Tag: shamanism

Shamanic residues in medieval Europe: a review of Ginzburg’s Ecstasies

 

In Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1989, tr. Raymond Rosenthal 1991, University of Chicago Press), Carlo Ginzburg argues that the practices of medieval witches in Europe, as testified to in the documentary evidence compiled by their persecutors, can best be understood in the light of shamanistic belief systems inherited or borrowed in ancient times from the central Asian steppe.

The work is certainly a tour de force, with an extraordinary breadth of reference, and it brings many interesting elements to light which on the whole support the author’s thesis. Nevertheless, there seem to me to be a number of problems of methodology and certainly a great deal of material (some of it, admittedly, unavailable to him) which Ginzburg does not employ and which deserve further consideration in a more complete reconstruction of the historical links between the phenomena in question. In this review I will therefore try to summarize Ginsburg’s argument as I see it, whilst attempting at the same time to suggest further avenues of research or alternative understandings.

The principal difficulty Ginzburg encounters, it seems to me, is a failure properly to delimit what he sees as the “shamanic” elements from other pagan traditions. The book lacks a framework interpreting the place of properly shamanic elements in ancient religion, whether it be Greek or Celtic. That Celtic religion and certain Greek and Roman ecstatic cults may owe a lot to shamanic precursors is easy to acknowledge, but these cults and others then took on a life of their own which is certainly more directly relevant to the phenomena we encounter in medieval Europe. This layer is absent or assumed away in Ginzburg’s account, making to my mind for a considerable amount of speculation and confusion.

This is evident for example in his account of the reconstructed prototype of the shamanic journey to the “world of the dead”. This concept is indeed reminiscent of the somewhat sinister reinterpretation of the underworld in Greek religion and may represent an Indo-European type (borrowed into Christianity in medieval times only as the notion of purgatory); but it is certainly far removed from the understanding which would have characterized, and still characterizes to this day, nomadic shamanism in central Asia. The same is true of blood sacrifices, which cross-culturally characterize organized religion, but not shamanic practice. The same is true of sexual specialization in the ritual context. Many elements present in the strata uncovered by Ginzburg are therefore more suggestive of survivals of Indo-European religion (that is, of the religion of settled agricultural societies) than of shamanism as such. This would have benefited from clarification and greater rigor.

Ginzburg’s treatment of the role of psychoactive substances in medieval witchcraft appears as much of an afterthought, as a result of which he forgoes a number of interesting lines of enquiry. Drawing substantially on Eliade, he certainly sees the witches’ flight as a phenomenon experienced in a state of shamanic ecstasy, but there is little on how this state might have been induced and what there is draws heavily on Wasson’s identification of the soma with Amanita muscaria and on the disputed theory that the Eleusinian mysteries were fuelled by consumption of ergot. There is plenty else which may seem more persuasive, from the likely use of anticholinergic plants such as Atropa belladonna to the well-known affinity of witches for toads, snakes, serpents and spiders, all of which are known to have psychoactive components in their venoms and were gaily thrown into the cauldron as part of the witches’ brew. In Slovenia, it appears, live salamanders are used to this day in the process of fabricating a psychoactive eau de vie. This rather obvious connection is inexplicably neglected, even as Ginzburg himself furnishes important evidence in support such as the likely derivation of Italian rospo, toad, from Lat. haruspex, a type of sorcerer.

The picture Ginzburg paints implies a great deal of accommodation of traditional practices by the church up until the threshold of the Renaissance. These were of course, at times, given a superficial Christian dress; but it seems that they also often remained anchored within a pre-Christian (or para-Christian) worldview. The Celtic cult of Epona therefore persisted in various guises, as did Greco-Roman cults of Diana/Artemis and Hera, fused by the Inquisitors into the figure of “Herodias”. The cult of Isis, absorbed into that of the Madonna, might also be mentioned. The reasons for the apparent change in attitude on the part of the church at the time of the persecutions are not evoked; doubtless one should interpret these developments, however, as a reaction to the threat of loss of temporal power by the church due to the same encroachments of modernity – the Italian renaissance in particular – which later led to the protestant reformation. Ginzburg does not make the point, but the reasons why the traditional beliefs would have remained vibrant are not hard to identify: Christianity was unconcerned with worldly health and well-being, leaving many popular needs unsatisfied. Small wonder that mediums, soothsayers and healers occupied a fundamental spiritual niche in society (they have never ceased to do so to this day). The challenges of uncertain harvests and the ravages of the plague also necessitated intermediation with cosmic forces which the organized church could not offer. It is highly unlikely that this was ever even conceived of as a problem until the church sought to leverage its spiritual power behind the consolidation of its temporal influence and the enterprise of the crusades.

Ginzburg sets considerable store by the widespread mythological theme of lameness or loss of one shoe on the part of figures considered to occupy a shamanic vocation. This part of his reasoning is convincing, but surprisingly he has no interpretation of its actual meaning. It is, however, difficult to resist the hypothesis that the wearing of a single shoe symbolized the position of the shaman-priest as a walker or intercessor between worlds.

Certain elements which presumably survived into Greco-Roman, Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic religion nevertheless do seem specifically to evoke themes found in central Asian and Siberian shamanism but which are not, according to current understanding, thought of as shamanic universals. The use of animal mounts or the metamorphosis into animal form in order to undertake the shamanic journey is the most persuasive of these, as it is distinct from the more auxiliary role of spirit animals in the New World traditions. A further interesting commonality is the widespread notion identified by Ginzburg in Eurasian traditions that the spirits can resurrect animals and people from their bones, which recalls Harner’s account of ecstatic dismemberment as characterizing the shamanic vocation (and may offer a bridge to animal or even human sacrifice). Other themes found in the European witch cults and in shamanism more generally are shamanic election with the concomitant inability to refuse the vocation and the ministry of depossession as well as intervention in climatic phenomena and psychopomp activity. The Scythians, according to Herodotus, practised a form of sweat lodge in which hemp seeds were thrown on the hot rocks; certain archeological discoveries seem to support this account. Lastly, the use of the drum to induce ecstasy seems to be attested in Ginzburg’s sources, though it is far from clear how material an element it was.

Ginzburg, then, has done enough to convince us that elements of nomadic shamanistic beliefs persisted into the folk traditions of medieval Europe, although it is not entirely clear how the thinks that this has happened (in the book, the notion that there may actually exist a parallel reality the substance of which explains structural convergences cross-culturally is not even entertained; at best he allows that this may be explained by the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious). That we may be less historically estranged from these traditions than we thought we were may be an abiding legacy of his work. It nevertheless is at best suggestive, leaving much unsaid. Despite his impressive scholarship, it seems certain that there is ample evidence yet to be considered in order to give a more complete account of medieval European folk religion and its immediate and more distant antecedents.

The urban shaman

 

In recent years there has been a considerable revival of interest in the West in shamanic practices, both those conserved by indigenous peoples and more syncretic forms such as Michael Harner’s “core shamanism“, Wicca and various nativist revival movements.

Whilst I certainly don’t have the anthropological knowledge to discuss this at length, however, it seems to me that Harner’s notion of a traveller between worlds who typically seeks to effect individual healing, which seems to owe an uncomfortable amount to Mircea Eliade‘s unreliable speculations, clearly fails to cover the entirety of the phenomena we have come, for perfectly comprehensible reasons dictated by a respect for, and the study of, actually observed cultures, to refer to using the shamanic label; and indeed it runs the risk, if used as an interpretative filter, of distorting the rest. Eliade’s shaman is in essence an intercessor, and Harner’s inherits this characteristic which owes a great deal to Eliade’s more than debatable assertion of a primary division of the world between sacred and profane. Whatever the role of technicians of the spirit realm in indigenous communities, others within those communities emphasize healing by means of plants, ordeals or personal journeying; they also fulfil ritual functions within the community, intervene in matters of collective interest and play at times a prophetic role as well. The shaman, as we now conceive of this role, is anyone devoted to healing and protection of the tribe and its environment as well as of individuals within it, and different persons may embody different gifts and vocations within this overall nexus. Eliade’s and Harner’s accounts easily tend to denature this more complex reality.

Whilst the revival of interest in indigenous healing technologies is salutary from numerous standpoints, it seems obvious that simply applying shamanic wisdom to urban Western society is in any case anything but a trivial affair. It is also a perverse objective: we cannot just bracket off ten thousand years of development of an alternative model of society, whatever the woes it has, in many ways, brought us. A more balanced appraisal of it is needed, and in any case we are called to work within it. So if we accept the need nevertheless to draw inspiration from this ancient paradigm, what could the role of the shaman look like in the very different and ever-shifting modern environment?

I think we need to look around us and take some fundamental facts as a starting point. Firstly, although many of us are indeed estranged from the natural world and its healing powers, and there is no doubt that we need collectively to recover this connection, we nevertheless have developed a vast range of healing modalities unknown to primitive societies and many of which do have value. These range from the interventions of clinical medicine through psychotherapies, group rituals and therapies, bodywork, music and dance just to name a few. These modalities are expressly designed for, and function in, the intellectual as well as material environment within which we live and, while we may also seek to change that environment, doing so is a project of another order entirely. Secondly, the tribe has gone global and features multiple allegiances. Moreover, post-modern tribality needs to be global because local communities no longer have the resources to function as a tribe. It also derives considerable benefit from this harnessing of technology: without today’s metatribal technologies there is little doubt that our tribal instincts would be frustrated or détourned even more than they are. So we need to function in our local communities but we cannot depend upon them for our spiritual life. Identity has become process-based and the work of each individual.

Within this global tissue of tribality, the shaman’s role must also be fundamentally transformed relative to the archaic prototype. The modern shaman must speak the language of modern tribes; she or he must doubtless be more specialized also, but nevertheless the shamanic role retains, it seems to me, a federating ethic and disposition which has much in common with the ancestral model: a passion for healing knowledge and an ethic of service based on matching resources in the environment to individual human needs, exercised based on compassion, with the greatest possible degree of humility and openness to the unknown and the astonishing. The shaman is a sort of spiritual guide, devoted to the immanence of lived experience and therefore beyond any ideological creed: however enthusiastic she or he may be about certain practices, this stands in contrast to the role of guru as popularly understood. The shaman is a person who may be a prophet but is above all a friend, who knows that your spiritual journey is yours alone, a sacred enterprise into which (s)he ventures, if at all, only with the deepest of awe and reverence. For the urban shaman in the 21st century, there is no recipe, but only respect of the deep mystery, which no human mind can grasp, of how all these human streams, whatever their provenance and course, eventually flow together and into the ocean.

The enterprise of building a shamanism for modern technological society involves major cultural reengineering and is not even called to be a consensus exercise. However, the nascent figure of the urban shaman is all around us, perhaps not always self-conscious and often unperceived, but ready to be sought out and available to those who are spiritually hungry and in need.

Proof of Heaven?

pohOn a recent trip to Germany, I picked up a copy of Eben Alexander’s bestselling book Proof of Heaven, an account of what he claims was a near-death experience which he underwent while in coma. It turns out the book has been more than controversial: he has not only been roundly criticized by materialists (masquerading as scientists) but also (surprise, surprise) by a bunch of Christian fundamentalist zealots, disturbed that the picture Alexander paints of the afterlife does not fully accord with their biblicist preconceptions.

This is a book which certainly has its faults. Trivially, it is not a proof of anything: Alexander’s experience cannot be repeated nor can it be falsified; it can only be taken on trust. Hence the precipitation to impugn his character. I find these attempts (which will cost you $1.99 just to read) unconvincing and beside the point. Alexader’s experiences, in so far as they are laid out in the book, are of limited intrinsic interest and scope – what is of interest is the fact that he had them, and not, beyond some general features, what they were. He had to make a book out of it, and accordingly most of the book is more of a dramatic retelling of the facts surrounding his falling into coma and emerging from it, rather than what he experienced when he was there. Apart from the fact that the end is preannounced, he makes a fair job of it: it is quite readable, and this is hardly a flaw. Towards the end of the book, he starts unfortunately to belabor endlessly his rather simple message, and this becomes irritating. But so much for the literary critique.

What Alexander describes is hardly surprising to anyone with a knowledge of the literature on near-death experiences (what he elsewhere calls “non-local consciousness”) and on reincarnation. If the purpose is to get a feel for what these experiences look like, other sources would offer a much better comparative overview. Indeed, Alexander’s own account is rather obviously colored by his cultural and religious environment; this is perhaps inevitable but underlines that a cross-cultural approach would be more scientifically interesting.

Alexander goes to inadequate lengths to avoid giving the impression that what was surprising to him necessarily should be to anyone else. I did not find his account surprising in the least. Nor do I lay much importance by the question of whether his neo-cortex was or was not incapacitated throughout the experience. I do not at all see why this should be critical and I believe experiences that multitudes of people have had under the influence of entheogenic substances – or for that matter in dreams, shamanic journeys or waking reality – have plenty in common with his own. This hardly invalidates his experience, rather the reverse. I do not think there is any “scientific” explanation for the content, or even fact, of any of these other experiences either. All such “explanations” fall well short of capturing the subjective intensity of the experiences in question.

Ultimately, I see little reason why someone disinclined to believe in the possibility of consciousness existing apart from the brain, and not knowing him personally, would be swayed by Alexander’s account. Nevertheless, I certainly wish him well in trying to move mentalities in that direction. His story, in isolation, is hardly the dynamite for the materialist worldview which he makes it out to be.

Its true power, which he does not mention at all, lies elsewhere. Even if it features pastors and prayer groups, even if he is moved to tears by the eucharist, it still does not accord with the primitive, brutalist worldview of Christian (or any other) fundamentalists. Imagine this: God is unconditional love. Yes, you read that right: unconditional. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Christian or Jew, it doesn’t matter if you believe in a salvation history or do good works, you are loved unconditionally.

That sort of puts a spanner in the business model of all those whose value proposition depends on helping you negotiate God’s favor in the afterlife.

And on this key point, anyone whatsoever who has ever had any genuine spiritual experience – including those who would rather avoid the term of God like me – knows that Alexander is absolutely right.

I guess it’s just a technicality that this is not a proof of heaven.