-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder Craig Lockwood©1993 CompCare Publishers 3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100 Minneapolis, MN 55441 612.559.4800/800.328.3330 ISBN 0-89638-363-6 255+pps — out-of-print/one edition. --[7]-- Part II Within The Circle "When the acts and magical beliefs of present-day folkloric groups are subjected to a systematic-sychronic interpretation ... the prehistoric antiquity of a great Part of what is concealed in the elements that have come down to us appears convincingly attested to. We then realize ... that folkloric testimonies have their roots in a much more remote time and are much more widely diffused than we thought." -Roman Jakobson, 1966 ----- Chapter 7 Shamans, Magic, And The Mind "[Shamans] are of immense social significance, the psychological health of the group largely depending on faith in their powers ... the various psychic powers attributed to them must not be too readily dismissed as mere primitive magic and 'make believe,' for many of them have specialized in the working of the human mind, and in the influence of mind on body and body on mind." -A.P. Elkin, 1945 Among those societies that use magical language and wield magical power, the shaman is an important fixture. Ethnopsychologist Holger Kalweit, a German who has made a lifetime study of the cross-cultural psychological aspects of shamanism, notes in his book Dreamtime and Inner Space: The World of the Shaman, "Everywhere and at all times, cultures have striven to produce and train people of parapsychic ability so that they might effectively support the struggle for the survival of the tribe or community in question." Cultures and societies vary in their attitudes. Eighteenth, century Polynesians conferred respectful titles indicating degrees of spiritual authority on hunas, who possessed this specialized occult knowledge. In sixteenth-century France, anyone suspected of holding superstitious folk beliefs could be made a public barbecue. Contemporary Korean shamans, the Mu dang, are "organized in a professional association," but are considered to be on the "lowest rung of the social ladder, along with prostitutes, shoe-menders, soothsayers, Buddhist monks, and dancing girls," according to Kalweit. What's the difference between a shaman, a witch, and a sorcerer? Anthropologists, scholars, and other experts on and practitioners of the occult, esoteric religions, and witchcraft don't always agree. Sometimes those terms are used as stand-ins for more specific words. English nouns such as adept, alchemist, augurer, conjurer, diabolist, diviner, enchanter, initiate, magician, magus, necromancer, priest, priestess, thaumaturge, shaman, sorcerer, warlock, witch, and wizard are applied to, and used by, practitioners of magic and those who write about many different kinds of magic. Any of the above practitioners may adhere to one or more forms or schools of occult, esoteric, religious, and ritual or ceremonial magic. Some are benign, others maleficent. Terms such as shaman, medicine man, medicine woman, and witch doctor have been used to describe persons who practicein whatever way-medical healing or curative magic. These labels, however, are not definitive. In the popular media they are used somewhat interchangeably, and often inaccurately. Many of these titles are honorific in their native languages. They generally denote respect, but in some cases also carry a connotation of fear. Others, such as the Middle English terms warlock and wizard, are used more by Hollywood than everyday practitioners of the occult. Terms like witch doctor come complete with negative Western cultural associations. Most contemporary Europeans or Americans wouldn't consider taking a medical problem to an old person in a dusty hut who diagnoses while in a trance state. Most Africans, including many with Western educations, however, would consult this respected old person first. Translating specific, non-English magical appellatives into English is challenging. English, especially American English, no longer provides as many linguistic distinctions. According to Ruth-Inge Heinz in Shamans of the Twentieth Century, when the Tungus of Siberia translate their word saman it means: "Social-functionary-who-with-the-help-of-guardian-spirits-attains -ecstasy- in-order-to-create-a-rapport-with-thesupernatural-world-on-behalf-of-his-group - members." Translated into English as witch doctor, which Westerners equate with a Tarzan movie-image, the meaning gets lost. Yet there are cultures in which a witch doctor serves the specific function of curing people from curses placed upon them by sorcerers or evil witches. On occasion the cultural overlay of a conqueror-language such as English gives us a term that is once or, in some cases, twice removed from the original non-English term. And the native term itself can have many subtle, or contradictory, meanings. Brazilian ethnographers transcribing terms from an Amazonian Jivaro culture first translate them into their native Portuguese. For international publication, their works are then translated into English. The terms have now gone through the filter of two languages. Subsequent publication may be in French or German. For readability, researchers often revert to the lexical habits of their own native language. Occasionally, however, the available words are not sufficient, or have a negative connotation. Shaman, the noun, is a good example. Shamanism, a term of convenience, is not the word most practitioners of various traditions use to describe their practices. Shaman is not an English noun with Latin or Anglo-Saxon roots. Shaman entered popular usage through the door of early twentieth-century American anthropology. But shamanism has become the word of choice to describe a spiritual activity that is not Wiccan craft, black magic, sorcery, spiritism, mediumship, channeling, augury, or divining. In his book The Highest Altar, Patrick Tierny, a researcher in contemporary human sacrifice, first refers to the Mapuche Indian Dona Juana by the Spanish appellative Dona, then in English as the "sorceress at Lago Budi," and finally, in the same sentence, as a "shaman, or machi," the Mapuche Indian term. While Tierney was attempting to locate Dona Juana, he was warned by a judge who presided over her human sacrifice trial to be careful in approaching her. "There are all kinds of machis," the judge had said. "Some of them cure people. Others use black magic to do evil." Machi Juana later tearfully confided to Tierney that her neighbors called her a witch. In Spanish, a witch or sorceress is a bruja. A rose by any other name may still be a rose, but nobody aside from a witch, it seems, is ever quite sure what or who a witch is. Many of today's beliefs about witchcraft are based on old, and not necessarily correct, assumptions. Getting to the bottom of them is more than a matter of simple definition. As we have seen previously, terminologies and names, like spells, have power. Linguistically Seeking Shamans Shamans have become conventionalized through cinema, television, and popular literature as wise old men or women with long white braids, a feather or two, lots of knockout handcrafted textiles and jewelry, and the answer to almost all contemporary angst, with or without the use of hallucinogens. Anthropologists first used the term shaman, pronounced shah-maan, to describe the spirit-based esoteric traditions of Northeast Asia and the derivative spiritual practices of Native Americans. Scholars who traced the origins of the word shaman concluded that it is an ancient Asian word that has its roots in the archaic dialects of the Evenk saman and Mongol saman;[1] the Russian/Siberian Tunguso-Manchurian verb sa "to know" and the Tungus saman;[2] and possibly sha-men, a Chinese word, and even the Sanskrit sramana, or the Pali samana. For many years in Western societies, shamanism was inaccurately equated with sorcery and witchcraft. The problem was that the word was culture-specific. Diffused, it became abused. Shaman as an all-purpose noun has found its way into both Western language and culture. Newspapers like Der Spigel in Germany and France's Paris Match run features on "des schamanen" and "le chaman." Shamanism has undergone a kind of late twentieth-century cultural-ethnic debugging and is now marketed in the United States and Europe as a sort of kinder, gentler, ritual-based spiritual therapy. Spiritually oriented bookstores and New Age gatherings sell books, tapes, drums, feathers, rattles, shamanic ritual apparel, and other specific ritual objects. Induction, Trance, and Psychological Reorganization People become shamans through a variety of cultural spiritual paths. A basic requirement, however, is the ability to enter a trance state with some ease. Trances are altered states of consciousness in which voluntary movement may be impaired or lost. Trance states can be induced by various forms of hypnosis, chanting, breath control, and rhythmic percussion. Trance, from the Latin "to die," "to go across," is the fundamental spiritual tool of the shaman. Through trance, the shaman acquires access to an area of the human mind that is unavailable to most of us-most of the time. In trance, the shaman may literally "cross over" from one realm of consciousness to another. Milton Erickson, a psychologist who pioneered much of our modern psychological understanding of hypnosis and trance from 1948 through 1980, defined trance as a "period of creative reorganization." "The induction and maintenance of a trance," he says, "serve to provide a special psychological state in which the patient can reassociate and reorganize his inner psychological complexities and utilize his own capacities in a manner in accord with his own experiential life."[3] How trance functions psychobiologically is still largely unknown. Experts disagree on many major points. What most will agree on is that certain simple actions stimulate the induction from ordinary consciousness to an altered state. Research into hypnosis has identified certain key areas of the brain, such as the locus coeruleus, which respond when a repetitive sound or tone reduces stimulus activity. This may explain how the repeated beating of a drum creates part of the shaman's induction, but it fails to explain what happens once the induction has occurred. Shamanic trance varies from light to profound, and even comatose, as in the case of the Lapp shamans. Andrew Neher researched the phenomenon and concluded that rhythmic stimulation such as a drumbeat, with its many frequencies, affected electrical activity in "sensory and motor areas of the brain."[4] Testing a deerskin drum used in the shamanic dances of the Salish Indians, another researcher was able to confirm Neher's findings.[5] Once the shaman has induced trance, powerful and "highly specialized cultural belief systems" take over.[6] just as we "construct" our outer world, so shamans construct their inner world. Shamans by the Book: Ecstasy, Drugs, and Literature Once the shaman has entered an inner world, new interpreta-tions for perceived phenomena must be found. Here, cultural symbols hold powerful sway. Shamanic practice is distinguished from other kinds of magic in that it involves entering and using a state of consciousness that Mircea Eliade terms "ecstasy." But ecstasy alone does not a shaman make. In Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Eliade says, "The shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body"; the soul ascends or descends to another world. Carlos Castaneda, whose questionably authentic but highly popular and entertaining accounts of a supposed Yaqui Indian sorcerer, Don Juan Matus, in The Teachings of Don Juan defined this state as "nonordinary reality." Once in nonordinary reality, the shaman may be able to diagnose, heal, and eliminate harmful forces in a patient's psyche. Or, as in the case of Castaneda's chic female counterpart, former Beverly Hills Indian Art dealer Lynn V Andrews, the shaman joins the ranks of the lecture-circuit literary neoshamans and writes another novel. Agnes Whistling Elk, the Cree heyoehkah tells Andrews, who finds herself undergoing a surprise medicine-woman apprenticeship: "I'm a medicine woman. I live in the beyond and come back ... you are being initiated into a knowledge as old as time ... What is a medicine woman? She is a traveler of the dimensions."[7] While Castaneda's Don Juan initiates him with an herbal psychotropic pharmacopoeia, Andrews, thirteen years later and writing to a non-drug-using, spiritually oriented female audience, keens her consciousness on low-fat deer meat jerky. Apparently one shaman's magic mushroom is another's toadstool. Drugs may be used, however, depending on the culture. But true shamanic journeys are never "trips." They are more like "missions," described sometimes as interesting, frightening, risky, or, when the shaman encounters negative forces, dangerous. Contemporary shaman Michael Harner, Ph.D., an anthropologist who became a shaman in 1961, notes in The Way of the Shaman that shamanic methods are not complex, but "require a relaxed discipline, with concentration and purpose." The result is an ecstatic state. The basic techniques, Dr. Harrier Claims, can be learned from a book. Medicine Men and Women and Folk-Healers Medicine men and women and folk-healers are pretechnological society's answer to the practical nurse or medical technician. (They have certain tried, tested, and often reasonably effective medical skills learned within the context of their cultural/religious and ritual traditions. Skills may include setting broken or dislocated bones, treating wounds and general illnesses with herbs and plant concoctions. Most of these folk-healers are capable of offering prayers or incantations and have a variety of supernatural back-up skills. Payment for services is established by custom. Healers may also be shamans. Shamans and so-called witch doctors, depending on the culture, may possess all the above entry-level medical/herbal skills plus a sophisticated understanding of psychology. Shamans are generally considered "in service" to their communities. Shamans, depending on the geographic location, have a wider range of knowledge relating to drugs, especially the narcotic, psychotropic, or healing plants that—by tradition and to maintain their edge of knowledge—they protectively guard. Shamanic knowledge may include interpreting signs and omens in nature. In some contemporary cultures, the shaman may be responsible for performing animal and even human sacrifice.[8] Training and initiation in various American Indian traditions, usually conducted by another shaman, include rigorous ascetic practices. Fasting, mutilation, and the ingestion of psychotropic plants are some of the methods used to create a dissociative experience generally perceived as a vision or a journey to the land of the spirits or ancestors. Shamans usually operate on a part-time basis. Shamans may or may not perform religious duties. Shamans deal with the supernatural primarily as individuals. "Rarely," according to Frank R. Vivelo in his Cultural Anthropology Handbook, "do they act as a spokespeople, or represent a group." Depending on a shaman's popularity within a community or locale and his or her propensity to commit harmful acts, shamans may either be highly respected or feared, and thus may also be considered to practice sorcery. pps.74-83 --[notes]-- Chapter 7 1. B. Laufer, "The Origin of the Word Shaman," American Anthropologist 19 (1917). 2. V. Dioszegi, Tracing Shamans in Siberia (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado; 1978). 3. Milton Erickson, "Hypnotic Psychotherapy," The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis, vol. IV, Innovative Hypnotherapy. ed. E. Rossi (New York: Irvington 1948/1980). 4. Andrew Neher, "A Physiological Explanation of Unusual Behavior in Ceremonies Involving Drums," Human Biology 34 (1962). 5. W. Jilek, Salish Indian Mental Health and Culture Change: Psychogenic and Therapeutic Aspects of the Guardian Spirit Ceremonial (Toronto: Holt, Reinhart, Winston of Canada, 1974). 6. E. Rossi, The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing (New York: Norton, 1986). 7. Lynn V. Andrews, Medicine Woman (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981). 8. Patrick Tierney, The Highest Altar (New York: Viking, 1989). --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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