Shamanism, Spirit-Possession and Ecstasy
Mircea Eliade argues that: ‘The specific element of shamanism is not the incorporation of spirits by the shaman, but the ecstasy provoked by the ascension to the sky or by the descent to Hell: the incorporation of spirits and possession by them are universally distributed phenomena, but they do not necessarily belong to shamanism in the strict sense.’ While we must welcome Eliade’s recognition of the link between shamanism and ecstasy, which we shall develop here, it will be clear that his attempt to distinguish between shamanism and possession does not accord with the Tungus primary evidence.
This, however, has not deterred the ingenious Belgian structural anthropologist, Luc de Heusch, from taking this supposed distinction between shamanism and possession and making it the corner-stone of his ambitious, formalist theory of religion. Shamanism, de Heusch maintains, is the ascent of man to the gods, possession the reverse. As an ‘ascensual metaphysic’ the first is, naturally, the opposite of the second which is an ‘incarnation’. Where, in the former, man ascends, in the latter the spirits descend. Possession, moreover, according to de Heusch, can itself be divided into two types. The first, characterised as ‘inauthentic’ assumes the form of an undesired illness, a malign demonic assault which must be treated by the expulsion or exorcism of the intrusive demons. The second, a sublime religious experience, is in contrast a ‘joyous Dionysian epiphany’. This highly prized state of exaltation is cultivated in what becomes a ‘sacred theatre’.These misleading contrasts, based on the tone of the emotional experience involved, are further confounded by later writers notably by Douglas in her Natural Symbols, although Bourguignon, who writes of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ possession, clearly appreciates that the distinction may not have such far-reaching implications.
The truth is that, just as there is generally little point in distinguishing between shamanism and possession since both occur together in the arctic locus classicus and widely elsewhere, so the distinction between benign and malign possession experiences can be highly misleading. In the first place, it is simply not true that what is perceived as a negative or even traumatic event is necessarily interpreted in the same vein as irrefutable evidence of demonic intervention. On the contrary, amongst the Tungus and all over the world, traumatic episodes, personal calamities and even physically crippling afflictions regularly serve as the harbingers of the divine call. This is not to say, of course, that where experiences of this kind are actually interpreted as sighs of satanic possession they are not treated by exorcism. But, frequently, the situation is far from being as clear-cut as this neat intellectual dichotomy might seem to imply. There is not invariably any direct parallelism between the emotional quality of an experience and its interpretation: what begins as an illness requiring treatment to appease the spirit responsible may gradually develop into a mutual accommodation where, as we would say, ‘the patient learns to live with his problem’. In this extended process, which is Ekely to include intermittent recurrence of the original symptoms, a new and binding relationship develops between the human subject and the spirit with the increasing domestication of the latter. The final step in this long-drawn out initiatory process occurs when, having fully demonstrated his power to control spirits, the ex-patient begins to diagnose and treat similar spiritual affliction in others.Thus, as St Paul’s traumatic experience on the road to Damascus reminds us, what ends in ecstasy may begin in agony. Indeed, those who vainly seek divine inspiration from other shamans may only succeed in achieving it after much self-inflicted mortification. So, in a characteristic account, an Eskimo shaman explained to one observer, Rasmussen, how, after unsuccessfully attempting to learn the shamanistic mysteries from others, he wandered off on his own into the wilderness of the arctic Tundra.
There, he explained to Rasmussen,I soon became melancholy. I would sometimes fall to weeping and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then for no reason all would suddenly be changed, and I felt a great inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break in to song, a mighty song, with room for only one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of my voice. And then in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight I became a shaman, not knowing myself how it came about. But I was a shaman. I could see and hear in a totally different way. I had gained my enlightenment, the shaman’s light of brain and body, and this in such a manner that it was not only I who could see through the darkness of life, but the same bright light also shone out from me, imperceptible to human beings but visible to all spirits of earth and sky and sea, and these now came to me to become my helping spirits.
The importance of recognising the ambivalent character of the announcement of the shamanistic vocation cannot be overestimated. It is precisely for this reason that no absolute value can be attached to displays of reluctance in responding to the call. The universal mystical convention, here, is to protest one’s unworthiness, so that the more one does so (e.g. through suffering affliction) the more one asserts the imperative importance of the divine command. Thus, manifest reluctance becomes the conventional mode of signalling the urgency and significance of the divine call. It consequently becomes impossible to attempt to assess the ‘authenticity’ of inspiration in these terms.
We may conveniently note here, also, that possession and trance do not necessarily always coincide. Trance is a physiological state; but possession is a cultural construct and may be used to interpret the condition of people who are clearly not in any sense in states of trance. Thus, a possessed person may only experience trance from time to time, and especially in shamanistic rituals.
Indeed, as Oesterreich acutely observes of the traditional Christian exorcist rituals, as practised, for example, at Loudon, it is frequently only at the climax of the rites designed to expel the spirits that the afflicted victims actually fell into trance!Shamanism and spirit possession are, then, cultural theories of trance, of states of altered consciousness, and more widely of illness and affliction. The ambivalence which we have been stressing is fully consistent with the fact, well known to mystics of all religions and periods, that religious ecstasy can be readily produced by two apparently diametrically opposed methods: by sensory deprivation (e.g. fasting, wandering alone in the wilderness and so on), and by sensory over-stimulation with hallucinogenic drugs, music, dancing and so on. (Illnesses and other traumas may sometimes include elements of both these extremes.) Since we are now liable to overemphasise the role of drugs, we should note here that even LSD is regarded generally by pharmacologists and psychiatrists as possessing no ‘drug-specific’ features, being rather as Groff suggests an ‘all-powerful, unspecific amplifier and catalyst of mental processes’. We must applaud the painstaking labours of R.G. Wasson and others in attempting to chart the global distribution of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and we must recognise the importance of these powerful stimulants even in some of the classic shamanistic cultures. Thus as Jochelson, who travelled among the shamanistic peoples of Siberia at the turn of the century, reports of the Koryak:
Fly-agaric produces intoxication, hallucinations, and delirium. Light forms of intoxication are accompanied by a certain degree of animation and some spontaneity of movements. Many shamans, previous to their seances, eat fly-agaric to get into ecstatic states... Under strong intoxication the senses become deranged; surrounding objects appear either very large or very small, hallucinations set in, spontaneous movements and convulsions!... attacks of great animation alternate with moments of deep depression.
Yet while acknowledging the significance of drugs here and elsewhere, we must not get things out of proportion as, for instance, John Allegro so manifestly does in his curious book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. We must not fall into the trap of assuming that shamanism and ecstasy can only be produced with the aid of such powerful pharmacological aids. As we have seen many other well-tried techniques exist in which drugs play no part at all. And from the widest perspective, it is probably in illness and affliction that we find the commonest route to the assumption of the ecstatic vocation.