Shamanism

Shamanism names the complex of practices in which a specialist — the shaman — enters controlled trance states to engage with spirits for purposes of healing, divination, and social regulation. The word derives from the Tungus (Evenki) term šaman and was extended cross-culturally by scholars in the twentieth century. The dominant scholarly account, Mircea Eliade’s mystical interpretation centered on celestial voyage, has been challenged by I. M. Lewis’s sociological approach, which defines the shaman by mastery over spirits rather than by any particular cosmology. On Lewis’s account, shamanism is inseparable from spirit-possession: the shaman’s vocation begins in an involuntary, illness-like possession crisis and matures into controlled, reversible trance. The shamanistic complex appears across radically different cultures but tends to flourish in small communities under acute environmental or political stress, where it provides healing, social control, and a channel for oblique protest by the marginalized.

Defining the Shaman

The etymology is Tungus: among the Evenki people of Siberia and Central Asia, šaman designated the specialist who mediated between human communities and the spirit world. The word entered European usage through Dutch travellers approximately in 1692, and comparative religion scholars extended it globally — most influentially Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), who defined it by the shaman’s celestial voyage and descent to the underworld.

Lewis’s sociological reframing rejects this emphasis and begins with a methodological critique of prior scholarship. Most earlier writers on possession, Lewis argues, were captured by the theatrical drama of ecstasy itself — absorbed in debates about whether particular trance states were genuine and in the expressive or theatrical dimension of the rituals — rather than asking what social functions possession serves and which categories of person are most likely to be possessed.(Lewis, I. M., 2003) Lewis’s opening questions set the agenda he would spend the book answering: how does the incidence of ecstasy relate to the social order? Are particular social categories of person more prone to possession than others? If possession runs in consistent social grooves, what does that pattern reveal?(Lewis, I. M., 2003)

For Lewis, what makes a shaman is not the kind of journey undertaken but the direction of control: the shaman is a spirit-inspired specialist who has achieved mastery over spirits that once mastered him. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Eliade’s insistence on celestial voyage as the defining feature is, for Lewis, both empirically false and analytically misleading. Examination of the Tungus sources — the very culture from which the word derives — shows that Tungus shamanism inherently involves controlled spirit possession; shamans among the Eskimo and the Chukchee are likewise possessed by spirits. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The shaman-as-master-of-spirits definition detaches the concept from any particular cosmology, making comparative study possible without assuming that Siberian metaphysics is the norm.

Trance states that shamanism employs are not mysterious. They can be induced in most normal people through a wide range of stimuli: music, rhythmic dance, fasting, sensory deprivation, rapid breathing, and psychotropic plants. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Physiologically, these techniques promote the release of endorphins — the brain’s natural opiates — which explains how states of altered consciousness and analgesia can be produced without external drugs. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The cultural interpretation of the state varies enormously across societies and is independent of the physiology. Lewis distinguishes trance (a physiological state) from possession (a cultural evaluation): someone is possessed if their community considers them to be. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

The Shamanistic Vocation: Illness and Initiation

Across cultures, the shaman’s calling follows a recognizable trajectory. It begins not with a serene gift but with crisis: an uninvited, uncontrolled possession seizure experienced as illness, psychological disorder, or personal catastrophe. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Among the Tungus, the stock sign of initial spirit seizure is culturally stereotyped behavior resembling hysteria. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The candidate for the shamanistic vocation typically resists the spirits’ call — and the more violent and dramatic this resistance, the greater the authority the eventual shaman commands. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Where initial exorcism — attempts to expel the intruding spirit — proves ineffective, the therapeutic strategy shifts. Rather than permanent expulsion, treatment moves toward accommodation: placating and domesticating the spirit by paying it cult. This is adorcism. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Through the adorcistic process, the uncontrolled, unsolicited initial possession leads to a state in which possession can be turned on and off at will in shamanic séances. As Lewis summarizes the Tungus formulation: the shaman possesses his spirits, although they also possess him. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The trajectory is what the cliché compresses: what begins in agony ends in ecstasy.

Korean shamanism (mansin tradition) illustrates this pattern in fine ethnographic detail. Destined shamans — naerin saram — undergo a pre-initiation period marked by spirit voices, visions, and compulsive pilgrimages to sacred mountains. (Kendall, Laurel, 1988) The calling narrative, encompassing dreams, crazed wanderings, and portentous events, both legitimizes the woman’s claim to practice and testifies to the power of her personal gods. (Kendall, Laurel, 1988) Korean mansin studied in the late twentieth century shared traits of extraordinary intelligence and a persistent sense of having been morally wronged — qualities that aligned poorly with the subordinate female role in Confucian Korean society and that the shamanistic vocation resolved, if obliquely. (Kendall, Laurel, 1988)

The séance, once the shaman has mastered her vocation, is a collective event. Among the Tungus, the shaman’s rhythmic music and singing gradually implicate every participant in a shared action; as the tempo rises, only those with cognitive deficits fail to join the chorus. The entire audience approaches a state near the shaman’s own, restrained from mass possession only by the collective belief that when the shaman is present, the spirit enters him alone. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Peripheral Cults and Central Religions

Lewis’s most analytically productive contribution is the distinction between two types of possession cult. Peripheral cults involve spirits that are morally amoral — they strike capriciously, without reference to the victim’s conduct, so victims bear no responsibility for the affliction or for the demands it generates. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) These cults serve the marginalized: women in patriarchal societies, ex-slaves, low-caste laborers, conquered peoples. Central possession religions involve spirits that uphold public morality: they punish violation of community norms, adjudicate disputes, and regulate the cosmic order through the shaman’s mediation. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) In central cults the shaman is a public authority figure; in peripheral cults the possessed person is a suppliant extracting concessions.

Established religions suppress ecstatic participation once they become institutionalized because the inspired individual’s direct claim to divine knowledge threatens ecclesiastical hierarchy. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Central possession cults therefore tend to persist in small, fluid communities facing harsh environmental conditions or alien political domination — precisely those contexts in which ordinary secular institutions fail and ecstatic religion fills the gap. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

The peripheral/central distinction is a continuum rather than a binary. The Giriama of the Kenya coast offer a transitional case: Islamic spirits cause possession illness in non-Muslims, and the only effective cure is conversion — so peripheral affliction becomes the doorway to a new moralistic religion. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) More dramatically, the Zezuru Shona of Zimbabwe demonstrated that the transition can run in reverse: a central, politically potent shamanic cult, suppressed by colonial authorities, regressed into peripheral form maintained by women when direct male political action was unavailable. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

The peripheral/central distinction should not be understood as mutually exclusive. Among the Vedda of Ceylon, male ancestor shamanism constitutes a central possession religion upholding clan morality, while women maintain a separate peripheral cult — both operating simultaneously in the same small society. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Lewis is explicit that the peripheral/central distinction designates ideal types at opposite ends of a continuum, not mutually exclusive categories. Many actually existing cults occupy intermediate positions: the same ritual apparatus can function as peripheral from the vantage of one set of social actors while appearing as a central morality institution from another vantage point in the same society.(Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Gender, Power, and Spirit Possession

Women are the primary practitioners and clients of peripheral possession cults across a remarkably consistent cross-cultural range: Islamic Somali and Sudanese society (sar/zar), West African Hausa society (bori), Japan, South and Southeast Asia, and Korea. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Lewis reads these cults as thinly disguised protest movements directed against male dominance. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The mechanism is structurally elegant: the spirit voices the woman’s demands, not the woman herself, which allows husbands to yield without ostensibly deferring to their wives. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Male dominance ideology is nominally preserved; material concessions are extracted.

Among Somali women, the prime targets of sar spirits are married women in polygynous conflict, neglected by husbands, or threatened by divorce. The spirits’ demands are costly gifts and ceremonies that husbands must provide — expenditures that men attribute to female malingering and women attribute to the spirits’ genuine appetites. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The contradiction is stable: both sexes believe in the spirits, but men remain appropriately sceptical when their own wives and pockets are immediately affected. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The zar complex extends from Ethiopia across the Muslim Sudan, Egypt, North Africa, and into the Arabian Peninsula. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Peripheral cults are not women’s monopoly. Italian tarantism in earlier centuries drew a considerable proportion of men; the subordinate male peasantry used the cult in ways parallel to women’s use of sar. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Ex-slave communities in North Africa used bori and zar brotherhoods as mutual aid organizations — providing credit, welfare, and solidarity alongside their healing function — and as pressure groups protecting members against harassment by Arab and Berber superiors. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Women’s prominence in shamanic vocations intensifies under conditions of extreme social stress. Czaplicka’s early twentieth-century records from Siberia document that wars, famines, and epidemics reliably produce surges in female shamanistic vocations. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Korean mansin are predominantly women; the few men who practice perform in women’s clothing. (Kendall, Laurel, 1988) Lewis reads female entry into the shamanistic role under stress as consistent with his general thesis: the shamanistic vocation offers women an authoritative public role precisely when their subordinate position makes other avenues to authority inaccessible.

The relationship between gender and ecstasy has a historical dynamic. New prophetic movements typically show greater gender egalitarianism in ecstatic participation; as movements institutionalize and develop formal male hierarchies, women’s prophetic roles are marginalized and redefined as peripheral. The Montanist controversy in early Christianity is the historical paradigm case. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Cross-Cultural Comparisons

Lewis surveys a wide geographical range to test whether the peripheral/central typology holds beyond its African origins. Among the Korekore Shona, a tiered shamanic hierarchy — alien spirits, tribal spirits, royal ancestors — upholding tribal morality, regulating rain and fertility, and historically serving as a vehicle for anti-colonial resistance demonstrates the central pattern in its most elaborated form. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Among the Akawaio of Guyana, shamanic séances function simultaneously as healing sessions, law courts, and public confessionals: spirits identify wrongdoers, require confession, and impose community sanctions through the shaman’s mediation. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Among the Eskimo, the shaman’s primary function is managing the cosmic economy: violations of hunting and sexual taboos, which offend the spirits controlling game, must be publicly confessed in shamanic séances to restore the relationship between community and spirit world. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Haitian voodoo, practiced by over 90 percent of the island’s population, illustrates that peripheral spirit cults can scale to become a vehicle for populist nationalism and resistance: the loa spirits drew on African cosmological heritage to sustain peasant solidarity against French colonial rule and the mulatto ruling class after independence. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

The Ethiopian case shows that this process can occur rapidly. The Macha Oromo, Lewis records, experienced a collapse of their traditional gada age-grade system and its hereditary priests under the combined pressures of conquest and social transformation; into that vacuum a proliferation of new possession shamans — the qallu — emerged to perform the regulatory and protective functions formerly held by hereditary office, demonstrating that central possession is an achieved route to authority in disrupted systems rather than a residue of archaic tradition.(Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Lewis draws a general sociological principle from this evidence: central possession religions flourish most vigorously in small, fluid social units facing acute environmental pressure or alien domination. When ordinary secular mechanisms of social integration are overwhelmed, ecstatic religion provides collective action grounded in supernatural sanction — compensating for the absence of effective secular institutions. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Shamanism and Psychiatry

Early psychiatric observers, including Bogoras, Devereux, and Silverman, pathologized shamanism: the shaman’s initial crisis was read as clinically diagnosable psychopathology, and cultures where shamanism flourished were characterized as anomic or sick. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) This interpretation did not survive careful fieldwork. Nadel’s comparative study of Nuba shamanism insisted that shamans in everyday life are not abnormal individuals, neurotics, or paranoiacs; if they were, they would be classed as lunatics, not respected as priests. Jane Murphy’s research on Alaskan Eskimo shamans found that psychiatric disorder was not a prerequisite for the shamanistic role — well-known shamans were unusually mentally healthy. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Lewis’s synthesis, the wounded healer resolution, reconciles these findings: the shaman undergoes a genuine initial crisis, but what defines him is mastery of that crisis. The greater the apparent trauma mastered, the greater the authority and power of the new shaman. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The shaman is not the slave but the master of anomaly and chaos — the healer’s passion is his triumph over the chaotic experience of raw power that threatened to drag him under. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Lewis draws an explicit analogy between shamanism and psychoanalysis at precisely this point: both traditions require the healer to have personally undergone the disorder they will subsequently treat, and both treat mastery of one’s own disorder — not freedom from it — as the precondition for therapeutic authority.(Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Shirokogoroff’s formulation frames the spirit system as cognitive technology: spirits are hypotheses, cultural constructs that name and manage forces otherwise experienced as alien intrusions into psychic life. The Tungus spirit system, Shirokogoroff argued, regulates the psychomental complex more effectively than Western psychological concepts like instincts and complexes — and hysteria “can be easily regulated” within it. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Lewis endorses this position and extends it to Western psychiatry: following Shirokogoroff, he argues that psychoanalysis constitutes an alternative framework for understanding perceptions and behaviors that elsewhere are couched in the logic of spirit possession. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

The séance functions as danced psychodrama and group therapy. The atmosphere is permissive and comforting; repressed urges are given public rein; abreaction is the order of the day. Each participant ideally achieves ecstasy and collapses in trance, emerging purged and refreshed. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Lévi-Strauss characterized the shamanic cure as the exact counterpart of psychoanalysis with all elements inverted — the analyst listens while the patient constructs an individual myth; the shaman speaks and provides a social myth. Lewis regards this contrast as contrived, but the comparison illuminates the structural parallels.

Possession and shamanism deal essentially not with the hopelessly psychologically impaired but with ordinarily neurotic people. Those who cannot enter collective trance — refractory psychotics — are the exceptions that prove the rule, typically screened out by cult probationary periods. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The question of normality is inherently relative: in societies where spirit possession is integral to shared belief, disbelief in spirits would be the striking abnormality. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Lewis’s key inversion: psychiatry and psychoanalysis are limited, imperfect forms of shamanism — not shamanism a primitive form of psychiatry. Both aim to maintain harmony between person and person, and between person and nature. Their basic aims are the same. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) The shaman is not less than a psychiatrist; he is more — his practice includes organic disease, interpersonal conflict, environmental misfortune, and psychiatric disorder, while the Western psychiatrist’s domain is restricted to psychogenic complaints. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Multiple Personality Disorder, Lewis observed in his 2003 preface, represents a return of possession ideology to Western culture. Its structural parallels with non-Western possession cosmologies — specialist diagnosticians, spirit entities including aliens, the standard explanation in terms of malevolent acts by a kin-figure — are not coincidental but reflect the persistence of possession frameworks within secular societies. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Significance for Medical Anthropology

Lewis’s sociological reading of shamanism opened three lines of inquiry that remain active. First, it established that healing roles in small-scale societies cannot be assessed by Western diagnostic criteria without ethnocentric distortion — the shaman’s initial crisis is a culturally structured vocation, not a symptom. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Second, it demonstrated that healing systems simultaneously perform social functions: the shamanic séance is a mechanism of social control, dispute resolution, and moral enforcement in societies that lack formal legal or political institutions. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) Third, the peripheral cult analysis showed that apparently religious illness behavior can function as political action — a strategy available to the subordinated when direct confrontation with power is unavailable. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

For medical anthropology, the Shirokogoroff insight that spirits are hypotheses — functional models that organize and regulate psychological experience — remains a productive frame. It allows comparison between indigenous healing systems and biomedicine without asserting the superiority of either, and it grounds Lewis’s larger claim that Western psychiatry and non-Western shamanism are cultural variations on a common human project. (Lewis, I. M., 2003) (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

The distinction between adorcism (accommodation) and exorcism (expulsion) has practical implications for cross-cultural clinical work. A treatment that aims to eliminate a possessing agent will fail when the patient’s community understands possession as requiring taming and integration, not expulsion. Lewis’s observation that exorcism paradoxically stimulates possession trance — and that repeated exorcism can covertly function as an ecstatic cult — suggests that therapeutic strategies that resist the patient’s cultural framework may amplify the very phenomena they seek to eliminate. (Lewis, I. M., 2003)

Human Notes

See Also

• spirit-possession
• healing-ritual
• trance-states
• medical-anthropology
• culture-bound-syndromes
• animism
• ethnopsychiatry

Sources

Lewis, I. M. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Evidence IDs: lew03-ch00-* through lew03-ch07-*.

Kendall, Laurel. The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988. Evidence IDs: ken88-ch01-001, ken88-ch03-002, ken88-ch04-004, ken88-ch04-005.