Seeing into the Future

A Short History of Prediction

Martin van Creveld, Creveld, Martin van, van Creveld, Martin

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781789142297
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789142679
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

If there is anything that distinguishes us from animals, it is our ability to understand that such a thing as the future exists and our willingness to try and look into it.
But how have people through the ages gone about making predictions? What were their underlying assumptions, and what methods did they use? Have increased computer power and the newest algorithms improved our success in anticipating the future, or are we still only as good (or as bad) at it as our ancestors?
From the ancients watching the flight of birds to the murky activities of Google and Facebook today, Seeing into the Future gives us an insight into the past, present and future of prediction.

PART I:

A MYSTERIOUS JOURNEY

1

A VILLAIN OF A MAGICIAN

It hardly requires saying that shamanism, the ‘method’ for looking into the future that is the topic of the present chapter, is derived from the term ‘shaman’. Originating in the Tungus language of Siberia, samân means ‘a person who is excited, moved, or raised’. One modern author has related it to an ancient Indian word meaning ‘to heal oneself’. It may also be linked to the Sanskrit word saman, ‘song’.¹

The first Westerners who incorporated the idea into their vocabulary and tried to explain what shamanism was were explorers who visited Siberia during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first of the eighteenth. Some of them, notably the German physician Daniel Messerschmidt, worked for Peter the Great and his successors. Messerschmidt and others were charged with describing the geography and ethnography of the barely known regions in question and bringing back information concerning any useful and rare things they might contain. Other early explorers were missionaries or prisoners of war.

The way Westerners understood shamanism has changed over time. Five main stages can be distinguished. Prior to the emergence of secularization from about 1700 on, Siberian shamans and their colleagues in other parts of the world were often regarded as emissaries of the Devil, dangerous both to themselves and to others – ‘a villain of a magician who calls demons,’ as Avvakum Petrovich, the Russian priest who was the first to use the term publicly, wrote.² Some even went so far as to join ‘shaman’ to ‘Satan’.

Enlightenment travellers and the scholars who, back home, drew on their accounts took the opposite view. Convinced that they had reason on their side, they saw shamans not as the Devil’s creatures who were up to anything outlandish and sinister but simply as preposterous impostors. That accounts for the terms under which they were known in various languages: giocolare in Italian, jongleur in French, Gaukler in German and ‘wizard’ in English. Catherine the Great, no less, went to the trouble of penning a comedy in which she took this point of view. By doing so, she wrote, she had delivered ‘a huge blow’ against superstition. At the same time she reinforced her right to expand her enlightened rule into the vast, but unknown and backwards territories to the east.³ Some even proposed that shamans be punished for making false claims.

But that was just the beginning. Nineteenth-century colonial administrators and anthropologists took shamanism for the product of minds ‘half devil and half child’, as Rudyard Kipling put it. They considered such practices ‘repugnant’ to humanity and common sense and did their best to suppress them. The rest they regarded with amused tolerance and, on occasion, tried to take advantage of as one of the ways to control the gullible natives, as they saw them. Next, around the turn of the century there emerged a growing tendency to look at shamans from the inside, so to speak. The objective was to bridge the cultural gap so as to understand the way they reasoned and the role they played in their societies.

The advent, from about 1970 on, of multiculturalism, diversity and ‘New Age’ ideas caused this tendency to gain momentum. More and more often, shamans, instead of being described as relics, good or bad, of a bygone age, came to be admiringly cast as sages, healers, teachers, leaders and even artists, all rolled into one. Such as were closer to ‘nature’, and therefore more authentic and more righteous, than Westerners with their science and technology had been for a long, long time past. And such as were deeply familiar with the social and psychological needs of those who believed in them and took their advice, which encompassed every detail of the world in which they lived: the weather and the climate, animals, plants, food and medical herbs, poisons and minerals of every sort. Their practices, far from being rooted in mere superstition, foreshadowed many modern medical and, even more so, psychological ideas. As such they were worth studying in depth and, when the occasion presented itself, adapting to modern life.⁴

The classic account of shamanism was written in 1951 by the Romanian cultural historian Mircea Eliade. He defined it as ‘a technique of religious ecstasy’.⁵ Considered in this broader sense, shamanism was not confined to the region in which the term originated, that is, northeast Asia (Siberia, China and Korea). Instead it is, or was, widespread all over the world. That is especially true of societies made up of hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists and pastoralists – tribes without rulers, as I have called them in another book,⁶ of which there are still a few left in remote and undeveloped areas such as the Upper Amazon. In Latin America it is known as ‘mestizo shamanism’.⁷

But shamanism has also been imported into modern cities, especially developing ones in Latin America and South, East and West Africa, where many people remain relatively ill-educated and have been torn out of their native environments and left without a clear social network to provide direction or assistance. Some have large numbers of followers, and some allow themselves to be rewarded accordingly. Some of those practitioners are ignorant of any link between themselves and the customs of earlier societies. Probably many more are aware of such links, however. They deliberately and explicitly make use of them so as to produce what is often a rather strange mixture of animist, Christian and even Jewish elements.

Shamanism being a spiritual practice first and foremost, it tends to leave few material traces behind. Nevertheless, some modern archaeologists claim they have been able to track it back all the way to the Palaeolithic, some 30,000 years ago.⁸ True or not, certainly it far antedates the rise of organized religion, with its hierarchy of priests and followers. No known society, not even one as simple and lacking in institutions as that of Andamanese islanders in the Indian Ocean, is without it.⁹ There is also some reason to believe that it is the oldest form of government, or perhaps one should speak of proto-government, on Earth.

The ability to communicate with spirits might be a gift made by the spirits themselves. But undoubtedly it also conferred some real benefits on those who had it or were believed to have it. The details varied from one society to the next; generally, though, shamans credited themselves, and were credited by others, with the ability to control the weather, cast and counter spells, cure the sick (or, to the contrary, cause illness in people and cattle) and other similar feats. Coming on top of the ability to look into the future, such feats could readily be translated into economic and political power.

Most shamans appear to have been men. However, in many societies there were also women among them. Remote rural areas in pre-Revolutionary Russia were familiar with the figure of the klikusha, plural klikushi, ‘shrieking woman’. Modern feminists claim that it was male oppression that caused them to go off the rails and display all kinds of symptoms akin to madness. Traditionally, though, they were understood as being possessed by the spirits and credited with some ability to predict the future.¹⁰

In some of the simplest, least structured and most egalitarian societies, notably those of the Amazonian forest, shamans were self-selected. The implication was that anyone could find a way to communicate with the spirits, acquire powers and, if he or she was able to gather followers or believers, gain recognition as a shaman. On occasion this was taken to the point where anyone who had a dream was said to have a little bit of the shamanic spirit in them, specifically including the ability to look into the future.¹¹ In other societies the quality ran in families. In others still, shamans selected their own successors more or less as they pleased.

To become a shaman, it was almost always necessary to undergo a prolonged and complex period of training during which the novice absorbed the relevant myths and learnt the necessary incantations. In some societies the process was punctuated by tests requiring him or her to, for example, spend some time living in complete darkness or suffering pain and hunger. The climax was an initiation ceremony during which they discovered their personal guiding spirit and concluded the alliance with it that would govern their lives from that point. Normally, to be chosen was considered an honour, and the apprenticeship was willingly entered upon. But there were also occasions when youngsters became shamans against their will, either because the spirits commanded them to or because they had been summoned by their elders. Appearing in public, both apprentices and fully fledged shamans often carried special insignia and wore special clothing, amulets and other signifying items. There might, however, also be ceremonial occasions when they wore nothing at all.

Considered as a method for cracking open the future and providing guidance as to what it might bring, shamanism rested on the assumption, spoken or tacit, that doing so is very difficult and requires special qualities as well as expertise. That is why it could be accomplished only by extraordinary people acting under extraordinary influences and possessed of extraordinary powers that clearly distinguished them from the rest. And this only with the aid of the spirits that inhabit every tree, waterfall, rock and peak; invisible they may be, but there is no doubting their ubiquity, potency and ability to influence fate.

Contacting the spirits implied leaving the ‘normal’ world so as to enter into what is commonly known as an altered state of consciousness. An ASC may be defined as ‘any mental state . . . which can be recognized subjectively by the individual himself (or by an objective observer of the individual) as representing a sufficient deviation in subjective experience of psychological functioning from certain general norms for that individual during alert, waking consciousness’.¹² Well-known examples are intoxication, ecstasy, trance, hypnosis, and epilepsy or similar conditions. Some students of the various forms of human mental life include dreaming in the list, as I myself have done in the present volume. What all forms of ASC have in common is that they seem to turn those who are caught up in them into different persons. Also, that they temporarily decrease the relevant person’s awareness of his or her surroundings. Simultaneously they enhance their ability to perceive a variety of other things, or so it is believed.

As far as available information, both that provided by shamans themselves and that which originates in those who observed them, allows, all of these conditions bear certain similarities to a shaman’s mental state. But none is exactly identical with it. Recently there has been an explosion of interest in using MRI tests in order to see whether shamanic rituals and ASC in general can alter the pattern of electric activity inside the brain that is supposed to constitute thought, and if so, in what ways. By using such methods, one team found that the areas of the brain whose activity departed most from ‘normal’ during ASC were the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (DACC) and the insula.¹³ Not that these facts, even if they can be verified, tell us much about the subjective experience in question.

The methods used to make the switch to an ASC varied from one culture to another.¹⁴ In Siberia they included spending time in a steam room, from which the shaman, his blood pressure having gone up, would emerge in a state of high excitement and covered with sweat. Everywhere, one of the most common means was music, especially singing, rattling and sustained drumming, which were and often still are capable of having a hypnotic effect. Either the shaman himself played, or the music was sounded for him by others. Other methods were dancing, prayer, solitude, long vigils, fasting, vomiting (by way of purification), self-flagellation, and breathing exercises designed either to accelerate the metabolism or to slow it down. Sexual abstinence (or, less often, its opposite, engaging in sacred sex) and consuming strong alcoholic drinks were also used. All or parts of the ceremony might be carried out in full view of others. In some cultures, though, the relevant rituals were performed indoors and in the dark.

As part of the transition from one state of mind to another some shamans used special canes that were believed to have magic qualities and with which they tapped the ground. Others stripped naked, though whether doing so was a method for entering an ASC or one of the latter’s effects is not always easy to say. Finally, there was the consumption of certain substances supposed to be associated with the spirits. Some scholars believe that the use of such substances stood at the origin of religion, and at least one has tried to show that Jesus himself was a shaman and that he and his followers consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms in order to transcend the limits of the here and the now.¹⁵ In fact the use of hallucinogens by shamans and their followers had been documented in many places around the world. In some cultures the relevant ceremonies also comprised the bloody sacrifice of an animal, such as a sheep or a goat.

In each of these cases, the objective was to make the shaman, or rather his soul (since his body remained in place), abandon its normal surroundings and embark on a mysterious voyage. As a rule, the first thing the shaman had to do was to get past some kind of obstacle. This might be a high mountain pass, or a dark forest inhabited by all kinds of wild beasts, or an ice-cold stream. Often, doing so was not without some risk. Those who took a wrong turn might forget whence they had come, as, in Greek mythology, those who had drunk from the underworld river Lethe also did. Or else they might go mad, or even die. Often, too, the exact nature of the experience was hard to put into words or convey to others in a way they could understand.

The crossing having been accomplished, the shaman would enter into a different domain, realm or reality – one in which, among other things, the difference between present, past and future is eliminated, turning the last-named into an open book. The domains themselves varied from one culture to another. For Plato, whose theories bear more traces of shamanism than most people realize, they were the place where souls, in between one incarnation and another, could see past, present and future.¹⁶ Among the Inuit of the Yukon Territory it was the ‘White Country’, a mysterious place where anything was possible. Whether it got its name from the ‘fact’ that everything there was white or, later, from the indigenous people’s belief in the miraculous powers of the white man, it is no longer possible to determine.¹⁷ Among the Aboriginal Australians it was Dreamtime, understood as the place from which came the laws of existence. And in ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: A MYSTERIOUS JOURNEY
• PART II: BE SOBER AND REASONABLE
• PART III: ENTER MODERNITY
• PART IV: THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX