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Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century
By Gloria Flaherty PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06923-4
CHAPTER 1
The Paradigm of Permissibility, or, Early Reporting Strategies
The age of discovery brought forth a prodigious supply of information about the multifarious vestiges of shamanism all over the world. The methods used to gather this information can at best be termed elusive, and the means of disseminating it, eclectic. The reporters usually strove for as much accuracy as circumstances in the field would allow, but their observational skills were mostly undeveloped. As could be expected, they saw and evaluated things solely on the basis of European religion, politics, and social customs, which then blended with their own personal desires for fame and fortune.
Their reports appeared almost at the same time as did those works investigating alchemy and magic as possible means for discovering the hidden secrets of nature. All those reports and works happened to coincide with the rising tide of European fear of witchcraft. The ensuing craze produced mercilessly widespread persecutions and many obstacles for those attempting to articulate what they thought they observed about what seemed to be not quite normal. If their reports did not treat shamanism as a form of diabolic demonology, they were listed on the Index librorum prohibitorum; they were refused license to appear in print; or, even worse, they incurred accusations of heresy. Such difficulties encouraged the development of a theologically acceptable paradigm or safe pattern of discourse that served as a model to be copied. As long as the devil was clearly disavowed, questions could be broached about matters otherwise considered too delicate or forbidden. While many writers conscientiously adhered to this paradigm of permissibility, there were others who merely used its rhetoric, oftentimes with no other objective than titillating their readers with stories of exotic or lascivious rituals. Still others developed evasive strategies that did not compromise their intellectual integrity. Some very serious investigators who refused to adulterate their findings never did get to see their works published during their lifetimes. Only several centuries thereafter did they appear. Among them were some reports still valued today by ethnobotanists and pharmacologists about the unguents, anesthetics, and other medications used in shamanic healing.
An explanation for miraculous cures had been sought since the earliest travelers to the New World recorded their experiences—if not before. Time and time again faith was singled out as the most significant factor. One traveler to the Americas in the sixteenth century, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (fl. 1535), totally astonished himself when the treatments demanded of him by some natives succeeded to such a degree that even a corpse purportedly came back to life. His success was attributed to imitating indigenous medicine men while also saying the Lord's Prayer and making the sign of the cross over the patients. In other words, he combined an appeal to their faith with his own Christian belief.
The arrogance of eurocentric male Christendom was evident in most early accounts of shamanism. Their authors unabashedly referred to native peoples as stupid brutes who believed in evil spirits and worshiped heathen idols because they had no sense of the true god. Paul Einhorn (d. 1655), for one, tried to articulate what he had learned about Baltic superstitions. He often expressed his amazement at the acknowledged high status of women in those geographical areas, and, in trying to give reasons for it, he related pregnancy and fertility to the innumerable songs about "the mothers," whether the revered mothers of the forest, the garden, or the sea. Einhorn, a Christian missionary, did not overlook the sexual aspects of heathen religious practices. He explored the importance of what he interpreted as their saturnalias, stressing that all kinds of carnal activities were accompanied by lascivious songs and deeds, in addition to veneration of the highly honored god Comus. He also recognized a tendency to go underground, something that was becoming increasingly prevalent among the believers in shamanism who had been assaulted by European missionaries and conquerors. While explaining how the Baltic peoples managed to outwit those sent to convert them to Christianity, Einhorn displayed his own knowledge about the literature of travel to the New World and Asia as well as the remote parts of Europe. Despite whatever efforts might have been made, Einhorn reported that the local peoples retained their faith in the power of "their soothsayers, augurs, and priests of the idols."
Another description of early seventeenth-century Livonians along the Baltic coast exemplified how lip service could be paid to reason while at the same time denigrating the quality of local wizardry: "They are by nature obtuse and dull, inclined to Necromancy and Sorcery, but in the performance of an Exorcism, so palpably ridiculous, that I wonder how they have obtained that repute they have in the World among those, who ought to be wiser than to believe such groundless Fictions." So strong was the hold of shamanism on the minds of the Baltic peoples that writers at the end of the eighteenth century were still remarking about it and about the precariousness of the entire Christianizing effort.
Nicolas Witsen (1640–1717), who was eventually to become mayor of Amsterdam, was yet another on-site witness to shamanistic practices in the seventeenth century. He spent his youth traveling rather widely throughout the imperial Russian lands. His innate curiosity, coupled with his natural research instincts, made him so well known at the Muscovite court that Peter the Great sought him out there and later in Amsterdam. It was Witsen who happened to facilitate Peter's introduction to the members of the political as well as the scientific community of Western Europe, among whom was the famous physician, Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738).
Witsen's account of his travels and studies, Noord en Oost Tartaryen, was first published in 1692 in what apparently was such a rare, limited edition that not even his good friend and colleague Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) knew about it. Included in that account were descriptions of the various forms of idolatry and superstition that Witsen found still extant. After displaying his familiarity with classical antiquity by mentioning Pythagoras and metempsychosis, and after making comparisons with other inexplicable aspects of the accepted past, he spent a great deal of effort on the shamanic practices he managed to observe or learn of during his travels. Everything he reported about them naturally remained within the accepted paradigm of permissibility. Writing in Dutch, he used the Germanicized word Schaman and explained to his readers that it meant a priest of the devil. He found the kinds of services such priests rendered to the various tribes of aborigines intriguing. About one tribe, he reported the following:
They come to their heathen priests or holy men in order to be helped out of need when ill or otherwise discomforted as if to a source of information. These then go for advice to the idol, and they make the people believe one absurdity or another. For example, according to ear- and eyewitnesses, in order to become healthy, they will slaughter the best horse and consume the meat with the entire family in one day. The hide, feet, and head are hanged at the church tower in honor of the idol. In so doing, they pray to it for themselves. (634)
Witsen's great desire to communicate what he had learned about the phenomenon of shamanism had led him to include an illustration of a shaman from the Tungus in full ceremonial regalia and wearing a hat with reindeer antlers, long recognized as symbolizing death and regeneration (plate 1).
Another tribe's practices prompted him to offer a strikingly comprehensive description:
Thus must the sorcerer with his magic know what to say, or advise about who has done such, or what is going on. In the same way as this swearing and the stabbing of knives occur, so, too, do they practice magic, or, rather, make predictions. They chop down the branches of trees, which they then lay on the water, or, in the winter, set in the middle of the ice, around which they do their work. And then they take in their hand a heavy cutting knife or an arrow, making much clamor by jumping and screaming while drumming on a little drum. Afterward the soothsayer then also stabs himself bravely in his body. Many Samoyedes stand around him screaming similarly. The sorcerer, hurting himself in this manner, falls in a faint while jumping, and after having lain for a time, just as if rising out of a sleep, begins to prophesy about all the preceding matters. This is the most respected kind of divination. Smaller things are divined and examined with fewer efforts, although not without practicing magic in their manner, but rather without the chopping down of trees, that is, only inside a tent or in the smoke from the fireplace. One finds some Christians who ask advice from them as often as from the devil, and through that try to retrieve their lost or stolen goods. (896)
Those practices were corroborated by such people as John Perry (1670–1732), an architect and engineer, whose relatively long-term residence among the Russians resulted in The state of Russia under the present Czar, a work that was thereafter translated into many languages. In Perry's opinion, the corruption, ignorance, and idleness of the so-called Christian clergy prevented the czar's enlightened attempts to introduce social as well as religious reforms. Consequently, superstition of all kinds was widely prevalent, as was sodomy and other such habits.
Similar circumstances on the other side of the globe were attested to by Lionel Wafer (ca. 1660–ca. 1705), a buccaneer and physician who spent several years in the Americas. In 1699, he published A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, a work that saw several editions in various languages before 1750. His attention was particularly drawn to matters having to do with curing and healing. He therefore described how the natives very successfully treated wounds with herbs they chewed in their mouths to the consistency of paste. Their methods of bloodletting also concerned him. Most startling to him, however, were the various shenanighans of their shamans, or, as he preferred to call them, conjurers. It was they who predicted and prognosticated as well as cured. He thought of them as being "very expert and skillful in their Sort of Diabolical Conjurations." He described a stance or "pawaw" that he himself had experienced:
We were in the House with them, and they first began to work with making a Partition with Hammocks, that the Pawawers, for so they call these Conjurers, might be by themselves. They continued some time at their Exercise, and we could hear them make most hideous Yellings and Shrieks; imitating the Voices of all their kind of Birds and Beasts. With their own Noise, they joyn'd that of several Stones stuck together, and of Conch-shells, and of a sorry Sort of Drums made of hollow Bamboes, which they beat upon; making a jarring Noise also with Strings fasten'd to the larger Bones of Beasts. And every now and then they would make a dreadful Exclamation, and clattering all of a sudden, would as suddenly make a Pause and a profound Silence. But finding that after a considerable Time no Answer was made them, they concluded that 'twas because we were in the House, and so turned us out, and went to work again. (290–91)
Once more they had no luck, so they double-checked the area and found some of the explorers' items of clothing. They removed them because of their negative aura or influence, and "Then they fell once more to their Pawawing; and after a little Time they came out with their Answer, but all in a Muck-sweat; so that they first went down to the River and washed themselves, and then came and deliver'd the Oracle to us" (291).
Healing was an important issue for the French explorer Louis Armand, baron de La Hontan (1666–ca. 1713) as well. The account he gave of his travels in America contained an entire section called "Diseases and Remedies of the Savages." In addition to describing the procedures—the dancing and the howling like animals—he remarked on the background and calling of the shamans, or, as they became known in the French literature, jugglers: "A Jongleur is a sort of Physician, or rather a Quack, who being once cured of some dangerous Distemper, has the Presumption and Folly to fancy that he is immortal, and possessed of the Power of curing all Diseases, by speaking to the Good and Evil Spirits."
The reactions to shamanism that such voyagers and explorers supplied were supplemented in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the observations of missionaries and hostages or prisoners. Again and again they linked the present to the past by making comparisons to still earlier travelers, such as Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (d. 1252) and Marco Polo (1254–1324). Their reports went through several editions in different languages and also appeared in the major collections of voyage literature. Pian del Carpine wrote in general terms about purification rites, oracles, divination, and sorcery among the Tatars he observed during his expedition to the northeast in 1246. Marco Polo related his perception of the healing séance he witnessed in China. He described how chanting and increasingly frenetic dancing induced in the practitioner a deathlike trance that purportedly allowed for communication with the spirit world so as to reveal the cause of and the cure for the particular affliction. The curiosity coupled with objectivity that he mustered explains why later centuries so often credited him with having keen powers of observation:
But when they are ill they make their physicians, that is magicians come to them, these are the devil-charmers and those who keep the idols (and with these the province is well supplied), and ask them to foresee concerning the sick. And when these magi are come they ask about the manner of the sickness; then the sick persons tell the ills which they have, and the magi, very many of them being gathered together, begin immediately to sound their instruments of music and to sing and to dance and leap in honour and praise of their idols; and they continue this dancing, singing, and playing all together for a long time until some one of these magicians fall all on his back on the ground or on the pavement or on the bed and with great foam at the mouth and seems dead, and then they dance no more. And they say that it is that the devil is entered there inside his body, and he stays thus a great while, in such manner that he seems dead. And when the other magicians his companions, of whom many were there, see that one of them is fallen in such way as you have heard, then they begin to speak to him and they ask him what sickness this sick man has and why he has it. And that one remaining in ecstasy answers. Such a spirit has smitten him because he did him some great evil and displeasure, and he names some one. And the other magicians say to him, We pray thee that thou pardon him the fault and that thou accept and take from him for recompense of his blood those things which thou wishest to have, all at thy will. And when these magicians have said these and many other like words and have prayed much the spirit who is in the body of the magician who is fallen down, then that spirit answers. And if it seems to the demon by the signs of the sickness that the sick man must die in that sickness of his, he answers like this and says, This sick man has done so much wrong to such a spirit and is so bad a man that the spirit will not be pacified by any sacrifice [or] pardon him for anything in the world. Within so many days he mil die. This answer have those who must die. And if he shows that the sick man must be healed of that disease, then the spirit which is in the body of the magician answers these magicians and says, He has offended much, but yet it shall be forgiven him. For if the sick man wishes to be healed let them take two sheep or three, and let them also make ten drinks or twelve or more, very dear and good to drink and with good spices. And they say again that the sheep may have black heads, or they describe them marked in another way just as they please to say. And he says that he make sacrifice of them to such an idol and to such a spirit—and he will name him, and that so many magicians and so many ladies, pythonesses, that is of those who have the spirits and who have the idols, may gather with them, and that they all must make great praises with great singing and with great lights and with good odours and great feasting to such an idol and to such a spirit; and that in this way the god will be appeased toward the sick man. And thus the spirit answers them when the sick man must be healed. And when these have had this answer, the friends of the sick man instantly perform all that the demon commanded and do so as the magicians tell them to do.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century by Gloria Flaherty. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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