The World's Religions: The Study of Religion, Traditional and New Religion

Peter Clarke, Stewart Sutherland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134922215
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Examines the `primitive' (traditional) non -mainstream religion and also 20th century sects such as the Moonies and Scientology. Looks at the `nature' of religion - the general philosophical issues. Written by international specialists.

Traditional Religions

5
Introduction to Traditional Religions

Peter Clarke

The term ‘traditional’ as used here to refer to the Australian Aboriginal, African, Melanesian, Maori and North, Mesoamerican and South American Indian religions covered in this section of the volume is not meant to suggest that these religions are static and unchanging, but is simply one way of distinguishing them from the major world religions which have spread themselves more widely across many different cultures and which tend to be, therefore, less confined to and by any one specific socio-cultural matrix. Indeed, it is very likely, given that they are, with some exceptions, in a sense non-literate and for that reason among others highly eclectic, that traditional religions have been more flexible and tolerant of change than those excluding, literate religions or religions of the book, the world religions as they are called, whose literary mode of supernatural direction and guidance leaves them in theory at least less room for manoeuvre. Moreover, while the use of the label traditional can be somewhat misleading, it is perhaps less so than primitive which has been applied to these religions, not only in the sense of early or primeval, but also in the sense of ‘lower’ and less ‘rational’ than the religions of what have often been described as the more ‘civilised’, ‘advanced’ societies. This view of traditional religions was based not on empirical data but on a theory of social and intellectual development or evolution current in the nineteenth century. According to this evolutionist approach, the term primitive referred on the one hand to a stage low down on the scale of social and intellectual development reached by prehistoric man and on the other to those contemporary, non-literate peoples whom, it was assumed, had remained at this same low social and intellectual level. It is clear that evolutionists of this mind tended to make too close a connection between social structure and thought, making development in the latter totally dependent on development in the former. In this century beginning after the First World War, and increasingly from the 1930s, researchers began to produce convincing evidence that not only undermined the two last mentioned propositions but also the premiss concerning the alleged inferiority of the ‘primitive’ mind, showing that non-literate peoples, though technologically very far from advanced, had developed, none the less, highly complex systems of thought and belief.¹ One ethnologist, the Austrian, Father Wilhelm Schmidt, went so far as to maintain that the hunting-gathering, forest Pygmies of central Africa, far from being animists or fetishists, later ‘degenerations’ of religion, were in fact monotheists, and that since they represented the oldest surviving culture on earth this was the earliest form of religion. It hardly needs to be said, however, that any attempt by the ethnologist or any other scholar to trace the earliest form of religion has encountered and will continue to encounter unsurmountable obstacles, the main one being the lack of historical data.

This has also been a problem for the student of traditional religion and perhaps explains why these religions have come to be regarded not only as static but also the product of and confined to a particular society. The contributions on African and Native American religions in particular show how misleading this view of traditional religion can be. In both instances, as in many other cases, the traditional religions in question spread across numerous political, economic, geographical and cultural boundaries and underwent considerable development and change.

For the most part, it has been the social scientist and, in particular the social anthropologist, who has provided most of the information we have about these religions, some focusing their attention almost exclusively on the functions of these religions within the social system, others on their symbolic and philosophic content and others (Chapter 6 on Shamanism being an example) on both function and meaning.

But what about the possible application of other disciplines, such as history, to this subject? Can this discipline, for example, contribute to a deeper understanding of traditional religions? The fact that many of these religions are in a sense non-literate religions not only makes the task of documenting their history extremely difficult but also opens it up to a great deal of speculation and conjecture. But, as several of the contributions to this section show, this should not deter the student from attempting such a study. The kind of written historical document rightly valued so much by the Western-trained historian although of great importance is not everything. The historian can usefully attempt a study of traditional religion by the judicious use of oral tradition and other materials such as those provided by the archaeologist, art historian and linguist among others, as a number of the contributions to this section, and in particular those on African and Native American religion, show. Moreover, in some instances traditional societies have their own ‘written’ records of their history, as the chapter on Native American religion illustrates. The ‘outside world’ has also documented, but not always very accurately or objectively as we have seen, something of the beliefs and practices of these religions, and here again we can look to all the contributions to this section for examples. It is both possible and fruitful, then, to attempt the historical study of ‘traditional’ religions.² Moreover, a study such as this might usefully examine these religions in a wider cultural, geographical and religious context. Although their contact with literate cultures and the wider world in general has been uneven it is, however, the case, that for a relatively long time many of the traditional religions, far from existing in a self-contained traditional universe have been part of a complex sphere of relationships that extended to contact with the world religions, and which in varying degrees involved contact with the world of books, most often at first the religious books or scriptures of Christianity and Islam, or the ideas contained in those books. And the result has very often been, not the complete demise of the former but, as the contribution on Melanesian religion illustrates, the development and modification of the beliefs and practices of both the traditional religion and the world religion in question.

But how long can traditional religion survive the impact of these world religions, regarded increasingly by many in traditional societies as religions of progress, and the process of ‘modernisation’ itself? This question is addressed directly in the contribution on Australian Aboriginal religion. There are examples, as the author of the account on North American Indian religion shows, where in the past forces from outside have brought about the virtual collapse of traditional religion. Moreover, elsewhere in this volume contributors have pointed to the rapid growth of Christianity and Islam over the past one hundred and fifty years in, for example, Africa, and to the fundamental changes brought about by these two world religions in the social and religious life of African societies. Under their impact and that of the forces of modernity all things traditional, including religion, appear to have literally fallen apart.

But changes and developments have not all been in one direction only. As is the case in Melanesian religion, and the same holds for African religion, traditional religion has not only shown in the recent past a remarkable capacity to develop and adapt its own beliefs and practices when confronted by both the world religions and ‘modernity’ but has also greatly influenced much of the belief and practice of these same world religions and to an extent the direction in which the forces of modernity have sought to steer traditional society. Moreover, there are examples, the Maori religion being one and Afro-Brazilian religion another, where what is in essence a traditional religious life has developed a way of interacting with and settling down alongside a world religion in a modern setting.

Furthermore, although fewer people now refer to themselves as traditional religionists, these religions continue to appeal for a variety of different reasons to many from all walks of life, whether Westerneducated or not. In parts of

Africa, as one contributor shows, not only have traditional religions ‘intermixed with the main movements of twentieth-century change’ and ‘turned out to be alive and important at the heart of revolutionary movements’ but they have also countered new ideas and approaches in a number of fields, including modern medicine and technology, which have not been able to undermine confidence in that important insight at the heart of traditional religion: that solutions to health and environmental problems have an important relational dimension. And we see from the contribution on Australian Aboriginal religion how important Aboriginal myth and ceremony have been in determining Aborigines’ legal rights to land. Traditional religions, then, though under threat, continue to be of importance to many both at the level of meaning and function and it would, therefore, be premature to predict their demise.

Notes

1. For an example see E.E.Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford university Press, Oxford, 1956).

2. In addition to the contributions to this section of the volume see also T.O. Ranger and I.N.Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972).

6
Shamanism

I.M.Lewis

Shamanism is not, as Weston La Barre comprehensively claims, the origin of religion, but rather of religions in whose decline and fall it certainly plays a highly significant role. By ‘shamanism’ we mean the religious activities of inspired priests or shamans who control cosmic spiritual forces and regularly incarnate them. The term shaman, more familiar in American and continental than in British ethnography, is generally traced to the language of the Tungus reindeer herders of the Lake Baikal region of the Soviet Union and, according to the great Russian medical ethnographer Shirokogoroff, like its Manchu cognate saman means literally ‘one who is excited, moved, or raised’. Its first appearance in a major European language seems to have been in seventeenth-century Russian. More particularly among the Tungus, a shaman is a man or woman who has acquired the power of mastering spirits and who knows how to introduce them into his body. Frequently the shaman permanently incarnates his spirits, controlling their manifestations, and going into states of trance on appropriate occasions. As Shirokogoroffexpresses it, the shaman’s body is thus a ‘placing’ or receptacle for his spirits, and it is through his power over these incarnate forces that the shaman has the authority to treat and control afflictions caused by malign, pathogenic spirits in other victims. The Tungus shaman is consequently literally a ‘master’ of spirits, although, as we shall see, the spirits can, at times, overpower their tamer and controller. In this classical arctic setting, shamanism is firmly embedded in the Tungus clan structure. So the shamanistic master of spirits guarantees the well-being of his clansmen, controlling the clan’s ancestral spirits which would otherwise wreak havoc amongst his kin. These domesticated spirits can, moreover, be employed to counteract hostile alien spirits and to divine and treat local illnesses and other problems and misfortunes. Here the main diagnostic and therapeutic ritual is the public shamanistic seance in the course of which the shaman seeks to establish contact with the spirits of the upper or lower worlds. Shirokogoroff vividly describes the typical setting:

The rhythmic music and singing, and later the dancing of the shaman, gradually involve every participant more and more in a collective action. When the audience begins to repeat the refrains together with the assistants, only those who are defective fail to join the chorus. The tempo of the action increases, the shaman with a spirit is no ordinary man or relative, but is a ‘placing’ (i.e. incarnation of the spirit); the spirit acts together with the audience and this is felt by everyone. The state of many participants is now near to that of the shaman himself, and only a strong belief that when the shaman is there the spirit may only enter him, restrains the participants from being possessed in mass by the spirit. This is a very important condition of shamanizing which does not however reduce mass susceptibility to the suggestion, hallucinations, and unconscious acts produced in a state of mass ecstasy. When the shaman feels that the audience is with him and follows him he becomes still more active and this effect is transmitted to his audience. After shamanizing, the audience recollects various moments of the performance, their great psycho-physiological emotion and the hallucinations of sight and hearing which they have experienced. They then have a deep satisfaction—much greater than that from emotions produced by theatrical and musical performances, literature and general artistic phenomena of the European complex, because in shamanizing the audience at the same time acts and participates.

Shamanism, Spirit-Possession and Ecstasy

Mircea Eliade argues that: ‘The specific element of shamanism is not the incorporation of spirits by the shaman, but the ecstasy provoked by the ascension to the sky or by the descent to Hell: the incorporation of spirits and possession by them are universally distributed phenomena, but they do not necessarily belong to shamanism in the strict sense.’ While we must welcome Eliade’s recognition of the link between shamanism and ecstasy, which we shall develop here, it will be clear that his attempt to distinguish between shamanism and possession does not accord with the Tungus primary evidence. This, however, has not deterred the ingenious Belgian structural anthropologist, Luc de Heusch, from taking this supposed distinction between shamanism and possession and making it the corner-stone of his ambitious, formalist theory of religion. Shamanism, de Heusch maintains, is the ascent of man to the gods, possession the reverse. As an ‘ascensual metaphysic’ the first is, naturally, the opposite of the second which is an ‘incarnation’. Where, in the former, man ascends, in the latter the spirits descend. Possession, moreover, according to de Heusch, can itself be divided into two types. The first, characterised as ‘inauthentic’ assumes the form of an undesired illness, a malign demonic assault which must be treated by the expulsion or exorcism of the intrusive demons. The second, a sublime religious experience, is in contrast a ‘joyous Dionysian epiphany’. This highly prized state of exaltation is cultivated in what becomes a ‘sacred theatre’.

These misleading contrasts, based on the tone of the emotional experience involved, are further confounded by later writers notably by Douglas in her Natural Symbols, although Bourguignon, who writes of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ possession, clearly appreciates that the distinction may not have such far-reaching implications. The truth is that, just as there is generally little point in distinguishing between shamanism and possession since both occur together in the arctic locus classicus and widely elsewhere, so the distinction between benign and malign possession experiences can be highly misleading. In the first place, it is simply not true that what is perceived as a negative or even traumatic event is necessarily interpreted in the same vein as irrefutable evidence of demonic intervention. On the contrary, amongst the Tungus and all over the world, traumatic episodes, personal calamities and even physically crippling afflictions regularly serve as the harbingers of the divine call. This is not to say, of course, that where experiences of this kind are actually interpreted as sighs of satanic possession they are not treated by exorcism. But, frequently, the situation is far from being as clear-cut as this neat intellectual dichotomy might seem to imply. There is not invariably any direct parallelism between the emotional quality of an experience and its interpretation: what begins as an illness requiring treatment to appease the spirit responsible may gradually develop into a mutual accommodation where, as we would say, ‘the patient learns to live with his problem’. In this extended process, which is likely to include inter-mittent recurrence of the original symptoms, a new and binding relationship develops between the human subject and the spirit with the increasing domestication of the latter. The final step in this long-drawn out initiatory process occurs when, having fully demonstrated his power to control spirits, the ex-patient begins to diagnose and treat similar spiritual affliction in others.

Thus, as St Paul’s traumatic experience on the road to Damascus reminds us, what ends in ecstasy may begin in agony. Indeed, those who vainly seek divine inspiration from other shamans may only succeed in achieving it after much self-inflicted mortification. So, in a characteristic account, an Eskimo shaman explained to one observer, Rasmussen, how, after unsuccessfully attempting to learn the shamanistic mysteries from others, he wandered off on his own into the wilderness of the arctic Tundra. There, he explained to Rasmussen,

I soon became melancholy. I would sometimes fall to weeping and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then for no reason all would suddenly be changed, and I f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Religion and the Study of Religions
• Traditional Religions
• New Religious Movements