Michael Harner,
Guest Writer
Waking Times
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 (Jívaro)
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
Jívaro, 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 (Jívaro) 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.
source- http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/05/08/our-world-shamans-and-spirits/
Christopher Coppes, Guest Writer
