by J H Brennan
A century later, as Russia began to colonize Siberia, explorers discovered similar individuals in its chill interior. Here too were men and women, claiming, like their American counterparts, to commune with spirits, heal or harm, influence the weather and game. In the east of the country, the Tungus peoples called them saman or shaman, the latter term destined to become a worldwide generic in describing the profession. Once again, there were priests impatient to condemn them. The conservative Russian cleric Avvakum Petrovich, in the first written account of shamanic practice, denounced the object of his study as “a villain of a magician who calls the demons” and, like others before him, suggested trickery might also be involved.
With the dawning of the Enlightenment at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the theory of fraud became more widespread and more all-encompassing. Shamans were no longer looked on as demonologists who sometimes used tricks but as tricksters through and through who only pretended to truck with spirits. It was not an entirely unwelcome development since it took away the excuse used by the religious to execute them. But even the rationalists could be harsh in their judgments. A German professor of chemistry and botany, Johann Georg Gmelin, spent ten years studying Siberian shamans. After watching one performance marked by much leaping, shouting, sweating, and “infernal racket,” he dismissed the whole thing as humbug and remarked that “we wished in our hearts that we could take him and his companions to the Urgurian silver mine, so that there they might spend the rest of their days in perpetual labor.”6
The French Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau, who spent five years among the Amerindian tribes near Montreal, also decided their shamans worked largely through “tricks of skill” but retained doubts that this was the whole story. He found them to have “some innate quality” that reminded him of the divine. He had witnessed them enter states of ecstasy in which a spirit appeared to take possession of them, throwing them into “frenzies of enthusiasm and all the convulsive movements of the Sibyl.”7 Interestingly, Lafitau remarked that the voice of the spirits, speaking from the depths of the shamans’ chests, led to their being considered ventriloquists—an example, surely, of a genuine phenomenon masquerading as a fake, rather than vice versa. It is also difficult to reconcile trickery with his observation that the power of spirit sometimes raised shamans into the air or gave them greater stature than they normally possessed.
Lafitau, despite his religious convictions, stands out as one of the most open-minded of the early investigators of shamanism. It proved a rare enough quality. Even after the distinguished German-American anthropologist Franz Boas established the principle, in the late nineteenth century, that indigenous cultures should be appreciated on their own terms, there was a noteworthy tendency toward lip service when it came to evaluating shamanism. Western observers might conscientiously report the claims of the shaman as if they were true, but the unspoken assumption was that no civilized person could possibly believe them. In 1904, Waldemar Bogoras was careful to place the word spirits in inverted commas when he published his study of shamanism among the Chukchee peoples of the North Pacific.
Humanity’s first contact with the spirit world arose in prehistoric times from individuals like this Siberian shaman.
This situation endured throughout the first half of the twentieth century and only really began to break down when a handful of intrepid anthropologists took the unprecedented step of trying out some shamanic techniques for themselves. Few were intrepid enough to face the prolonged fasting and other, sometimes life-threatening, ordeals of traditional shamanic training but concentrated instead on the use of plant narcotics. Limited though it was, this approach produced striking insights.
The first recorded example of the approach dates back to 1957 and involved not a professional anthropologist, but an American banker named R. Gordon Wasson. With his friend Allan Richardson, Wasson approached a Mexican shaman named Maria Sabina and asked for her help in experiencing the secrets of a “divine mushroom” used in certain religious rites. The woman agreed and the two Americans found themselves drinking chocolate with some eighteen Mixtecos, all dressed in their best clothing. After the chocolate, they each ate their way through twelve acrid-tasting, evil-smelling mushrooms. The effect was, in Wasson’s own word, staggering.
As the final candle was extinguished shortly after midnight, Wasson and Richardson were plunged into a visionary experience—or, if you prefer, began to hallucinate—and the visions continued at high intensity for fully four hours. They included art motifs in vivid colors, palaces set with semiprecious stones, and a chariot drawn by some great mythological beast. The walls of the house dissolved and Wasson left his body to float in midair viewing mountain landscapes with camel trains crawling across slopes which raised tier upon tier until they reached the very heavens. The figure of a beautiful, enigmatic woman appeared, leaving him with the impression that he was viewing a different world in which he played no part. He had become nothing more than a disembodied eye, poised in space.
From time to time, the shaman would make oracular utterances that, Wasson knew, were accepted by her native audience as the words of God. At one point something even stranger occurred. The shaman’s daughter, herself a shaman, began a rhythmic dance during which she produced claps and slaps that came from unpredictable directions in complex rhythms, sometimes appearing close at hand, sometimes distant, sometimes above, sometimes below. Wasson described them as “ventriloquistic,” although it is clear that if ventriloquism really was involved, it was nothing like ventriloquism as we know it in our present culture.
Wasson’s published account, in Life magazine, aroused considerable interest but may have been somewhat devalued within the academic community since he was not an anthropologist. With the dawning of the 1960s, however, the American anthropologist Michael Harner underwent an experience of the plant psychedelic ayahuasca that led, nineteen years after his drug-induced visions, to his establishing the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, an organization dedicated to the investigation and preservation of shamanic techniques.8 Harner lived for several years among the Jívaro and Conibo peoples of the Western Amazon and there drank more than a pint of the brew in order to understand the religious beliefs of the natives. On the instruction of his guide, a shaman named Tomás, he lay down on the bamboo platform of the tribe’s communal house and waited.
At first his visions were unspectacular: faint lines of light and a sound like that of a distant waterfall. But then dim figures appeared and gradually resolved into a “supernatural carnival of demons” surrounding a gigantic crocodile head that gushed huge quantities of rushing water.9 He became aware of other, even more disturbing spirit creatures—giant reptilian entities that resided at the base of his brain, where the skull met the spinal cord. They showed him planet Earth as it had existed in prehistoric times and he watched hundreds of black specks dropping from the sky to resolve themselves into huge whalelike dragons with stubby pterodactyl wings. They told him they were fleeing an enemy in outer space and had created the earth with its myriad life-forms as a place to hide. They were, they said, the true masters of humanity and, indeed, the entire planet. Harner went on to meet humanoid bird-headed spirits that reminded him of the traditional portrayals of Egyptian gods, but it was the dragons he found most disturbing and had eventually to ask his shamanic friends for medicine to bring the visions under control.
When his experience ended, Harner was left with a feeling of threat brought about by the thought that he now held a dangerous secret—humanity’s unwitting slavery to the reptilians. His mood was not helped when two missionaries pointed out similarities between his vision and passages from the biblical book of Revelation, with the disturbing suggestion that the dragons he had seen might actually be aspects of Satan. Later, however, he was greatly reassured when he told a Conibo shaman of the dragons’ claims that they were masters of humanity. The man grinned and said, “Oh, they’re always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darknes
s.”10
Another pioneer of direct shamanic experience was Barbara Myerhoff, who studied anthropology at the University of California–Los Angeles and, in 1974, decided to accompany the Huichol Indians of Mexico on a desert pilgrimage to search for supplies of their sacred peyote cactus. To prepare herself for the trip, she undertook to sample the cactus under the direction of a shaman named Ramón Medina Silva. After eating a dozen of the small, green peyote buttons, she lay down with closed eyes and eventually experienced a growing euphoria. Time and space evaporated and images arose into her consciousness. She began to experience her life as a series of discrete events, like booths at a carnival, thus allowing her to move backward in time to revisit earlier incidents. She found herself impaled on the Tree of Life, forming an image identical, it transpired, to a Mayan glyph she did not see until several years later. A vivid red speck flitting through the forest transformed itself into a spectacular bird that landed on a nearby rock. Myerhoff questioned the creature about myths and it responded by saying that myths could only be approached on their own terms, as themselves, and not interpreted according to preconceived ideas of what might be real and what not. But she missed a more important message—a message she believed to be the essential purpose of her experience—when her Western rationality prevented her from fully encountering another spirit being.
Since that time, various other anthropologists and academics have followed the trail blazed by these early pioneers. Harner’s work in particular, with its emphasis on shamanic drumming techniques, has led to the phenomenon of the “urban shaman,” men and women from First World countries who embark on their own shamanic adventures as a lifestyle choice. One result has been a deeper understanding of shamanism itself and a growing respect for practices that were once dismissed as fakery or Devil’s work. The University of Chicago professor Mircea Eliade, who died in 1986 but whose books arguably remain the most authoritative academic sources on the subject, described the shaman as “medicine-man, priest and psychopomp.”
He cures sicknesses, he directs the communal sacrifices and he escorts the souls of the dead to the other world. He is able to do all this by virtue of his techniques of ecstasy, that is, by his power to leave his body at will.11
Contrary to the New Age idea that anyone can become a shaman by banging a drum in their living room, Eliade insists there are only three roads into the profession: spontaneous vocation (seen as a “calling” from the spirits), hereditary transmission from parent to child, or personal quest by means of which the candidate attempts to seek out his spirit allies. But whatever the route, a shaman is only a shaman after he or she has received the proper initiation, which involves a twofold transmission of knowledge. Part of this knowledge, passed on by an older, master shaman, is purely technical—details of the techniques for achieving trance, the names of the spirits, the secret shamanic language used by the given culture, tribal myths, traditions, and genealogy. The remainder, arguably more important, is imparted directly by the spirits during ecstatic visions, dreams, and trances. Thus prepared, the candidate faces the initiation itself, which may be an elaborate tribal ceremony but may equally be a wholly inward, visionary experience. Either way, an ordeal is often involved. Siberian shamans maintain that they die as part of the process and lie inanimate for up to a week. During this time, they are cut up by spirits, the flesh scraped from their bones and their body fluids drained. The spirits then carry what remains of them down to hell, where they are locked in a house for three years.
It is at this stage that the actual initiation takes place. The candidate’s head is cut off and set carefully to one side so he can watch the remainder of the process. The spirits then hack his body to pieces, which are distributed among the spirits of various illnesses. (This gives him the power to heal when he becomes a full-fledged shaman.) His bones are then covered with new flesh.
This fearsome initiation can be, and often is, itself the result of illness. Says Eliade:
It becomes clear that initiatory sicknesses closely follow the fundamental pattern of all initiations: first, torture at the hands of demons or spirits, who play the role of masters of initiation; second, ritual death, experienced by the patient as a descent to hell or an ascent to heaven; third, resurrection to a new mode of being—the mode of “consecrated man,” that is, a man who can communicate with gods, demons and spirits.12
This then is the crux of the matter. For all his dreams, visions, and (perhaps) fakery, the shaman remains at his deepest essence, an individual with one all-encompassing power: the ability to communicate with spirits. It is the spirits who help him heal, who find the game, forecast the weather, predict the future, and generate the tribal customs. Spirit influence on primitive communities is both enormous and widespread—Michael Harner claims it is virtually universal: “the practice of shamanism existed on all inhabited continents.”13 A less sympathetic Sir James Frazer described primitive man as “a slave … to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.”14 Animism, the belief that spirits inhabit every hill, tree, stone, stream, pool, cloud, or breeze in Nature, proved so widespread among primitive cultures that an Oxford anthropology professor once proposed it as the origin of all religion.15
And the influence goes back a very long time. According to anthropologist Forest E. Clements,16 there was a belief in spirits in western Asia more than ten thousand years ago and the “witch doctor” who dealt with them was a member of a profession that seems to have originated even earlier. A painting, apparently depicting a shaman, in the cave of Les Trois Frères at Lascaux in the French Pyrenees dates to ca. 14,000 BCE,17 while Dr. Jean Clottes of the French Ministry of Culture argues that the function of all Paleolithic rock art was shamanic.18 Since the primary work of the shaman is spirit contact, this suggests an interaction between humanity and spirits dating back as far as thirty thousand years.
Were cave paintings, like this one at Lascaux, France, an attempt to depict spirits?
2. COMMUNION WITH THE GODS
THE EARLIEST CIVILIZATION TO HAVE LEFT WRITTEN RECORDS IS THE Sumerian culture that arose in the fertile crescent of ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Although populated from early times, the area was first settled between 4500 and 4000 BCE by a people referred to as Ubaidian,1 who knew nothing of the local language but arrived from outside as a markedly civilizing influence. They drained the marshes, established agriculture, then created industries that included metalwork, leatherwork, masonry, pottery, and weaving. From this base, they developed a flourishing trade with neighboring regions.
But the people we now call Sumerian, whose tribal tongue became the prevailing language of the territory, did not arrive on the scene until 3300 BCE, probably from Anatolia. Within a few hundred years, the country had developed twelve separate city-states: Kish, Erech, Ur, Sippar, Akshak, Larak, Nippur, Adab, Umma, Lagash, Bad-tibira, and Larsa. Each comprised a walled city with its surrounding villages and land. Their earliest political system was a democracy of sorts, with power vested in the people. This gave way to a theocracy controlled by various independent groups of high priests, but growing rivalry between the states seems to have called for a more centralized form of authority so that one by one they each adopted the institution of kingship.2
There was, according to their written records, a universal belief in spirit beings. Each city had its patron god. In the early days of the civilization these numbered only ten—Anu, Enlil, Enki, Inanna, Ki, Nanna, Ningal, Ninlil, Ninurta, and Utu—but by 2000 BCE, the Sumerian pantheon had grown to some thirty-six hundred deities. However, we must not assume such belief was only a matter of religious faith. Julian Jaynes, a Princeton professor of psychology, has warned not to impose such a modern-day prejudice. Following a thorough study of the period, he was led to the astonishing conclusion that the ancient texts should be taken literally: not only did the spirits speak, but their voices were heard by entire urban populations.3 In a
carefully reasoned thesis, Jaynes presents a wealth of compelling evidence to suggest that whole civilizations were founded and functioned on the orders of these preternatural entities. They were, he claims, far more intrusive even than they are today, taking on visible form and directing the actions of a humanity that functioned at a level little better than an army of robots. We were, at that time, literal playthings of the gods, utterly unable to disobey their edicts or resist their plans.
Jaynes, who died in 1997, was the son of a Massachusetts minister. He studied at Harvard and McGill, received a doctorate (in psychology) from Yale, and lectured at some twelve other universities including Princeton and Cornell. In 1976, he dropped a bombshell on the academic world with his publication of a work later described by the prominent Darwinist Richard Dawkins as “one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between.”4 The book in question groaned under the unwieldy title of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but read, in many respects, like an intellectual thriller. In it, Professor Jaynes argued that prior to about 1250 BCE—a date that permits the establishment of several ancient civilizations—the whole of humanity was guided by spirit voices. No medium was involved. These voices manifested to everyone with apparent objectivity, sometimes accompanied by materializations—or at least visionary experiences—and were accepted as instructions from the gods.
Jaynes’s starting point was the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem chronicling the events of the Trojan War and itself one of the oldest extant works of Western literature. His initial analysis of the document revealed something strange. The heroes of the Iliad all seemed, without exception, to be in constant communication with their gods—and almost incapable of taking any action that did not spring from divine instructions.