I have been
brought up to be incurious regarding shamanism, yet as we broaden the net of
spiritualism it is clear that the shaman existed everywhere and was seriously
successful. Thus their work needs to be
taken as seriously and this item goes a long way to redress this imbalance.
A true shaman is
successfully initiated into accessing the levels of spirituality at least on
the causal level and to directly communicate with attending spirits far more
fully than I had anticipated. Their
purpose is to affect healing through guidance from this communication and
through their own general knowledge and empirical skill.
What they do
represent is a body of knowledge that allows them to effectively guide others
toward the same goals. It is noteworthy
that the shaman does expect to be rewarded with gifts but he needs to be clear
of conscience when acting on behalf of a subject. This is actually unsurprising.
Our World: Shamans and
Spirits
May
8, 2013
Michael Harner, Guest Writer
The following is
excerpted from Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality, published by North Atlantic Books, featured
at Reality Sandwich.
Close your
eyes, then you will find the way. –from a Puyallup
Indian myth
Based on archaeological and comparative
ethnological evidence, shamanism is believed by many scholars to be at least
30,000 years old and quite possibly is more ancient. Without dispute, it is the
most time-tested system for healing through the purposeful integration of
mental, emotional, and spiritual capacities. Although the word “shaman” comes
from the Tungusic-speaking peoples of Siberia and north China, the worldwide
similarity of the basic practices led anthropologists to apply the
term generically elsewhere. Until the present century, shamanism was
practiced on all inhabited continents by indigenous peoples, including such
widely separated peoples as the Sami (formerly “Lapps”) of northernmost Europe,
the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Kung Bushmen of southern Africa, and
the indigenous peoples of North and South America.
However, due to such factors as introduced disease, wars, missionization, and
persecution, the numbers of indigenous shamans were drastically reduced in the
last five centuries, commonly along with a radical erosion of their
culture’s shamanic knowledge.
In the last few decades this situation has started to change.
Shamans
Definitions are often a contentious matter,
particularly in the case of shamans and shamanism. What I offer now is what I
have personally found useful in my work with shamans, and within shamanism, for
half a century. The following words are not intended to satisfy everyone, or
perhaps even most, but they are intended to communicate what I am talking about
in this book. While the work of shamans encompasses virtually the full gamut of
known spiritual practices, shamanism is universally characterized by an intentional
change in consciousness (Eliade’s “ecstasy”) to engage in purposeful
two-way interaction with spirits. Its most distinctive feature, which is
not universal, is the out-of-body journey to other worlds. It should be
noted that in some indigenous societies, there are shamans who do not journey
at all, and others who journey only in the Middle World or, if they journey
beyond the Middle World, may not go to both the Upper and Lower Worlds. What
they all do share is disciplined interaction with spirits in nonordinary
reality to help and heal others. Whether journeying or not, shamans
depend heavily upon the assistance of their tutelary entities, or helping
spirits, with whom they interact in the altered state of consciousness that
worldwide is most commonly achieved with the aid of auditory (sonic) driving.
Both in traditional indigenous settings and in contemporary society, shamans
work within a holistic framework.
They address the spiritual side of illness in a complementary relationship with
the nonspiritual treatment of illness and injury.
Shamans must be distinguished from sorcerers.
Sorcerers are not healers and commonly cause pain and suffering.
The Two Realities
A basic assumption in shamanism is that there
are two realities, and the perception of each depends upon one’s state of
consciousness. This assumption is explicit in core
shamanism but usually is implicit in indigenous shamanism, where there is commonly
not as much interest in
a disciplined distinction between realities. Indeed, some indigenous shamans I
have known seemed to enjoy the drama and romance of a blurring between
realities.
Shamans access another reality especially in
order to work with helping spirits to heal, divine, and accomplish other tasks
for their patients and clients. This other reality is accessed by entering the
shamanic state of consciousness (SSC), as I described in The Way of the Shaman. The SSC can range
from light to deep and is most commonly entered temporarily with the help of
auditory driving.
Those in the ordinary state of consciousness
(OSC) perceive ordinary reality (OR); those in the SSC are able to enter into
and perceive nonordinary reality (NOR). These states are both called realities
because each is empirically encountered and has its own forms of knowledge
and relevance to human existence.
NOR is not a consensual reality, and indeed if
it were, shamanic practitioners would have no function, for it is their
responsibility to perceive successfully what others do not. One of the
distinguishing characteristics of the shamanic practitioner is the ability to
move back and forth at will between these realities with discipline and purpose
in order to heal and help others.
“Seeing” in Shamanism
“Seeing” is an important aspect of shamanism
and shamanic journeying. As Eliade remarks, “‘Seeing’ a spirit … is a certain
sign that one has in some sort obtained a ‘spiritual condition,’ that is, that
one has transcended the profane condition of humanity.” The word “seer” in
English may refer to the ancient European shamans, those who were “see-ers.”
Similarly, the Matsigenka Indians of the Upper Amazon call a shaman one “who
sees.” At the same time, “seeing” is a gloss in shamanism for more than
visualizing, for it refers to perceiving with all the senses, including
hearing, touch, smell, and taste.
Shamans differ from those who believe in
spirits, because they know from firsthand experience that spirits exist. They
see the spirits, touch them, hear them, smell them, and converse with them.
This is why in many tribal societies around the world, the shaman is referred
to not only as “one who sees” but also as “one who knows,” or as a “person of
knowledge.” Shamans no more believe spirits exist than you believe your family,
friends, and acquaintances exist. You know your family, friends, and
acquaintances exist because you talk and otherwise interact with them daily.
Similarly, shamans know spirits exist because they interact with them daily or,
more often, nightly, for it is usually easier to see spirits in darkness. Also,
darkness is an important medium for identifying spirits, for it eliminates the
possibility of confusing them with the ordinary images of daylight reality.
The familiar concept
of the “third eye” from Eastern spiritual practices crops
up elsewhere. It is often known among Australian aboriginals, for example, as
the “strong eye,” located similarly in the center of the forehead. Sometimes
a quartz crystal, a uniquely important stone crossculturally in shamanism, is
pressed into that center to help the beginning shaman see shamanically more
clearly. In former times, a Paviotso shaman in America could carry a quartz
crystal on the cave power quest described in Chapter 1 so as to be able
afterward to “see through anything.” The seeing of shamans is not restricted to
perceiving in darkness but commonly extends to seeing through things that in
ordinary reality appear to most people as opaque. In shamanic extraction healing
work, one sees or senses the illness within the sick person.
A power to “see through anything” is a common
feature of shamanic experience. This power brings its own light to penetrate
darkness and matter, as Knud Rasmussen notes for the Iglulik Eskimo:
“The first time a young shaman experiences
this light, while sitting up on the bench [in the darkened igloo] invoking his
helping spirits, it is as if the house in which he is suddenly rises; he sees
far ahead of him, through mountains, exactly as if the earth were one great
plain, and his eyes could reach the end of the earth. Nothing is hidden from
him any longer.”
In shamanism, “seeing” also involves seeing
with the heart, or knowing in your heart that what you are perceiving is truth.
This emotional certainty is fundamental to the experience of direct revelation
and is one of the features that usually characterize shamanic seeing.
In 1968 I was discussing shamanic seeing with
French ethnologist Jacques Lemoine, a specialist in the shamanism of the Hmong
peoples of Laos. Although an outstanding fieldworker, he had never asked the
shamans if they saw images, because they had already told him that they “saw
with the heart.” Therefore he assumed that no visual perception was involved. I
urged him to interview one of his Hmong shaman friends further. Sure enough, a
few months later he reported that they did indeed see images with their closed
and covered eyes when they were doing their journeys and other work, and that
they still said they saw with the heart, simply because emotional certainty was
part of their direct revelations. Such an emotional certainty is also necessary
for successful work in Western shamanic healing.
Are Shamans Born or
Made?
For the Westerner, it is easy to assume that
shamans practice their profession full-time. In fact, however, shamans usually
spend most of their time doing ordinary work such as farming or hunting, food
gathering and processing, and child-rearing. In the evenings, and upon request,
they journey and do other shamanic work in a disciplined and controlled way. Their
spiritual work in an altered state of consciousness is very intense. It is not
possible even to eat a meal when doing it. So it is inconceivable that one
could be working in this kind of altered state of consciousness all day on a
regular basis. Shamans must be part-timers.
Persons may become shamans in many different
ways. In Siberia, for example, shamans might inherit the power and knowledge
through their families. Elsewhere in Siberia, and in some places in native
South America, persons might suffer a serious illness, such as smallpox, and be
expected to die but then have a miraculous recovery. Or perhaps it was a freak
accident like a lightning strike that one survived. When such a thing happened,
the community members characteristically concluded that healing power had come
to save the person. They then sometimes asked the power-blessed person, upon
recovery, to help heal someone else who was sick. The recovered person, even if
unsure of his or her ability, could hardly refuse relatives and friends in
need. If, in response, he or she successfully intervened, a shaman could be
born.
In some indigenous societies, children were
watched to see if they showed signs of being directly in touch with the
spiritual realms, such as when they spontaneously sang a song apparently
received from the spirits, as among the Pomo of Native California. If such
signs occurred, then the children’s healing powers might be tested by the
adults. However, even in such cases the child was rarely recognized as a
full-fledged shaman until becoming an adult. Shamanic practitioners worldwide
were typically mature adults, usually with their own children.
In certain cultures, it was quite common to
pay an established shaman for training. For example, East Greenland Eskimo
shamans usually had several paid teachers. Among the Shuar in eastern Ecuador,
the only known way to become a shaman is to buy the power, in the form of
spirit helpers, from another shaman. The usual payment in the 1950s was in
shuar kuit, or “Indian valuables.” To pay a well-known shaman for a weeklong
period of training and power transmission, a man might have to spend two or
three years amassing enough feather headdresses, blowguns, curare blowgun dart
poison, perhaps a hunting dog, and maybe even a muzzle-loading shotgun. Today
shamanism remains strong among the Shuar, but the payment is usually in major
amounts of Ecuadorian currency.
There are other ways, too, that one may become
a shaman. In the Conibo tribe of eastern Peru,
for example, the beginner, under the guidance of a shaman, may learn primarily
from the spirit of a tall sacred tree (the ceiba). In the old days among Inuit
of the Arctic, usually one of the most valued ways to become a shaman was to be
initiated by the spirits in extreme isolation while suffering. To achieve this,
an apprentice, under the supervision of a shaman, might spend days alone in a
miniature igloo in the dead of winter without any heat, light, food, and little
or no water, until the spirits brought enlightenment and healing power.
Perhaps one of the most mysterious and
distinctive ways of becoming a shaman has been through experiencing the
dismemberment of one’s body in an altered state of consciousness. Accounts of
this kind of initiatory experience are relatively common among Siberian tribes
and Aboriginal Australian people. Later we will examine this important type of
shamanic experience and its significance (see Chapter 11).
While there are many ways to become a shaman,
how is not as important as the strength of the helping spirits supporting a
person. In other words, the crucial issue is not whether one pays a shaman, as
among the Shuar, or almost starves and freezes to death in isolated darkness on
the ice, as among some Inuit in the days before missionization. Rather, the issue
can be stated very simply: does one’s shamanic work produce successful results
for those who ask for help? If such results come, it matters little how or
where one trained, or if one trained at all in a formal sense, for the people
will recognize him or her as a shaman. Shamans are known by their works, and
the ultimate judgment is by those on whose behalf they work for healing,
divination, and other purposes.
Shamans, Priests, and
Shaman-Priests
Shamans need to be distinguished from priests.
Priests, whether tribal priests or those of the major civilizations, typically
lead ceremonies involving extended traditional liturgies and rituals that
should be performed in a specified manner, with emphasis on prayer in honor of
the spirits and gods. The ideal is to perform the public ritual perfectly
without the slightest deviation in detail of prayer or offering.
Such rituals can be beautiful and emotionally
moving, but they are not shamanism. While shamans can and do make prayers and
offerings, shamanism is very much a revelatory activity in which the shaman
moves from this reality to another. There are, of course, cultures in which
individuals do both priestly and shamanic work. These persons are
shamanpriests. The mara’akame of the Huichol Indians of northwestern Mexico are
an example of such individuals. To become a mara’akame, one must spend years
learning the priestly liturgies perfectly, as priests must do in other
traditions. At the same time, the mara’akame learns to change consciousness and
journey with the aid of the native hallucinogens, usually peyote or
datura. Some mara’akame are more priests than shamans, and others are more
shamans than priests, but they typically can act as both.
The medicine men and women of the Plains
tribes of native North America likewise can be most accurately considered
shaman-priests. Through the vision quest, the purification lodge, and other
consciousness changing practices and rituals, they learn to interact directly
with the spirits, often in darkness. In addition, they learn detailed
traditional public rites and prayers in order to honor the spirits recognized
by the society. This normally takes years of training to perform correctly.
Direct revelation is thus balanced simultaneously with ceremonial leadership in
a ritual.
Whether a specific medicine man or woman can
be defined technically as a shaman depends heavily on their direct interaction
with the spirits and partly upon whether they make journeys in an altered state
of consciousness. Such journeying among Plains peoples is often a very subtle
thing that cannot be easily recognized by an outsider, and is done most
commonly in the Middle World. In the case of any specific medicine man or
woman, it might take years for an outsider to discover whether that person
makes such journeys and, if they do, whether they sometimes go beyond our
Middle World.
My intent in distinguishing between indigenous
priests and shamans is not to make invidious comparisons, for the work done by
each has its own traditional value to the community. The differences, however,
ought to be kept in mind, because it would be confusing and misleading if the
meaning of “shaman” were to become blurred.
Shamans and Mediums
There are many specialized shamanic practices.
Mediumship (or “channeling”) is a significant example. In mediumship a helping
spirit (or “guide”) comes to the medium, who, after entering an altered state
of consciousness and relinquishing control, voluntarily embodies it. Shamans do
this, too, to varying degrees, depending upon the needs of the situation. Doing
this in shamanism goes by various names, such as voluntary possession, merging,
union, or embodiment. In indigenous shamanism, the spirit merging with the
shaman is often considered to be a god, goddess, or ancestor. In contrast to my
position decades ago, I now acknowledge mediumship as an important aspect of
shamanic practice. However, if a medium does no other kind of shamanic work, it
is hard to call it full shamanism. Nineteenth-century British mediumship comes
to mind as studied and described by Alfred Russel Wallace.
Full shamans can invite a helping spirit to
speak through them, answering questions, but the merging is more commonly done
to bring power into the shaman to heal others. Even more distinct from
mediumship is the journey of shamans to visit other worlds. The spirits who
help the shamans on journeys are not called “guides,” because that is really a
mediumistic term and can be confused in full shamanism with spirit animals, who
may simply guide a person from one place to another on a shamanic journey.
If deep in an altered state of consciousness,
the fully merged shaman here in the Middle World can be relatively unconscious
of what the embodied spirit is communicating, or doing, through him or her. In
contrast, the journeying shaman is usually quite aware of what is happening
(except in a reconstructed Sami method) and attempts to remember as many
details of the journey experience as possible. Thus the shaman normally can
later relate to others in detail what took place in a spirit world, whereas a
shaman who has consciously “stepped aside” to facilitate mediumistic
communication often emerges from the altered state with limited memory, if any,
of what transpired.
While the shamanic journey is
seen as the most distinguishing feature of shamanism, most experienced shamans
include in their practice degrees of mediumship, voluntary possession, merging,
and embodiment, and they can be very important parts of their work. This is
particularly true when shamans bring back a helping spirit to heal a patient or
to answer questions through the shaman.
The concept of the two realities is useful in
understanding the subtle distinction between “merging” and “embodiment.” In
nonordinary reality the shaman’s spirit, or soul, may merge or engage in union
with another spirit in another world, without involving the body of the shaman
remaining in the Middle World. Thus, it is not “embodiment.” However, if those
spirits join together in the shaman’s body here in the Middle World, as in
mediumistic work or certain kinds of shamanic healing, that can be called
“embodiment,” although at a deeper level it still is a form of merging or union
of the shaman’s own spirit or soul and another.
Depending on the indigenous culture, a person
who does only mediumship may be considered a shaman, as often is the case in
Korea and parts of Southeast Asia. I have changed my earlier position on this,
but nonetheless they do not appear to be full shamans. In Japan, women who are
mediums specialize in being possessed by the spirits of the dead in order to
help them communicate with the living. I have not read reports that they heal
their clients otherwise. If they do not, then they probably should not be
called shamans.
The reasons for such limited or truncated
shaman-like work appear lost in the mists of history. What is clear is that
historical factors have greatly affected what survives as shamanism.
Material Aspects of
Shamanism
Indigenous peoples supply shamans and their
families with food and other assistance in order to reciprocate their
divinatory, healing, and other services. Shamans who help their people do not
need to worry about their families going hungry. Because tribal reciprocity is
more subtle than the impersonal cash exchanges of our market economy, some
Westerners mistakenly have assumed that shamans do not get paid for their work,
especially since such reciprocity is not mentioned publicly.
By way of illustration, I once took members of
a Plains Indian medicine men’s society to an international healing conference
in Austria. Most of these medicine men had never done their sacred work off the
reservation. At the international conference, before conducting a mass healing
session, the medicine men made speeches of the type they gave on the
reservation to their people. As on the reservation, they were careful to
declaim, “We do not accept payment for this work.”
After these speeches were made to the
Europeans, the medicine men produced a profoundly impressive traditional
healing session in utter darkness. When it was over and the lights came on, the
audience was obviously awed and impressed. They trooped out of the room in
silent respect but without leaving a single gift, having taken the holy men at
their word.
What the European audience did not understand
was that, among the medicine men’s people, their speeches about not accepting
payment were to make clear that their healing work was not done to acquire
cash, and that their healing services were available to all, rich and poor.
Nonetheless, on the reservation after such a healing session, almost everyone
tried to leave some sort of gift behind. These gifts were usually symbolic
offerings such as tobacco but often included envelopes containing significant
amounts of money, given especially by the families of the patients.
For the medicine men, the failure of the
Europeans to leave gifts so shocked them that they refused to do another healing
session the rest of the month they were scheduled to stay in Europe. Instead,
they mainly watched television, especially Western movies, in their hotel rooms
until time to return to America.
One reason I share this story is that today in
contemporary Western circles there can be a certain romantic idealism about the
material side of shamanism-sometimes to such a degree that Westerners may look
askance at anyone who accepts payment, other than a pouch of tobacco, for
shamanic services. They should know that today among Native Americans of the
Northwest Coast, it is not unusual for a person to leave a gift of a hundred
dollars or more for a healing session of two hours by an outstanding shaman,
with money being shared by the shaman and the assisting drummers. Similarly,
among the Mono-Yokuts people of Native California in the early twentieth
century, shamans were commonly given gifts of thirty to fifty dollars per
healing session, the equivalent at that time of at least one or two weeks’ pay
for a farm laborer.
Repayment of obligations takes different forms
in different societies, but it takes place nonetheless. In a few tribal
societies, shamans may explicitly specify how much is to be paid in exchange
for their services. Among the Shuar people of the Upper Amazon, the payment for
a healing to an outstanding shaman traditionally was a pig, featherwork, a
blowgun, a shotgun, or a combination of these. If the shaman had to travel to a
patient in a distant neighborhood, often payment was required in advance!
What is important is that matters of material
reward not be on the minds of shamans, for such preoccupations can interfere
with their necessary concentration on working generously and compassionately
with the spirits to help others. Similarly, to mention payments to shamans can
interfere with their being helped by compassionate spirits in the healing work.
The Spiritual Rewards
of Shamanism
Tribal shamans may seem to work long hours.
When the sun sets, their day’s ordinary chores done, they then have shamanic
tasks to undertake in their community. The work at times can appear quite
strenuous, involving several hours of dancing, drumming, and other physical
activity, as in Siberia.
In some parts of the indigenous world,
well-known shamans may also be requested to make distant “house calls,”
requiring them to walk, paddle, or ride horseback (or reindeer-back)
significant distances to visit infirm patients, although more frequently
patients and clients come to visit the shamans.
The shamans’ arduous routines and the
ceaseless demands of their communities have led some Western observers to
wonder why anyone would want to shamanize. Indeed, it is common even for many
younger relatives of a tribal shaman to express the disinclination to become a
shaman, for fear that their lives would not be their own.
Nevertheless, for millennia persons have
become shamans. To explain this, some anthropologists have proposed that
individuals become shamans in order to acquire social power and prestige. Such
factors can, of course, sometimes be involved, along with the pursuit of
wealth, as is the case with some Shuar in Ecuador. But looking at shamanism
crossculturally and from the inside, economic and social factors are not
particularly important, for there are far greater nonmaterial rewards. What
the outsiders miss, not having experiential knowledge of shamanism, is
the great
spiritual joy and ecstasy one commonly experiences working with
the spirits and helping others who are suffering or in pain.
How Safe Is Shamanism?
In my opinion, it is unsafe not to know
shamanism. Virtually all humans have unconscious connections with spirits, but
the vast majority of Westerners lack conscious knowledge of them and thus fail
to employ them to help and protect themselves. In addition, they may use them
unknowingly in nonordinary ways that may be harmful to others.
For example, New York City or any major urban
area is a shaman’s nightmare. There we have millions of people crowded
together, often tense and under stress, commonly experiencing ungenerous
feelings toward others but without any awareness or control of their power to
harm others on a spiritual level. When a cartoonist draws someone “looking
daggers” at someone else, it is a metaphor for the spiritual harm that people
can wreak on others. Through shamanic knowledge and training, one can bring
full awareness to such power so as to help, not hurt, others.
Shamans all over the world know that deep
feelings of hostility toward another person can result in that other person
becoming seriously ill. Knowing this, shamans (not sorcerers) can exercise
consciousness and discipline to control the nonordinary, or spiritual, side of
their anger, only venting the ordinary side. In this way, wise and experienced
shamans carefully keep their spiritual powers under control to protect the
object of their anger from psychic or spiritual damage.
Such shamanic self-control is not just
altruistic. In shamanic cultures, it is well known that shamans can harm as
well as heal; but it is also known that doing harm spiritually is a very
serious mistake-not just because of ethics but because it is suicidal. In the
folk wisdom of tribal societies around the world, it is taught that harmful
shamanic acts, or sorcery, sooner or later backfire onto the perpetrator with a
multiplier effect.
Conversely, the multiplier effect that
punishes shamans “gone bad” rewards those who focus their abilities on
alleviating human suffering. When shamans generously use their power to heal
others, the compassionate spirits usually give them even more power and help
them advance on this path.
Some Difficult Spirits
of Our World
The Middle World, our home, has a complex
assortment of spirits, many of which unfortunately have limited compassion, or
none at all, and can even be the source of illness and trouble. Others can be
positive beings, as are many nature
spirits, and helpers, most famously the power animal,
a spirit type that we will discuss shortly.
Here I will offer only brief sketches of some
problematical Middle World spirits, since they are not the focus of this book.
Quasi-Compassionate
Ethnocentric Spirits
Some spirits of deceased persons have
significant determination and power to remain in the Middle World to look after
their surviving family members. They are typically the spirits of people who
possessed considerable power during their lifetime but lost it, usually very
late in life. The deceased person’s power spirit usually lingers in the Middle
World in haunts that had long been familiar to it. This is the kind of spirit
that my Shuar companions were depending upon to protect them at that river crossing.
It is also the kind of power spirit that
traditional Inuit, for example, sought for their children by giving them the
name of a deceased relative that they admired for hunting and other
manifestations of power. By bestowing the name upon a child, they hoped to
attract the same power to the child for his or her adult life.
These quasi-compassionate ethnocentric spirits
usually provide power and protection only to their own descendants. As their
intent is to protect and help their own successive generations, they
are not fully compassionate in the sense that they may also undertake hostile
action against outsiders who seem to threaten their descendants, their sacred
places and objects, and their interests. In other words, they are both
compassionate and hostile, depending upon with whom they are dealing.
An Illustration: The
Shuar (JÃvaro)
Until the spiritual culture of the Shuar
significantly deteriorated during the last half of the twentieth century under
the impact of missionization and colonization, they sought the power of an
ancestor to make them resistant to illness and misfortune, and to avoid being
killed in a hostile world of feuds and warfare. In short, the power was to
ensure deserving descendants a long life. Young men would seek power at distant
sacred waterfalls, while the women sought their power spirits within the
shelter of small lean-tos in the forest close to their homes. Both genders used
hallucinogens to help them perceive the spirits.
As the
men were the warriors, the power was considered especially
important for their protection and success against enemies. There were two
stages to the male Shuar’s classic vision or power quest-the first one was the
vision itself, the arutam, usually at a sacred waterfall. As I described in my
book The JÃvaro, the power seeker suffered from hunger, exhaustion, and cold
prior to getting a vision at a remote waterfall. If the suffering pilgrim was
successful, a typically frightening vision came for a few seconds and tested
the person’s bravery and seriousness of purpose. The second part of this quest
usually occurred the next night during the questing person’s descent from the
waterfall. At that time, the person slept beside the rapid of a river and hoped
for a dream, which was the real transmission of the power.
If the dream came, it mostly was in the form
of an appearance by a Shuar warrior, in traditional tribal dress, who spoke to
the dreamer more or less in this fashion: “I am your ancestor. Just as I have
killed many times, so will you. Just as I have lived a long time, so will you.”
Immediately a feeling of power permeated the body of the dreamer, who usually
then awoke, feeling an urge to kill.
These local ancestral spirits were expected by
the Shuar not only to give them strength and well-being, but also to give them
power in killing their families’ enemies. These ethnocentric spirits were those
of persons who before or after dying resolved to continue to protect their
descendants. They retained the Middle World prejudices they nourished when
alive, so their compassion was mixed with hostility and even vengeance.
However, as I learned living with the Shuar,
an outsider does not necessarily have to be a descendant to come under the
protection of an ethnocentric power if the outsider has been helping its
descendants. This may help explain my success at the waterfall and, years
later, at the cave. Even so, the spirit’s protective power can be subsequently
taken away from strangers, and even descendants, who behave in ways that do not
honor the ancestor. Not only may these ethnocentric spirits take away the
protective power, they may even exact vengeance on outsiders who have failed to
protect sacred objects and places where the ancestral spirits reside.
The Example of the
Nganasan Idol
A possible example of the vengeful side of a
quasi-compassionate ethnocentric power is the main spiritual protector of the
Nganasan people of western Siberia. This spirit is considered to be merged with
an impressive carved anthropomorphic wooden figure (see Plate 5). The Nganasan
have traditionally treated the figure with extreme reverence, leaving it in the
care of a shaman with the responsibility of keeping the spirit content by
communicating with it and making offerings.
As with other ethnocentric spirits, its
compassion does not usually extend to outsiders, and especially not to tribes
that have been enemies of the Nganasan. When going into battle against other
tribes, the Nganasan carried this wooden image on a special sled, which seems
somewhat analogous to the sacred ark that the ancient Hebrews carried into
battle.
This wooden carving was of unknown age among
the Nganasan, but certainly very old. It had a difficult history during the
last couple of centuries, having been stolen from the Nganasan at least once
and later recovered. In the mid-twentieth century it was in the care of the
most famous Nganasan shaman, but, being old, he was worried about what would
happen to it after he died. So he passed it on to a friend, the Russian
ethnologist Yuri Simchenko, for safekeeping at his apartment in Moscow in order
that it would not fall into the wrong hands.
In the 1980s, during a period of social and
economic upheaval in the then Soviet Union, food became scarce in Moscow, and
Yuri Simchenko soon was desperate for funds to feed his family. He contacted a
visiting Finnish ethnologist to see if the Nganasan figure could be sold in the
West to get some money for food. Heimo Lappalainen agreed to help and smuggled
the carving out of Russia. Heimo, a friend and colleague, then contacted me,
explaining how he needed to sell it at Yuri’s request, and told me Simchenko’s
price.
Heimo and I agreed that we did not want to let
the object be lost by selling it on the open market. So money was found to buy
the carving from Yuri for the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. On behalf of the
Foundation, I kept it in our home, covered and stored in a safe place. My
intention was to return the power object to the Nganasan people when the
political and economic situations in the former Soviet Union settled down and
made it safe to do so. I treated it with respect and care, offering the image
tastes of foods that I presumed the Nganasan people ate, and making assurances
that I would get it home. I had long since concluded that spirits were real.
Then I noted that a curious series of
fatalities occurred as the “idol” was taken farther and farther away from its
own people. First the Nganasan shaman, Seime, died soon after turning over the
figure to Yuri Simchenko. Then when Simchenko transferred the figure to Heimo
Lappalainen to take to Finland, Simchenko died, and then when Heimo left the
figure with me in America and returned to Finland, he died as well. Needless to
say, this chain of events had a healthy effect on my conscientiousness, and I
mentally elevated the spirit to deity-status just to be on the safe side. Over
the subsequent years I kept giving it traditional offerings.
Finally, a few years ago, after many
difficulties and false starts in Russia, the Foundation was able to return the
object successfully to the Nganasan people through a meeting and ceremonial
exchange at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. There Dr. Bill Brunton
of the Foundation turned it over to a representative of the Nganasan people
who, with her companions, was to take the idol back to Siberia. Bill noted that
she was observably nervous and trembling as she accepted the power object,
spoke to it, and gave it offerings. She and her entourage later reported,
apparently with some relief, that their trip home to Siberia had gone amazingly
well. For my part, I’m happy to relate that by all accounts, Bill Brunton and I
both are still alive.
The Amoral Spirits and
Sorcery
Among important spirits of the Middle World
are the amoral powers, who lack even the narrow compassion of the ethnocentric
spirits. Use of these powers to affect the lives of others without their
permission is a symptom of sorcery.
These amoral spirits, whose effective realm is
the Middle World, include the spirits of elements and the spirits of certain
small objects and creatures, such as the tsentsak of the Shuar, which are
“bribed” with tobacco to do whatever their “master” wishes, whether a shaman or
a sorcerer.
A form of sorcery once common in Europe
involves the use of the spirits of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and
water, all of which are amoral. Wood, an Asian-named fifth element, can also
play a (usually less recognized) role.
A present-day European survival of such
sorcery was described to me by an Irish woman whose grandmother taught her how
to “source” the elements to provide her with their power by rubbing dirt from
the garden (earth) or charcoal (fire) from the fireplace on the forehead. (One
could speculate that this “sourcery” may be the origin of the English word
“sorcery,” despite the slight variation in spelling.)
Being amoral, the spirits of the elements lack
compassion and simply provide power to reinforce whatever a sorcerer is
attempting to do, whether for good or bad. Using these Middle World spirits, a
sorcerer is tempted to affect and even damage other people’s lives, quite in
contrast to the ethics of core shamanism, which emphasize the help of the
transcended compassionate spirits dwelling in the Upper or Lower Worlds. If a
shaman were for some reason to “go bad” and attempt to cause pain and suffering
to another person or being, such compassionate spirits typically take back the
powers they had lent to the shaman. Once this happens, the now powerless person
is no longer able to heal others and, without the protection of that power, may
become seriously ill or die if in a society where sorcery is prevalent.
A Classic Case of
Sorcery: The Shuar Again
The Shuar (JÃvaro) provide a good example of
troubles that can occur when shamans are limited to the Middle World, as I
first learned among them more than half a century ago. Working with Middle
World spirits is both complicated and dangerous, and this was the world of the
Shuar shamans. They did not ascend to the Upper World and went only a very
short distance toward the Lower World-that is, only into the lakes and the
rivers. A society that is thus limited to Middle World spirits tends to be
strong on bewitching (sorcery). I shall use the past tense in writing about
their practices, although I learn from visiting Shuar that much of what I
describe still continues covertly. Overt bloodshed, however, is said to have
declined due to the intervention of the Ecuadorian police.
Among the Shuar during my time in the field,
this situation was aggravated by a strong spiritual dependence on an amoral
spirit, the
element water, which was implicitly emphasized as an
underlying source of power. Rather than being sourced directly, as in the Irish
case cited earlier, it was the common denominator of some of the most powerful
spirits, including the local ancestors dwelling at the sacred waterfalls; the
first and eternal shaman, Tsunki, dwelling underwater; and the boa constrictor
in the lagoons. Shamans worked with such spirits to indirectly source the power
of water.
Shuar shamans worked with other amoral spirits
besides those of the elements. Both the good and bad shamans typically had
small helping spirits, such as those of insects, snakes, and thorns that,
depending on the type, were usually called tsentsak or tunchi. The “good” or
healing shamans used them for curing patients, while the “bad” shamans employed
them for bewitching.
Both these types were quite amoral and ready
to be “bribed” by the shamans to help them. The tsentsak and tunchi spirits love
tobacco, so shamans attracted and retained their services by ingesting an
infusion of green-tobacco-leaf water day and night to feed and keep them merged
with the shaman’s body.
Almost all Shuar shamans kept the spirits of
these small helpers merged with their bodies not only to assist them in healing
patients, but also to protect themselves from attacks by wawek or yahauchï
uwishin (shamans “gone bad” who became sorcerers). For example, the tsentsak
could gather together as shields to protect their “masters” when incoming
tsentsak and tunchi “missiles” were sent by sorcerers to kill or seriously
injure them.
The Shuar were formerly involved in long and
bloody feuds. In the course of those armed conflicts, shamans would
understandably get angry at the murderer of a family member or close relative.
Some, unable to control their anger, would then use their power to retaliate
shamanically against the perpetrator.
This was considered a big mistake, and shamans
who did this were known, even to their close relatives, as having become “bad”
shamans or wawek, in recognition of the fact that they had not only deviated
from the shamanic ideal of helping to alleviate suffering and pain, but were
also working in the opposite way.
If they engaged in spiritually hostile acts
against a relative, they could anger a common ethnocentric ancestral spirit
attempting to guard its descendants. Consequently, the spirit could be expected
to remove its power from such a shaman, with only the “perfume” of the power
remaining and then continually dwindling.
When the power had completely vanished, such
persons were shamans no more. They now became victims of their own acts, for
they had lost their protective power. Reportedly in a year and a half or less,
they were expected to meet calamitous and painful deaths, such as by sorcerers
and other enemies. Beyond the Shuar, and in general, such sorcery has a
karmic-like effect that eventually hurts or kills the sorcerer.
The Suffering Beings
Also in the Middle World are the spirits of
deceased persons who are involuntarily here, unlike quasi-compassionate
ethnocentric spirits that have chosen to remain. They normally do not have much
power but still can be a widespread source of illness.
These spirits most commonly do not know that
they are dead, and they are aware that they are lonely and usually unhappy. For
this reason, they are often called “suffering beings,” or sometimes “wandering”
or “lost” souls. In their unhappiness, they may seek to enter a living person’s
body/mind or simply be hovering close to that person. In doing so, they
typically reinforce the illusion that they are still alive, as they have merged
with or attached to the living person. They not only can influence dreams, but
the “memories of those deceased beings may become confused with the dreams of
the living person, with the result that living persons may assume erroneously
that they are having their own past-life
experiences.”
The person who is subjected to such an
influence will not only be affected in dreams. In more extreme cases, he or she
can become confused to the point of being unable to continue to function
adequately as a member of society. Thus, troubles of a spirit nature can have
serious repercussions in a person’s health and community life. It is the task of
the shaman, when requested, to heal such persons with spiritual help.
Copyright © 2013 by
The Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Reprinted by permission of publisher.
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