Nordic Neoshamanisms

S. Kraft, T. Fonneland, J. Lewis, S. Kraft, T. Fonneland, J. Lewis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137461391
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137461407
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

This book proposes that the drive for religiosity and experiences of the sacred are far from lost in contemporary western societies. The contributors' objective is to explore the myriad of ways late modern shamanism is becoming more vital and personally significant to people, communities, and economies in Nordic countries.

I

Background

1

Late Modern Shamanism: Central Texts and Issues

Olav Hammer

Shamans and the Modern World¹

Shamans and their séances exert a striking fascination for people in the Western world. Thousands of articles and books—both academic and popular—have been written about the subject. The words shaman and shamanism no longer belong merely to the professional jargon of scholars of religion and anthropologists, but have become part of everyday language. Shamanism has even, as few other religious phenomena, inspired people in modern times to create their own innovative versions. There is a wide variety of neoshamanic rituals that one accesses through books and via courses of various lengths and costs. The experiential nature of much neoshamanism is apparent from such recent titles as Serge Kahili King’s Urban Shaman (1990), Alberto Villoldo’s Shaman, Healer, Sage: How to Heal Yourself with the Energy Medicine of the Americas (2000), Tony Samara’s Shaman’s Wisdom: Reclaim Your Lost Connection with the Universe (2012), and Sandra Ingerman’s The Shaman’s Toolkit: Ancient Tools for Shaping the Life and World You Want to Live In (2013). For readers of such volumes, it is clear that shamanism is not an exotic practice found among various indigenous peoples, but practices that can be sampled by anybody willing to buy a book and try out the methods found there.

Although neoshamanism belongs to the same cultic milieu in which New Age practices are offered, the Western world’s fascination with shamanism is by no means a recent phenomenon; the historical background has been meticulously documented by Ronald Hutton (2001), Kocku von Stuckrad (2003), Andrei Znamenski (2007), and other researchers. Most of this earlier history is no doubt unknown territory for present-day practitioners of neoshamanism. Contemporary attitudes to shamanism outside academia are rooted in a very small number of widely read books. The classic of all classics, Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, first published in French in 1950, has been central to both the academic world’s understanding of the phenomenon and to the popular imagination. Eliade’s pioneering work came to define a concept and an often-implicit theory of how to approach that concept—something few other works have succeeded in accomplishing.

Another seminal text is Michael Harner’s The Way of the Shaman (1980). For the academically trained reader, the juxtaposition of Eliade and Harner might seem absurd. The same research community that once hailed Eliade’s book as a milestone has marginalized or scorned Harner’s work. For many people outside academia, however, the concept of shamanism has become redefined so that it is effectively synonymous with Harner’s neoshamanism. When in the autumn of 1997, Ma Oftedal was expelled from her position as a priest of the Church of Sweden, one of the main reasons was that she practiced shamanistic rituals with her confirmation candidates. The case was extensively covered in the Swedish media, but nobody seemed to pay attention to one of the most striking aspects of the case: no Siberian or Native American rituals took place in the Swedish confirmation camp, but rather so-called drum journeys, rituals that had been created by Harner.²

Together, these two books have been so influential that one might call them the canonical texts of Western neoshamanism. One can, of course, deal with texts of this nature in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most obvious perspective would be to evaluate them in relation to the ethnographic data we have on indigenous shamanisms. In this chapter, I will pursue a different approach and consider how such canonical texts mirror the Western context in which they were created. Regardless of whether Eliade is considered a “better” scholar and Harner an “inferior” one (or perhaps even no longer a scholar at all), they are comparable from a different perspective. Both have become instrumental in shaping modern people’s understandings of the spiritual legacy of indigenous peoples.

Modern Religiosity in Three Stages

Sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge have developed a tripartite typology of modern religious formations.³ The least demanding, the audience cult, is based on access to information through books, magazines, and broadcast media, but also through personal contacts. The interested audience comes into contact with different religious options by passive consumption of information; active involvement is not required. A form with a somewhat higher degree of commitment, the client cult, is based on the same kind of market economy in which most other goods and services are offered. One participates in the religious activity by paying a fee and taking part in a course, or participating as a client in a therapeutic situation. Even in client cults involvement is frequently minimal. After completing a course, interested clients often move on to other religious alternatives, without immersing themselves in depth in any of them.

The third form, the cult movement, is an organization with members and a leader, in which the top echelon typically attempts to define the dogma, mythology, rituals, and other religious activities with which members are involved. Unsurprisingly, cult movements demand a considerably more stable commitment than the two other forms.

Loosely structured religious milieus like neoshamanism can take on any of Starks’ and Bainbridge’s three variants. Through books, large groups of people come into contact with a new imaginary world. The many people who have read and appreciated Carlos Castaneda’s books on the mysterious Yaqui shaman Don Juan—or titles such as Olga Kharitidi’s Entering the Circle and Harner’s The Way of the Shaman—without actively carrying out the rituals described in them or fully accepting the cosmology they present, represent a very broad, but moderately engaged audience cult. The audience cult’s only common interpretative framework would be that indigenous peoples possess superior knowledge, and possibly, also, that altered states of consciousness can impart insights that our everyday consciousness is unable to provide. For an audience cult of this kind, it does not really present a problem that Castaneda’s books, and probably also Kharitidi’s, are works of fiction. As it is sometimes said in New Age circles: the important thing is not whether something is true in any objective sense, but that it works in one’s own life.

Both factual descriptions of shamanism like Eliade’s and fictional depictions such as Castaneda’s can serve as the basis for a wide audience to form opinions on the phenomenon of shamanism. A Google search will quickly reveal that Internet sites about shamanism can refer to Eliade and to neoshamanic literature side by side, as if they fall into the same category. Eliade’s book has also met with the somewhat strange fate of being reprinted in paperback edition in Penguin Publishing’s Arcana imprint, a series that otherwise consists of handbooks in astrology and cheap editions of A Course in Miracles. The categorization is less surprising than one might initially think. To this we will return.

In order for a client cult to be established, something more than reading experiences is required. Once a practice-based client cult arises, any remaining links to indigenous peoples are fully severed—probably because both creators and consumers of neoshamanistic courses are modern, often urban, people with a Western cultural background. Finally, for a much smaller group of people who have passed through the audience and client cult stages, neoshamanism becomes a fully organized cult movement. Such cult movements bear unmistakable traits of the late modern context within which they arise, as has been amply documented by Galina Lindquist.⁴ This small core of firmly dedicated neoshamanic practitioners will not be discussed further in the present chapter.

Mircea Eliade on Shamanism

The bare essentials of Eliade’s life can be summarized in a few sentences. Eliade was born in Bucharest in 1906. He started his university studies in philosophy in 1925 and became a disciple of and friend with the philosopher Nae Ionescu. Because Ionescu was actively involved in fascist politics, Eliade’s contact with his mentor subsequently came to tarnish Eliade’s reputation. Eliade’s own political sympathies continue to be discussed in an often highly polemical literature, but this aspect of his legacy is not crucial for present purposes. After World War II, Eliade moved to Paris and taught history of religions at Sorbonne. In 1956, he was invited to the University of Chicago by then-professor of history of religions, Joachim Wach, and stayed there until his death in 1986.

Eliade was from an early age an academic with encyclopedic ambitions. Scholarly trends have gone in the direction of increasing specialization: many years of study are needed to master the languages, the sources, and the literature of any given religious tradition. Eliade’s omnivorous interests belong to a largely bygone age. A Master’s thesis on Italian Renaissance philosophy was followed by studies in Sanskrit at the University of Calcutta and a PhD on yoga. After finishing his studies, Eliade embarked on an amazingly prolific career as a writer on highly diverse topics, which—to quote one of Eliade’s book titles—ranged from “primitives” to Zen. Some 20 monographs and no less than 1,500 texts of other kinds, from articles and novels to short stories and reviews, comprise his bibliography. Much of this written output continued to be characterized by an all-encompassing approach, with examples taken from all parts of the globe and all historical periods. The span of topics is also wide, from general surveys of the history of religions, to works on particular religious phenomena. Much of this oeuvre is characterized by a way of understanding religion that has been heavily criticized over the last decades. The point of summing up the main issues with his work is, however, not to engage in yet another unrewarding round of Eliade-bashing, but to uncover some of the presuppositions underlying his work on shamanism, and to show that precisely the same characteristics of his approach that many academics have found rather hard to accept are the very same features that can appeal to spiritual seekers.

Nostalgic Hermeneutics

In his writings, Eliade creates a distinction between two modes of being. Archaic, religious man experienced a distinct difference between profane and sacred time, and between secular and sacred space. For modern people, however, both time and space have largely become experientially homogenous, a mode of being in the world that in Eliade’s descriptions comes across as a state of loss. Thus Eliade’s way of presenting the contrast between archaic and modern people can be roughly characterized as nostalgic antimodernism. Nevertheless, Eliade finds authentically religious human beings in most times and places, from the shamanic cultures of hunter-gatherers to medieval and renaissance alchemists. Even modern human beings are in a sense crypto-religious,⁵ which leads to the strange and perhaps unintended consequence that the initially sharp distinction between the archaic homo religiosus and the profane modern human being dissolves as soon as it is established.

The Sacred

Writers like Eliade who had long careers and left extensive corpora of texts are often read in dramatically different ways. In Eliade’s case, the picture is further complicated by his preference for presenting numerous brief concrete examples over extended discussions of theory, method, and definitional issues. What, precisely, did Eliade assert when he suggested that archaic, religious man was acutely aware of the sacred?

Perhaps Eliade understood the sacred as a category that members of a religious tradition ascribe to certain places, times, or objects. As in the work of Émile Durkheim, people are the agents who describe something as sacred. If so, the “sacred” is hardly more than a convenient label for things set apart, that is, for whatever triggers a certain form of behavior among the members of a tradition. However, if one interprets “the sacred” in Eliade’s texts as a term denoting a distinct ontological category, as critical commentators have done, Eliade appears to construct a theology according to which the sacred actually exists and decides to manifest itself.⁶

The sacred and the profane are not just two categories; they a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Nordic Neoshamanisms
• Part I   Background
• Part II   Late Modern Shamanism in Nordic Countries
• Part III   Neoshamanism in Secular Contexts
• Notes on Contributors
• Index