Shamanism_and_Spirit.pdf

Shamanism and Spirit

taken from the Tungus of Siberia where it

means “spirit healer.” Shamanism, or working

with spirits, is found today in many parts of the

globe among people who live by what Lévy-

Bruhl, in , called “the law of mystical participation,” that

is, the sense of a spiritual connection that exists between

everyone and everything in the universe. Among such people,

shamanism is neither a religion nor a science, but an activity

in a world that is ordinary yet spiritual. It can be viewed as a

healing or helping technology — the technology of the sacred,

as it has been called — acts and experiences instead of a set of

beliefs or customs.

In the shamanic view, spiritual connections between

people are already in place and that is just how things are.

Such a sense still lingers on among hunter-gatherer peoples in

the Arctic, northern Asia, central Australia, around the

Pacific, and among Native Americans. Furthermore, shaman-

ism is now recognized to exist widely in Africa. All are cul-

tures in which corporate economies have less power.

To access the power that spirits can give, shamans make a

spirit journey. In times past, people drummed or sang, and the

music would become so powerful that shamans would lose the

ordinary sense of being present in the world. These people

would find themselves speeding along in a different world —

not a world created by the shaman’s imagination, because the

experience came to them — they were some place else.

Access to this different world could be gained beneath

the ordinary world, beneath the earth, under water or ice, or

reached high up on a mountain or in the clouds. The

shaman might encounter a spirit animal or an ancestor

spirit with knowledge of healing, both figures being helpers.

Over the course of such a journey, the helper could

empower the shaman to rescue the lost soul of a sufferer,

bringing it back to its owner.

The elements of shamanism are curiously similar

throughout the world. “Shaman” is a universal title for a per-

son who does such work, though “visionary” or “one who

experiences spirit events” would also describe the practi-

tioner, and those terms link shamanism to religion.

Mircea Eliade, who wrote what was, in the s, the

definitive treatise on shamanism, believed that what defines

a shaman is his ecstatic ascent to the sky or descent to the

underworld on mystic flights. Eliade shows there is often an

“entrance,” “door,” or “bridge” to these different realms, and

he also traces an interesting feature of shamanic initiation.

When a person first receives the call to be a shaman, he

or she experiences a vision in which his or her old, non-spir-

itual body is spiritually dismembered in some way and yet

brought together again in a new body with power — a

process known as “sparagmos.” This spiritual ordeal curi-

ously echoes the Biblical saying, “you must be born again.”

Later, in the s, Michael Harner, one of the present

world’s major authorities on shamanism, included a fre-

quently encountered commonality in his definition: the

assistance of a spirit helper, either animal or human.

Generally, shamanism provides powers that are greater

than the ordinary physical powers we possess in everyday

life. The following are the powers of a shaman: the hands-on

power to heal by removing harmful spirit stuff from the

body or restoring the body’s energy; the power to see in a

visionary manner into the body of a sick person; and the

power to retrieve the lost soul of the sick. Shamanism also

provides a kind of knowledge that is hard to describe, that of

a connection with animals, even help from an animal spirit;

it gives the sense of the presence of one’s ancestors or

friendly dead who come to give help.

A shaman while in a dream or on a spirit journey may

receive a vision of future events; shamanism may provide

knowledge of the whereabouts of lost things or persons,

along with the power to find them. Shamanism can oddly

alter the weather; give a person physical strength that seems

impossible; and curiously, give the power of bilocation, to

be in two places at once. It very often gives joy or makes

people laugh.

The sea-hunter’s umiak canoe. Ice still surrounds the village.

. . . ⁄

T “ ” derives from saman ,

kind of substance—then shamanic healing works. The ill-

ness or injury appears to be a spirit thing, offending inside

the body of the sufferer, telling lies to the afflicted person and

infecting her. These are not germs seen under a microscope,

but “spirit germs,” as it were, that one may sense. This heal-

ing story from the Iñupiat provides insight into this reality.

Dancing the eagle. The January Kivgiq ceremonies.

HEALING: THE SOUL’S JOURNEY

I listened in wonder to a story given by Clem, a whaling man

and a seer. (I have changed people’s names to preserve their

privacy.) It was the story of a sick man whose spirit was fail-

ing. In this story, it was the seals that healed. It may seem

strange that healing should come from humble animals, but it

was highly meaningful from the Iñupiat point of view.

Clem said, “A man was very sick. When he was about to

die, he found himself traveling under the sea ice to the

underwater house of the seals. When he came to the door of

the seal house, he went in by the double porch, the place

where people take off their parkas and hang them on pegs.”

Clem then pointed to his own double porch where rows of

parkas were hanging.

He continued, “The clothes hanging on the pegs in the

seal’s double porch were all sealskins. The man went inside.

He thought he was going to find seals without their skins, but

no, they were people .Underneath their skins, the seals were

people, sitting around in a circle. One of them had very long

ears. This was the seal-person who could hear everything that

went on in the village — you’ve heard of the Long-Eared One.

“The seal people took the man in and he stayed with them

for a whole year, learning shamanism. At the end of the year,

the seal people showed him the way back under the ice to his

house and said goodbye. He came to himself in his bed, quite

well, and found he’d only been away from home for one hour.”

This kind of experience has happened to others. The soul

sometimes travels when in extreme danger — and in our cul-

ture, we have heard of the near-death experience. Also, the

story attests to the fact that wisdom or skills may be imparted

in one great event.

One begins to understand why the Iñupiat hold seals in

reverence. In this ice-bound environment, hunters are con-

tinuously among wild animals, and they are dependent on the

generosity and self-sacrifice of animals in order to exist. Thus

the spirit power of the animals looms large, especially those of

seals, whales, and eagles.

It is a curious thing that before I ever came to Alaska, I

had a vivid shamanic message in which I saw a television

screen showing an animal’s internal organs. It was puzzling.

Ye t months later, ensconced in Clem’s house in northern

Alaska, I saw that animal in reality. It was a seal, and, in reality,

W ORKING AMONG THE IÑUPIAT

OF NORTHERN ALASKA

My own work on shamanism was among the Iñupiat of

northern Alaska. Shamanism with the Iñupiat does not

appear on the surface, but during my research of this Inuit

culture, I was able to trace many events that were shamanic

in character. Such spirit occurrences were a frequent source

of strength and healing to the Iñupiat. My main visit took

place from August to August . The shamanic events

that occured were each different, representing different

shamanic gifts. I have written about these experiences and

events in my book The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit

Presence among a Northern Alaska People .

Wherever shamanism is found, healing is a shaman’s

principal function, among his or her numerous roles. For

instance, among the Iñupiat, one has to see illness as some

Successful Iñupiat hunters drum and sing in the shelter of their whaling

boats

I was helping to open up its body for our food. I saw then the

selfsame sight I had seen on the dream television, the internal

organs. That earlier flash had been a predictive sight,

fortelling the future.

Seals, even dead and giving of themselves, have spirit

power. In order to be at one with their power, the Iñupiat

carve many beautiful seals in ivory, just as the Dordogne cave

artists in ancient days shaped their spirit animals on the cave

walls to activate their spiritual power.

A way to understand shamanism is to sense a kind of

medium in which all people live that liberates faculties that

are beyond the ordinary, a kind of medium that also makes

people permeable to each other. One understands this best

through stories of actual experience because, otherwise, the

power is hard to put into words. These stories demonstrate

both the sense of connectedness the Iñupiat share with

spirit animals and the power of experiencing spirits. They

are serious stories.

What then is the nature of the consciousness that can

develop in shamans when they are healing? When an Iñupiat

healer puts her hands on suffering human tissue, this is an act

of actual spiritual connection with the other. The sufferer

does not feel merely the hand’s pressure, nor does relief occur

only because the sufferer believes something will happen.

What happens is a phenomenom not much examined in

research, though those who experience this feeling know it

very well when it is in progress. It is a matter of connections.

People know they have connections with one another;

they are continually accessing the usual connections simply in

order to live. We “read” body language, we can even “read” love,

but in healing there is an extra charge, a kind of booster charge,

passing along through the healer’s hands. I have felt it myself.

That continuous, universal presence of connectedness

can carry energy and power from person to person, just as the

air carries our voices. Through this connectedness, people

receive the shaman’s powers. In most religions there is an

awareness of a spirit or power entity that intervenes and pro-

vides the gift (though rarely is this awareness found in the

philosophical or intellectual aspects of world religions). A

kind of connective spirit, then, exists that can join people, so

that a shaman can connect with others to heal.

Due to this spirit, a shaman may also be able to return

after death to help others and send unmistakable messages

when vitally needed; and in life, like a saint or the Delphic

oracle, may become conscious of purposes that flash

throughout the entire, all-connecting web. Awareness and

incorporation of these connections are more explicitly found

in folk religions, as well as in the experience and practice of

hunter-gatherer societies.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

My study among the Iñupiat was funded by a grant from the

We nner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I

am grateful for the kindness of the Arctic villagers and for the

support of colleagues at the University of Virginia. I am also

grateful to James and Mary McConnell for their generosity in

sending equipment for the research and gifts for the Arctic

villagers.

Edith Turner with her host’s baby.

, lecturer at the department of anthropology

at the University of Virginia, specializes in ritual, religion, heal-

ing, and aspects of consciousness including shamanism. She has

done fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia (healing and

divination), in rural Ireland (ritual, spiritual experience, and

healing), and in northern Alaska among the Iñupiat, where she

studied Eskimo healing and its relationship to shamanism.

Among her publications are “From Shamans to Healers: The

Survival of an Iñupiat Eskimo Skill,” “The Whale Decides:

Eskimos’ and Ethnographer’s Shared Consciousness on the Ice,”

and The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a

Northern Alaskan People .She is the editor of the journal

Anthropology and Humanism .

For Further Reading

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. How Natives Think . Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1985 [1910].

Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972 [1951].

Harner, Michael J. The Way of the Shaman . San Francisco, CA:

Harper and Row, 1980.

Turner, Edith. The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a

Northern Alaska People. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press,

1996.

. . . ⁄

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