Shamanistic Religions
Ecstasy is not, however, a female monopoly and cannot therefore be explained in the biological terms which the etymology of the word hysteria (i.e. ‘womb’) suggests. In stratified societies men of low socio-economic status join the ranks of the enthusiasts, either in a single, mixed cult, such as that of Dionysus, or, as in the Sudan and Egypt and widely elsewhere, with two parallel cults—one for upper-class women, and the other for the lowest orders irrespective of their sex.
As might be anticipated, in the Indian caste system, while priests belong to the highest caste (Brahmin), shamans, who may rival them in power, are drawn from the lowest castes. In this setting shamanism thus offers an important route to power for the lowliest of men. And, of course, when possessed by a divinity shamans of low status become gods who can openly denounce their superiors and treat them with contempt. So, for instance, MJ. Field reports how in Ghana, ‘An obscure little rural priest was moved by his spirit to travel a hundred miles to Kumasi where, endowed with the authority of possession, he forced his way into the presence of the Ashantihene and told him some unpalatable truths’. The mighty Ashanti king was forced to listen to him with respect and reverence.More generally, and as we should expect, those whose social circumstances render them peculiarly receptive to the ecstatic call change as society changes. So, for example, the ex-slave Cuban cult known as Santeria has undergone a remarkable sea change in the years since Fidel Castro’s rise to power. Despite its lowly origins translated to the Cuban refugee community in Miami, this has become a flourishing middle-class movement appealing to all those who oppose Fidel Castro and desperately seek an alternative Cuban identity. Similar connections appear to exist between the immensely popular Umbanda of contemporary urban Brazil and its more rustic, African precursor, Candomble.
With its ambiguous relationship to Catholicism, closely paralleling that of Haitian Voodoo, Umbanda is increasingly the effective religion of the urban masses. The most intriguing member of its mixed Afro-Indian-American spirit pantheon is that which, with its childlike innocence and uncertain parentage, seems to merge all these elements in a new, uniquely Brazilian identity as Pressel points out. The potential for dynamic developments of this kind seems to be a marked feature even of the ostensibly most conservative of ecstatic cults. Enthusiasm is a volatile force and spirits readily become literally the ‘winds of change’, being often, indeed, described as ‘winds’.When, under conditions of external pressure (whether of physical or socio-political origin), ecstatic cults develop into fully-fledged main-line shamanistic religions, they repudiate their lower- class connections. Enthusiasm which celebrates the position of the dominant classes in society can scarcely afford to allow itself to be controlled by the lower orders. Under such conditions, ecstasy becomes one of the principle expressions of orthodox, establishment power. This is generally true of classical arctic shamanism among the Eskimos, Tungus and other Siberian peoples and equally the case in the numerous tiny South American Indian communities where hallucinogenic drugs play such an important role. Although it is debatable whether all small hunting and gathering communities live under as acute environmental pressures as the Eskimos, or as precariously, prima facie there does seem to be some connection between this type of economy and central shamanistic religions. The view that the effervescent, shamanistic style of religiosity is a response to acute pressures of one kind or another tends also to find confirmation in the circumstances surrounding the rise and decline of new religions. Strident, new messianic ‘religions of the oppressed’ are invariably founded by inspired shamanistic prophets and religious dynamism characteristically finds expression in divine possession.
The dialectical interplay between this incamatory prophet- ism and an established priesthood can indeed be seen in the original and more recent Tungus material collected by Shirokogoroff and Hoppal respectively. The Tungus distinguish between those shamans who hold stable, priestly offices within the clan and their more volatile colleagues who have no fixed position. It is naturally those who are least secure and most ambitious who affect the most florid forms of ecstasy. In much the same way, the wild prophetic founders of the American Indian Ghost Dance subsequently assumed the more sober roles of priestly shamans. In the syncretic Shinto- Buddhistic tradition inJapan, the figure of the ascetic shaman (shamon) plays a complementary role to the spirit-inspired medium (miko). In feudal Japan, apparently, it was not unusual, as Blacker shows, to find an ascetic husband married to a female medium. Today, however, perhaps as in the Soviet Union with the marginalisation of these beliefs, women shamans seem to be increasingly prevalent in a society which the Japanese scholar K. Sasaki describes as ‘a hotbed of spirit possession and shamanism’.Yet if shamanism seems to thrive in circumstances of constraint and privation which it seeks to evade or transcend, there is also evidence to suggest that exactly the opposite conditions may generate the same response. Thus, as Douglas and others have claimed, formless anarchy or comparable conditions when society relaxes its grip on its members, appear also to promote the emergence of ecstatic shamanistic movements. At this point the Marxist and Durkheimian arguments intersect and, as so often with social phenomena, the extremes meet. This conjunction is, of course, fully consistent with our earlier observation that individuals can achieve states of ecstasy either through over- or under-stimulation. Nor, in this context, should we lose sight of the actual techniques employed to achieve ecstasy. Although the availability of powerful psychedelic drugs is not a necessary and sufficient condition for shamanism, it must influence the ease with which trance states can be achieved.