Shamanism

Shamanism is a term, originally taken from a Russian word used to describe a phenomenon of the religions of Siberia, that has now become established in international usage. It means a form of culture that revolves around the central position of the shaman, a religious expert who acts as an intermediary between man in his environment and society and the forces and the spirits of the other world. The shaman of the central Siberian peoples may be either a man or a woman. Among the shamans there probably existed a division of tasks and a hierarchy that was manifested in a specialization in different shamanistic skills. The respect enjoyed by the shamans was not dependent on their sex but on what they knew and remembered. The Saami noaidi (in English, “nojd”) is a northern European equivalent of the Siberian shaman. Among the Saami, shamanism seems to have been a male institution; references to female shamans are found only in the late tradition.

The concept of shamanism became more generally known and its meanings broadened as a result of the book Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaiques de l écstase, published by Mircea Eliade in 1951. According to Eliade, shamanism as an archaic technique of ecstasy is the most original form of religion. Because signs of shamanism are found in rock art, it has been considered to represent the religious culture of hunter-gatherer societies of the Paleolithic Age. A proof of its antiquity is the fact that the phenomenon is found both in the Old and the New Worlds.

The concept of shamanism is not, however, without problems. In the comparative study of religion, it is burdened by the scholarly tradition of the 19th-century Urreligion hypothesis with its emphasis on evolution or diffusion. When the word shaman(ism) was translated from Russian into English and German, its meaning took on a nuance reflecting the point of view of the Christian missionaries who defined it. The expression of basic pagan religion was made into an ism, a primitive belief, so that the missionary work might receive greater justification. Thus, the name of the phenomenon became established as shaman-ism, although this term is not found in the earliest documents, such as the diary of Avvakum Petrovitch, the Archpriest of the Old Believers, which describes the activities of the shamans that he witnessed among the Evenk people in the 1650s.

Shamans commonly used monotone drumming and frenzied dancing to attain a state of ecstasy. They also sometimes used narcotic substances: For example, the fly agaric fungus (Amanita muscaria) was used among northern Siberian peoples. Fasting was also one of their methods of preparation. In addition to dancing accompanied by drumming, the Saami nojd chanted shamanistic incantations (yoiking); this form of chanting was such an important part of shamanism that it was prohibited together with the shaman's drum during the missionary crusade to Lapland in the 18th century and in the preaching of the Laestadian revivalist preachers in the 19th century.