Shamanism, 1937-1946: Eliadean superpowers

In 1946, Eliade published an article that was going to have an unprecedented impact on the field. Entitled Le probleme du chamanisme (The Problem of Shamanism, Eliade 1946), that article had two main aims:

1.

2. Eliade wanted to offer a rebuttal to Swedish scholar Ake Ohlmarks' (1911-1984) work published in 1939 and entitled Studien zum Problem des Schamanismus

( Studies on the Problem of Shamanism; see Eliade's note dated 10 June 1946, in Eliade 1990a: 18).

According to Ohlmarks, who worked from both a nationalistic and racial perspective within a Kulturkreislehre framework, the most extreme, and almost pathological, form of shamanism coincided with the most psychologically and physiologically challenging experiences and was found in the area surrounding the Arctic Circle (North America included), which he labelled the Urheimat des Schamanismus, the ‘original fatherland of shamanism' (Ohlmarks 1939: 58; see Znamesnki 2007: 98-100). Southbound, with milder weather, shamans were forced to use psychoactive substances (fly agaric mushroom, tobacco and alcohol) or prolonged drumming and masked dancing in order to elicit the same ritual dramatization. Ohlmarks' ultimate aim was to dissociate the contemporary shamanic practices of the Sami, the discriminated autochthonous, non-Germanic, Uralic speaking population of Northern Scandinavia, from an ancient Norse ritual known as seti'ir, as both featured shamanic-like rituals.

Eliade's rebuttal was atypical: he was not interested in criticizing or disconfirming such Kulturkreislehre understanding, nor was he really concerned by the distinction between shamanism and more or less similar Indo-European practices.²³ Eliade just wanted to dissociate shamanism and psychopathology and expand the main features of Arctic shamanism to the entire world within the same, degenerative Schmidtian frame (for the resulting conceptual and racial ladder of shamanic degeneration, see Ambasciano 2014: 53; cf. also Pharo 2011 for Eliade's network of influences). Reprising some motifs from an older article from 1937 entitled Folclorul ca instrument de cunoaptere (Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge, Eliade 2006), Eliade set out to equate modern shamanism with a reimagined prehistoric religion, when more people could easily access supernatural powers and enter into divine realms. Resorting to the usual ‘living fossils' trope, some ‘primitive' peoples alive today were thought of as stuck in time, while others were merely considered degraded versions of the primeval humankind: therefore, always according to Eliade, certain ‘living-fossil' populations could have exhibited fantastic superpowers today not experienced any more by Western populations (quite confusingly, these powers were labelled as ‘living fossils' too).

As Andrei A. Znamenski has noted, Eliade ‘saw his own task as a comparative historian of religion as one of uncovering common ancient patterns hidden under the thick layer of “civilization”' (Znamenski 2007: 172). ‘Traditional societies', an Eliadean motley crew that included societies characterized by the presence of shamanism as well as ‘Stone Age people, classical civilizations, and modern “primitives”', provided a convenient case study to ground Eliade's diffusionist ideas and locate in ethnological terms his decipherment of allegedly transconscious ‘universal archaic patterns' while looking incessantly for a ‘primordial wisdom lost by modern civilization' (Znamenski 2007: 172; see Figure 12 and Figure 13). Therefore, Eliade proceeded to project modern Asian shamanism back in time, making it the most ancient religion of humanity further identified in prehistoric rock art, an idea that has exerted a certain disciplinary appeal, and subsequently has attracted many palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists, but which lacks a sufficient epistemic warrant (Bahn 2010; Ambasciano 2014; Ambasciano 2016a).²⁴ Asian shamanism was chosen as the absolute starting point because Eliade thought it was the ‘most complete form' of such technique, as he described it in the 1951 French edition of his monograph (Eliade 1951: 23). This idea had long been reinforced by Eliade's reading of some works by Turkish historian and politician Mehmed Fuad (or Mehmet Fuat) Koprulu (or Kopruluzade; 1890-1966) and Laviosa Zambotti. These two scholars shared the view of a predominant or exclusive role of central Asia, respectively, in the ethnological, Indo-European spread of shamanism and in the evolution of humankind and its religions (Ambasciano 2014: 179-246, 373-422). Finally, Eliade was possibly influenced by esoteric speculations, based on Indian mythology (reputed true), which asserted the existence of a mythical race of people coming from the North (the so-called ‘hyperboreans') as the custodians of the most primeval and divine revelations (Znamenski 2009).