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A review by andrueb
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Wendy Doniger, Willard R. Trask, Mircea Eliade
5.0
I read this book because I saw pictures of Siberian shamans from the 50's and I wanted to understand how people like this understand themselves. This book is great because it doesn't try to contextualize primitive shamanism through the lens of any particular religion or philosophy. Instead, it takes interviews and traditions of tribal shamans at face value and lets the reader decide what it all means.
I was surprised at the extent to which shamanic beliefs should be familiar to any contemporary religious person. It's as if the basic axioms of religion occur to all people in all places. It also seems to me that all people have a basic capacity for hallucination, some with more of a talent for it than others. It can be cultivated through harsh treatment of the body or drugs or mind control, but it's necessary for transcendent/phophetic/visionary elements of religion to germinate and prosper.
My favorite aspect of the book was the descriptions of how primitive shamanic societies handle mental illness. What we would call depressed/bipoloar/schizophrenic youth are identified and immediately placed in the care of an older shaman who himself/herself suffered the same symptoms as a young person. The young shaman-in-training isn't cured. Instead, he/she is taught a theory of mental illness. They learn the architecture of their internal pathology, and become masters of it. They are never well, but they become sick with purpose. For the rest of their lives, they tend to the mental/spiritual health of the tribe because they "know the way".
I was surprised at the extent to which shamanic beliefs should be familiar to any contemporary religious person. It's as if the basic axioms of religion occur to all people in all places. It also seems to me that all people have a basic capacity for hallucination, some with more of a talent for it than others. It can be cultivated through harsh treatment of the body or drugs or mind control, but it's necessary for transcendent/phophetic/visionary elements of religion to germinate and prosper.
My favorite aspect of the book was the descriptions of how primitive shamanic societies handle mental illness. What we would call depressed/bipoloar/schizophrenic youth are identified and immediately placed in the care of an older shaman who himself/herself suffered the same symptoms as a young person. The young shaman-in-training isn't cured. Instead, he/she is taught a theory of mental illness. They learn the architecture of their internal pathology, and become masters of it. They are never well, but they become sick with purpose. For the rest of their lives, they tend to the mental/spiritual health of the tribe because they "know the way".