Shamanism, 1951-1970s: the Eliadean synthesis

Eliade's magnum opus on shamanism, updated and translated into English in the early 1960s as Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Eliade 1964), made clear from the very title the equation he initially recovered in 1947 between contemporary ‘primitives' and prehistoric ‘primitives'.

contained a vast amount of information gleaned from an immense assortment of materials in multiple languages, ranging from the well-known to the most recondite sources. The book thus appeared to be a comprehensively investigated and painstakingly documented scholarly masterpiece. It quickly became the definitive study of shamanism published during the last half of the 20th century and had an enormous intellectual impact upon scholars and popular audiences alike.

Sidky 2010: 72; cf. DuBois 2009: 24

However, three issues affected Eliade’s qualitative meta-analysis of most of the then- known ethnographic works:

1. he relied heavily on ‘German translations, reviews, and digests’ of the main Russian ethnographic accounts (Znamenski 2003: 2);

2. he filtered the results of those studies through his preconceived biases in order to provide an interpretation that fitted his reconstruction (Sidky 2010: 86);

3. he did not provide anything new in terms of field research, but merely borrowed ideas following a confirmationist perspective and avoiding disconfirming data (cf. Ambasciano 2014; Ambasciano 2018a).

If we reverse-engineer Eliade’s Shamanism, we can better discern what he borrowed and from whom, and consequently identify his peculiar reinterpretations:

1.

2. Indocentrism: Eliade endorsed the view of a continuous co-dependence of (proto-) historical shamanism and Indian/Tibetan religions; thus, he adopted Shirokogoroff’s ideas about the influence of Indian religions on shamanism (Znamenski 2007: 173). Building on his previous works, Eliade created a dichotomy between internalized and externalized archaic techniques to achieve mystical states, i.e. shamanic ecstasy and yogic ‘enstasis’. Both yoga and shamanism were considered as the specialized mastery of supernatural powers that existed in modern times as ‘living fossils’, although Eliade considered yoga a purer and more elevated form (Ambasciano 2014: 53, 56; Eliade change his idea though; see below).

3. Universal (perennialist) symbolism: as a result of the coeval and constant dialogue between perennialists and historians of religions, Eliade took the idea of pan­Eurasian religious symbolism embedded within shamanic complexes (such as the so-called axis mundi, the tree of the world that connects the various mythological dimensions of the cosmos) from Finnish scholar Uno Harva (also Harva- Holmberg; 1882-1949), who, in turn, was influenced by Guenon (Harva 1922; see Ambasciano 2014: 363). Eliade, however, took these comparative patterns and applied them virtually everywhere, past and present, from contemporary native American myths and Australian initiations to ancient Mithraic rituals and worldwide heroic epic, with shamans idealized as forefathers of dramatics

(cf.

4. Degeneration and psychoactive substances: Eliade re-elaborated Ohlmarks’ distinction between arctic and sub-arctic shamanism and Czaplicka’s psychopathological frame in Schmidtian terms. Subarctic shamans were reputed to be failed and aberrant, abnormal, degraded practitioners who relied on drugs to achieve the required ecstatic trance. True ecstasy was available only to circumpolar shamans - heirs of the primordial revelations by the god(s), while the other shamans from Southern regions were forced to consume drugs and hallucinatory substances to reach a similar, and yet degraded, ecstasy. However, late in the 1970s, Eliade seemed to have changed his mind, considering hallucinogen usage as important as the ‘true’ circumpolar ecstasy (Ambasciano 2014: 53, 364; Znamenski 2007: 141).

More generally, how does this reconstruction fit in Eliade’s overall comparative project? In the 1960s, old racial classifications and provincial narrow-mindedness were used to describe the academic tenets of his restructured HoR as a ‘new humanism’ and a ‘saving discipline’ (resp., Eliade 1984: 1-11; note dated 2 March 1967, in Eliade 1989a: 296; cf. Turcanu 2007: 561). With regard to non-Western religions, in this period Eliade’s HoR became a sort of hermeneutical missiology aimed at investigating the resilience of pre- or (allegedly) proto-Christian tenets in non-Western cultures and religions for the greater good of Western spiritual renovation. In turn, the non-Western world had the duty or, according to Eliade’s terms, the ‘responsibility’ to come out of the shade and embrace their HoR-designed ‘destiny’ identified thanks to a patronizing teleology (Eliade 1984: 57).