Shamanism is about the shaman controlling the spirits. A shaman therefore takes the initiative in visiting spirits in their world. The shaman's chief role is to focus the psychic power of the community onto the positive aims of health, strength, and fertility and the restating of control over the forces of the supernatural. In this way they can influence the outcome of illnesses, wars, and hunting expeditions, all of which they see as controlled by the spirits of the other, parallel reality.  Shamanistic societies are found from inner Asia and Russia, through Oceania and Indonesia to the Americans, although many of these societies are now in decline. Although shamanism is spread widely across the globe, through quite dissimilar culture, the practices are usually remarkably similar. Signs of the existence of shamans go back as far as the prehistoric Palaeolithic period, where they are linked to the all-important world of the hunt. The walls of the French caves of Les Trois Freres, for example, have 15,000 year-old paintings showing a shaman dancing among the bison with a hunting bow - an image familiar today among Shamanistic hunting peoples. In the caves at Lascaux, other Palaeolithic wall paintings show entranced shamans with bison. More recent rock carvings in the former USSR, dated 5000 BCE, show a shaman dancing, wearing a mask and playing a drum. In hunting societies the humans are dependent on the animals for their survival and need somehow to be in contact. Shamans are the only beings able to straddle both worlds, to locate the powers they need to influence them. Through them the animals may be appeased and controlled, persuaded to give up their lives for the sake of the hunters.
Whenever things go wrong - illness, accident, poor hunting, bad relations with neighbours - the shaman is the person who can put it right. His role is vital in several areas. Illness, for example, is thought in many Shamanistic societies to be caused by the loss of the victim's soul, caused either by the spirits or the manipulations of a sorcerer. Only the shaman can locate the soul during his journeys to the world of the spirits, and arrange for its restoration. Likewise only he is able to find and remove objects which may have entered the victim's body to cause it harm. When he visits the spirit world, he can talk to the animal powers to discover the movement of game, persuade game into his group's area, influence the weather, and predict future events. The Shaman's acquiring of knowledge and its practice are no easy or pleasant matter - shamans are both born and made. Potential shamans often reveal their sense of difference during adolescence when they become solitary and have visions The Siberian Chukchee people describe a certain look in the eye of young shaman - a far-seeing brightness that indicates a heightened visionary gift. During the period of transition and training, the shaman is effectively remade. During trances he journeys to the spirit world and is destroyed there. The visions and experiences of this time are terrifying. He may be decapitated, dismembered, burned, and generally reduced to a skeleton, his human characteristics erased. Then he is reconstructed by the spirits, his body renewed but altered, his mind strengthened by the tests he has survived. He learns the geography of the spirit world and talks to the dead, and discovers how to move, through ecstatic trance, between the two worlds. There are traditional lore and poetry to learn and magical techniques to perfect. To function successfully, the shaman must know how to negotiate the paths which will deliver him safely to and from the spirit world. One interesting point is that Shamanistic accounts of the other world are remarkably consistent across cultures, centring on the place of the human world in the universe. So far as Shamanistic healing goes, in the words of an elderly Navaho healer, "the most important thing I learned from my grandfathers was that there is the part that is most important in whether we become sick or remain well". Shamanistic cures are not satisfactorily explained by Western science, although there are some interesting parallels between Shamanistic models of sickness and the most recent medical thinking. Shamans visualise illness as an intrusion, permitted by a loss of personal power, much illness is now seen as a breakdown in immunity. They direct their efforts to discovering the reasons for the weakness, and re-establishing the person's psychic defences. |
