Humanity’s first healers: psychological and psychiatric stances on shamans and shamanism

Background: the author describes shamans as practitioners who deliberately shift their phenomenological pattern of attention, perception, cognition, and awareness in order to obtain information not ordinarily available to members of the social group that granted them privileged status. Objectives: to describe how these phenomenological shifts were accomplished and used. Methods: archival studies of shamanic literature as well as field research in communities where shamans are actively functioning. Results: the source of shaman-derived information is attributed to such discarnate entities and forces as spirits, ancestors, animal guides, and energetic fields. These agencies were contacted through ritualized drumming, dancing, lucid dreaming, the use of psychotropic plants, focused attention, and other technologies. This study was important because it determined that shamans utilize the obtained information to attend to their community’s social, psychological, and medical needs. Conclusions: the ubiquitous appearance of shamans, especially in hunting and gathering tribes, indicates that their presence in a social group served adaptive functions. Further, these data can make important contributions to cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, psychotherapy, and ecological psychology. Krippner, S. / Rev. Psiq. Clín. 34, supl 1; 16-22, 2007 Key-words: Shamans, shamanism, health care, phenomenology, psychology. Correspondence address: Stanley Krippner, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, 747 Front st., 3rd floor, San Francisco, California 94111, EUA. E-mail: [email protected] The term shaman is a social construct that describes a person who attends to the psychological and spiritual needs of a community. The techniques that enable shamans of both genders to access information that is not ordinarily attainable are known as “shamanism” (Krippner, 2000). Recent developments in qualitative research together with the innovative use of conventional investigative methods have provided the necessary tools to bring rigor and creativity to the examination of shamans, their behaviors, and experiences. Roger Walsh analyzed shamanic phenomenology concluding that it is distinct from schizophrenic, Buddhist, and yogic states on such important dimensions as awareness of the environment, concentration, control, sense of identity, arousal, affect, and mental imagery (Walsh, 2001). Shamans were humankind’s first psychotherapists, first physicians, first magicians, first performing artists, first storytellers, and even the first weather forecasters (Ryan, 1999). They have long been active in hunting-gathering and fishing tribes but they also exist in nomadic-pastoral, horticultural, agricultural, and urban societies. Shamanic roles Any society may have one or more types of shamanic practitioners. The role of women as shamans worldwide, so often overlooked, has been recently addressed in depth by Barbara Tedlock (Tedlock, 2005). Among the! Kung of southwest Africa, the majority of males and a sizable minority of females are magical-religious practitioners (Katz, 1981). A recent cross-cultural study of shamanism focused upon magico-religious practitioners, individuals who occupy a socially recognized role which has as its basis an interaction with the nonordinary, nonconsensual dimensions of existence. This interaction involves special knowledge of spirit entities and how to relate to them, as well as special powers that allow these practitioners to influence the course of nature or human affairs in ways not ordinarily possible. Anthropologist Michael Winkelman coded each type of practitioner separately on such characteristics as the type of magical or religious activities performed, the techniques employed, the procedures used to alter consciousness, the practitioner’s mythological 17 Krippner, S. / Rev. Psiq. Clín. 34, supl 1; 16-22, 2007 worldview, and the practitioner’s psychological characteristics, perceived power, socioeconomic status, and political role. His statistical analysis provided a division into four groups: (1) the shaman complex consisting of shamans, shaman-healers, and healers; (2) priests and priestesses; (3) diviners, seers, and mediums; (4) malevolent practitioners including witches and sorcerers (Winkelman, 1992). Shaman-healers specialize in healing practices while healers typically work without the dramatic alterations of consciousness that characterize shamans and shamanhealers. Diviners, together with seers and mediums, act on a client’s request to heal or to make prophecies after they have incorporated spirits into their bodies. These practitioners typically report that they are conduits for the spirits’ power, and claim not to exercise personal volition once they are “possessed” by the spirits. Shamans, on the other hand, frequently interact with the spirits and sometimes “incorporate” them, but remain in control of the process, only suspending volition temporarily. For example, volition is surrendered during some Native American ritual dances when there is intense psychic “flooding.” Nevertheless, shamans know how to enter and exit this type of intense experience. Malevolent practitioners are thought to have control over some of the “lower spirits” as well as access to power through rituals. Typically, they do not see their mission as empowering a community as a whole. Rather, they are employed by individuals to bring harm to enemies (inside or outside the community) or to seek favor from the spirits for specific individuals through sorcery, witchcraft, hexes, and spells. Contemporary shamanic practitioners exist at the band, nomadic–pastoral, horticultural–agricultural, and state levels of societies. The more complex a society, the more likely it is to have representatives of each type of practitioner. It should be kept in mind, of course, that categories are never absolute; some practitioners are difficult to classify and others switch roles according to the occasion (Heinze, 1988). Many writers reserve the word “shamanic” to refer to practitioners and activities that clearly fall within the domain of the shaman or the shaman-healer. The same writers use the word “shamanistic” to refer to practitioners and practices that are related to the shamanic realm, but which are basically adaptations of it because one or more of the critical criteria — community sanction or voluntary control of shifts in attention — are absent. Selection and training of shamans Shamans enter their profession in a number of ways: some inherit the role while others may display bodily signs such as an extra digit, albinism, or an unusual birthmark; unusual actions such as seizures or else behavior patterns culturally associated with the opposite gender, or strange experiences such as out-of-body sensations and vivid or lucid dreams. Depending on the culture any of these might constitute a call to shamanize (Krippner and Villoldo, 1986). In addition, future shamans might survive a near-fatal disease and interpret this phenomenon as a call. Spirits might beckon them in dreams or in daytime reveries (Heinze, 1991). These “calls” may come at any age, depending on a society’s tradition; in some cases, the call arrives late in life, giving meritorious individuals opportunities to continue their service to the community in ways that utilize their life experiences. On the other hand, strange behaviors may be interpreted by the community as a call, thereby canalizing potentially disruptive actions into behavior patterns that are perceived to be beneficial. In some societies there is no formal training program, while in others the training process may last for several years. The mentors may be older shamans or even spirit entities including one’s ancestors, nature spirits, and power animals who can give instructions in the neophyte’s dreams. The skills to be learned vary from society to society, but usually include diagnosis and treatment of illness, contacting spirits, supervising rituals, interpreting dreams, predicting the weather, gathering herbs, prophecy, and mastering the self-regulation of bodily functions and intentional states. Since shamanism is based on an ethic of compassion and service, ethical training is a key element in a shaman’s education. Shamans often need to contact spirits for various purposes. If they are dissatisfied they need to be propitiated. If a person dies without leaving a will, the person’s spirit needs to be contacted to determine property dispersion. If an ancestor’s spirit is causing trouble it needs to be appeased. Magical performance of one sort or another is learned including sleight of hand, taking advantage of synchronous events, or the utilization of what Westerners call “parapsychological phenomena,” including extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. In most shamanic societies a variety of symbols, chants, dances, songs, epic poems, and stories must be learned and used when appropriate. Some tribes arrange a special feast when the initiate passes a key phase of his or her training. In many instances, a society recognizes several types of shamans. Among the Gold Eskimos, only the siurku shaman knows how to heal, the nyemanti shaman performs special rituals over a deceased person’s soul after his or her death, and the kasati shaman helps convey the soul of the deceased to the spirit world (Kalweit, 1988). Among the Cuna of Panama, the abisua shaman heals by singing, the inaduledi specializes in herbal cures, and the nele focuses on diagnosis (Krippner, 1993). It would be erroneous to assume that shamans represent a single constellation of traits, or that there is a single “shamanic personality.” Shamans are men and women of great talent, who master a complex vocabulary and a treasury of knowledge concerning herbs, rituals, healing procedures, and their culture’s world of the spirits. 18 Krippner, S. / Rev. Psiq. Clín. 34, supl 1; 16-22, 2007 Altered states of consciousness Early Russian explorers and ethnographers suggested that the first shamans were simple nature healers but that during a later feudal phase of social evolution they invented spirits that necessitated the inculcation of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) in order to contact and communicate with these spirits (Hoppál, 1984). More recently, Erika Bourguignon surveyed 488 societies and discovered that 89 percent of them had one or more culturally patterned ASC. She concluded that the capacity to experience ASCs was a basic psychobiological capacity of all human beings (Bourguignon, 1974). It has recently been suggested that “heightened awareness” may actually be a more accurate description than “an altered state” because shamans’ intense experience of the natural world are described with phrases such as “things often seem to blaze” (Berman, 2000). Most scholars, however, still favor the idea that ASCs are basic to shamanism, especially “spirit incorporation” and “journeying.” This conclusion was recently strengthened by British archaeologist Stephen Mithen who suggested that the cognitive fluidity that created the cultural explosion of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic ages also brought about the development of (ASCs) (Mithen, 1996). Winkelman agrees, suggesting that psycho-neurological data indicate that shamanic traditions institutionalized procedures to overcome the natural fragmentation of consciousness by synchronizing human cognition through inducing integrative brain processes (Winkelman, 2000). In order to determine commonalties among various shamanic ASCs, Larry Peters and Douglass PriceWilliams compared 42 societies, from four different cultural areas. They identified three common elements: voluntary control of entrance and duration of the ASC; post-ASC memory of the experience; and the ability to communicate with others during ASC (Peters and PriceWilliams, 1980). Ruth-Inge Heinze pointed out that the basic difference between shamans and mediums appears to be that “shamans are capable of going on a magical flight and remain the actors during their performances. On the other hand, mediums become possessed by spirits who use human bodies through which they are able to act” (Heinze, 1982). In addition, shamans characteristically travel into the spirit world more often than other practitioners do. They may journey from “middle earth” to the “upper world” to visit ancestral spirits, to the “lower world” to visit power animals, and journey to the past, the future, and remote areas of the globe. The spirits encountered in each of these realms differ from society to society, but shamanic journeying is typically linked to the ability to enter ASCs. The term often used to denote the voluntary nature of spirit embodiment is “incorporation.” It may or may not be accompanied by amnesia for the experience depending on the practitioner, his or her cultural training. In “possession,” however, the individual generally embodies the spirit in an involuntary or unpredictable manner and there is usually amnesia for the experience. The notion of spirit possession poses problems for psychologists because it is an implicit explanation as well as a description. Vincent Crapanzano defines it as “any altered state of consciousness indigenously interpreted in terms of the influence of an alien spirit” (Crapanzano, 1977). T. K. Oesterreich defines possession more behaviorally, noting that the possessed person appears to be invaded by a different personality who manifests through changes in that person’s physiognomy, personality, voice, or motor functions. He differentiates between shamanic forms of “voluntary possession,” or incorporation, and the “involuntary possession” of victims of hexes or of malevolent spirits (Oesterreich, 1966). Echoes of these practices can be found in Pentecostal churches where members of a congregation “speak in tongues,” in Evangelical and Charismatic churches whose members claim to be “filled with the Holy Spirit,” and in some Protestant churches in the United States with predominantly African-American memberships when members spontaneously shout, chant, and dance during a round of hymn-singing. Peters and Price-Williams found that shamans in 18 out of the 42 societies they surveyed engaged in spirit incorporation, 10 in out-of-body experiences, 11 in both, and 3 in a different form of ASC (Peters and Price-Williams, 1980). In a later study they compared ASCs to a rite of passage in which an episode of panic or fear yields to insights resulting in a new integration of various elements of one’s personality (Peters and PriceWilliams, 1983). Winkelman’s cross-cultural survey of 47 societies yielded data demonstrating that at least one practitioner in each populace demonstrated ASC induction associated with role training. The specific induction procedures included mind-altering substances such as alcohol, opiates, psychedelics, stimulants, and tobacco; auditory stimulation through drumming or rattling; exposure to extreme temperatures; sexual abstinence; social isolation; sleep induction or deprivation; food restrictions; induced convulsions; excessive motor behavior; and extreme relaxation. While his analysis indicates some distinct patterns regarding incorporation and magical flight, he found cases of profound ASCs that involved neither of these features. His presentation of the unifying psycho-physiological model of ASCs is that it is “a parasympathetic dominant state characterized by the dominance of the frontal cortex by slow wave discharges emanating from the limbic system” (Winkelman, 1992) interacting with various social variables. There are additional ways in which shamans can alter their consciousness: by chanting as in the incantations of Taiwanese shamans; by jumping as in the 16-24 hour kut ceremonies of Korean shamans; through mental imagery such as the visualization practices of Tamang shamans in Nepal who see their tutelary spirits prior to 19 Krippner, S. / Rev. Psiq. Clín. 34, supl 1; 16-22, 2007 incorporating them. Often, shamans use two or more procedures simultaneously to alter consciousness. Korean shamans combine drumming with jumping; Arapaho shamans smoke a ceremonial pipe and rub their bodies with sage, in addition to drumming. It has been demonstrated that drumming can produce brain activation by coinciding with the theta EEG frequency, which is about 4 to 8 cycles per second through auditory driving (Neher, 1961). Newer research has found that theta brain waves are synchronized with monotonous drumbeats of 3-6 cycles per second, a rhythm associated with many shamanic ritual themes (Maxfield, 1994). Enhanced positive mood states and an increase in positive immune response, as measured by a concentration of salivary immunoglobulin A (S-IgA), has also been reported during shamanic drumming (Harner and Tyron, 1996). Rhythmic drumming also has a salubrious effect upon group members’ immune system as measured by increased natural killer cell activity (Pappas and Ninehouser, 2001).