Shamanism, 1200s-1800s: Heretics, noble savages, (super)heroes
In order to fully understand Eliade’s contribution to the sub-field, we need a brief historiographical introduction. First of all, shamanism is a modern label with no general emic equivalent, a definition that has been historiographically used to describe a specific set of ritual practices from central Asia, characterized by a specialized local figure well-versed in artful performances that combine music, frenzied dance, roleplaying, healing practices, ecstatic trances, divinations, foretelling and contact with culturally postulated superhuman beings, usually for specific individual or social purposes.
Two of the most ancient accounts concerning Asian shamanism came from Italian travellers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, i.e. diplomat and Catholic archbishop Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (ca. 1185-1252) and Venetian merchant Marco Polo (1254-1324), whose descriptions vividly portrayed what is known today as a seance, i.e. a ritualized, highly emotional session featuring the aforementioned elements (see DuBois 2009: 14-15; precedent reports in DuBois 2009: 12-13).22 Closing a spell of curiosity and fascination, the subsequent history of shamanism follows closely the socio-political and cultural vicissitudes of Europe: from the European wars of religion and witchcraft trials to Czarist imperialistic expansion in Asia, shamanism was used to project heresy and delegitimize, eradicate and Christianize local ‘primitive’ beliefs and, more or less at the same time, justify national, imperial or colonial domination over those populations. With the Enlightenment, increased ethnographic knowledge spurred rational denunciation of such superstitious behaviours, although accompanied by ‘a good deal of condescension from worldly men of science’ (DuBois 2009: 21; see also Hamayon 1993, and Znamenski 2007).The unresolved tension between fascination, outraged consternation and desired subjugation for such alien behaviours was somehow resolved in the following century, when the process of colonization gave way to full institutional control over those communities that featured such rituals.
With shamanism falling out of practice during the nineteenth century,Western scholars began to seek out shamans to interview, observe, and analyze, so confident at last in the inexorable triumph of Judeo-Christianity over all trappings of barbarism that they almost regretted the fact. It was in this context that shamanism could at last be viewed with a semblance of scholarly neutrality or even sympathy, the object of a new ‘science’ of the history of religion.
DuBois 2009: 23
Subsequent positivistic and psychosocial explanations of shamanism between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries identified the interpretive key of shamanism in the extreme weather conditions of the circumpolar region. As a result, dietary deficiencies, lack ofvitamins and insufficient sunlight, with all their grave neurocognitive consequences resulting in psychiatric and behavioural disorders, were the suspected culprits. All these causes could effectively explain the manic performances enacted by shamans, which involved ‘trembling and the compulsive imitation of words and gestures’, and the resulting syndrome was recapped with the label ‘arctic hysteria’ (Lewis 1978: 43; Znamenski 2007: 83, 86-100). Such was the main thesis advanced by British-Polish anthropologist Marie Antoinette Czaplicka (1884-1921), who also noted ritualized similarities in other challenging, Tropical climates (e.g. the Malay peninsula in South-East Asia), and thus tied hysteria to ‘climatic extremes' in general, although she warned about the necessity of more field research (for such ‘environmental explanation' was apparently disconfirmed by its absence elsewhere) while not excluding a racial component (Czaplicka 1914: 323-4). However, it is important to note that the institutionalization of shamanism in those societies implied a standardization of the beliefs and practices that far exceeded any kind of health issues: some shamans might have been perfectly healthy and fine in all regards, and faked their behaviours.
Indeed, pointing out these very social aspects of shamanism, Russian anthropologist Sergei M. Shirokogoroff (1887-1939) interpreted instead hysterical acts encoded in the seances as a (mostly) non-verbal means to soften in-group conflict, to make people laugh, and to mock someone else's behaviour or ideas in order to relieve the community from stress. Shirokogoroff's shamans were funny social heroes (Shirokogoroff 1935; on both see Znamenski 2007: resp., 86, 87, 98, 112).Two features that intervened further to revise the general approach to shamanism were tied to the diffusion of European Romanticism as a conscious reaction against the Enlightenment. First, as we have seen, early HoR was obsessed by the role of Asia in the birth of whatever was considered religiously prestigious. Asia, and India in particular, were reputed to represent the earliest stages of modern human civilization, a belief boosted by the discovery of the linguistic affinities among extinct and extant Eurasian languages. Shamanism rose to the utmost relevance, and quickly became the focus of new research. Second, the post-Romantic pantheism of the German Naturphilosophie posited that shamanism was not a clever invention by impostors or charlatans (as sometimes held in the previous centuries), but a true and vivid manifestation of worship inspired or even caused by the natural landscapes in which shamans lived. The indigenous genius at work - reputed to be divinely inspired - was thus recovered as the religious manifestation of the ‘noble savage’, that is, the idea that primitive peoples were not tarnished or corrupted by modern civilization, and the subsequent admiration was inscribed into a degenerative dialectic. From this perspective, mainstream Western civilization at the dawn of the Industrial Age was considered regressive (Znamenski 2007: 17-28). As such, the study of shamans as noble savages might have helped to recover a more pristine form of natural devotion, and a quest for the purer forms of shamanism was thus started. Such enquiry was tied to specifically conservative, ideological and political propaganda (Znamenski 2009). As we shall see shortly, Eliade contributed in an appealing way to the popularization of these two ideas (i.e. the pristine origin and the Asian cradle of human origins). The resulting image was that of the shaman as a superpowered superhero.