and skepticism was written decades after he received his shamanistic name Qaselid around the age of sixteen, and he had long since adopted his role as an ethnographic informant about Kwakiutl culture when he narrated “I desired to learn the ways of the Shaman.” In another version of his path to shamanism, however, he stressed physical afflictions that began when he was young and led to his being recognized as a shaman (for example, paralysis, after which he felt he had been on a journey out of his body, and falling into fire).[986] Such a narrative of physical suffering being transformed into a religious experience is common in the literature on shamanism (compare 2 Cor 12:2-10 - Paul’s thorn in the flesh), and such physical symptoms provided a context for belief in the power of this young outsider become insider that led to his first healing, the healing of the son of the chief from whom Qaselid received his shamanistic name.Both accounts are equally embedded in social relationships, and the basis for either account is not to be sought in an inner, personal, religious experience of Hunt but in the social context presupposed by the accounts. The narration of affliction as a path to shamanistic power is a narrative that constructs a shamanistic identity in relation to a community of believers; the narration of fraud, belief, and unbelief is a narrative that constructs a shamanistic identity in relation to a community of skeptics. Hunt’s role as participant as well as an informant of Kwakiutl culture leads to the construction of different shamanistic realities. There is no need to posit a prior religious experience that lies behind and antecedent to these reports.
The so-called phenomenology of shamanistic experiences is public, not private; readily accessible to social analysis, not less accessible; a construction of the individual interacting with the group, not an individual interacting with interior causes as the basis for Ashton’s religion of shamanism.The experiences of a shaman are constructed out of a public discourse about physical bodies possessed by spirits. As such, shamanism is not about the inner, hard to access, religious experiences of individuals but about certain types of publicly identified and choreographed experiences of the gods. A shaman exists only to the extent that a community recognizes the spirit mediated in the body of the shaman according to socially negotiated criteria. Paul reflects such criteria in Gal 4:13-14: “You know that it was because of a physical infirmity [δι’ ασθένειαν τη$ σαρκό$] that I first announced the gospel to you; though my condition put you to the test, you did not scorn or despise me [εξεπτυσατε - an apotropaic action], but welcomed me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus” (NRSV). Compare Gal 3:1: “It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified” (NRSV).
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