What is shamanic initiation, and what part does dismemberment play?

What is shamanic initiation? #

In the cultures where shamans have been studied, becoming one was rarely a matter of simply deciding to. The anthropologist Michael Winkelman, comparing magico-religious practitioners across a large sample of societies, found that the people he identified as shamans, who are found in hunter-gatherer and simple farming and herding societies around the world, shared a cluster of features. Two of them were “an initiatory crisis involving a death and rebirth experience” and a training that involved entering altered states of consciousness, particularly with fasting and social isolation.¹

The anthropologist Piers Vitebsky describes the usual sequence. The future shaman is approached by spirits in dreams or visions, commonly falls seriously ill, and comes to understand during the illness what the spirits want. That first approach is then followed by a period of instruction, in which the illness itself becomes a way of learning: the future shaman is introduced to helper spirits, shown round the realms where they will work, warned of enemies and shown the true nature of the diseases they will have to fight.² The crisis that often opens this process has its own answer: see What is shaman’s sickness (initiatory illness)?

What part does dismemberment play? #

It is the most vivid form of the death at the centre of initiation. Especially in Siberia and Mongolia, Vitebsky writes, the spirits’ first approach comes as a violent onslaught that seems to destroy the future shaman’s personality completely, followed by a rebuilding. The candidate’s inner experience is expressed as a bodily dismantling: they may see themselves as a skeleton, a theme found widely in Asia and the Americas, and in Siberia “every bone and muscle is taken apart, counted and put together again”.³ Vitebsky gives the account of Dyukhade, a great shaman of the Nganasan, reindeer hunters and herders of north-west Siberia, who in the 1930s described being taken through the land of illnesses, having his head cut off, his body cut into pieces and boiled in a cauldron, and then being forged anew.⁴ The Yakut, herders of horses and cattle in Siberia, held that a shaman could cure only those diseases whose spirits had tasted the shaman’s flesh during initiation.⁵

The same pattern is found amongst the Inuit, who were hunter-gatherers. The Danish ethnologist Erik Holtved writes that a novice was expected to spend long periods alone in desolate places, often suffering severely from cold and hunger, because to become an able shaman “it was necessary to experience the mystery of life and death”. In Greenland the novice was said to be eaten by a great spirit that appeared as a bear, and to wake afterwards on the shore; amongst the Iglulik a shaman had to be able to see himself as a skeleton and name every bone of his body in the shamans’ sacred language.⁶

Why would becoming a shaman mean being taken apart? #

Because something old has to die before something new can come. In Vitebsky’s reading the shaman’s new powers are not a tool added on from outside but a new insight into the world, and especially into the kinds of human suffering the shaman has just been through so intensely; a new personality emerges, and the destruction of the old one is how that is expressed.⁷

Therapeutic Shamanism understands it in the same way, as the death of an old self and the birth of a new one. In growing up we build a middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer out of stories: about who we are, what the world is like and how we should behave. Shamans say that to become a shaman, the past has to die; the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer stories have to go, or at least we need to be able to step away from them when journeying, because only then can we truly experience being something else. This is also why, in most cultures, shamanic training deliberately shook the trainee out of the norms of their own culture, with periods of doing things the wrong way round, such as wearing clothes back to front or walking backwards, and by teaching them knowledge that changed how they saw the world.⁸ See How were shamans traditionally trained?

Does initiation always have to be violent? #

No. Vitebsky is clear that it need not be. Amongst the Sora of eastern India, who are farmers, a girl who will become a shaman is escorted by spirits in her dreams to the land of the dead beneath the earth; the visits are frightening, but there is no devastating dismemberment, and as the dreams grow more regular they lose their fearsome quality. On the North American Plains, where many peoples lived by hunting bison, the vision quest was a rite of passageRite of passage. The deliberate death-and-rebirth (separation → liminal → incorporation, after van Gennep) by which the childhood-built identity is dismantled and a new one, rooted in the Soul, is grown. The lost route to Adulthood. More about this in which a boy fasted alone in the wilderness to gain a guardian spirit. The initiation of a shaman, he concludes, does not have to be a single dramatic moment, and can be a gradual process lasting a lifetime.⁹

Therapeutic Shamanism agrees. It is often said in the shamanic community that people come to shamanism, or to finding their Soul, through near-death experiences or similar traumatic events, and sometimes that is true. But there are gentler, steadier paths too, and they are equally effective; good teaching is effective and yet manageable, grounded, trauma-free and without unnecessary drama.¹⁰ See What is ego death?

What is a dismemberment journey in Therapeutic Shamanism? #

It is one of the transformation practices, the classic shamanic practices in which the journeyer is taken completely apart, reduced to something formless and then re-formed: burials, burnings, dissolvings, dismemberments and others. In a sense they are a mini death and rebirth.¹¹ In a dismemberment, the journeyer is eaten and digested by an Animal, usually their Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, and then re-formed. It might sound strange, but in the Lower-World it usually feels perfectly normal and fine.¹² Like the other transformation practices it cleanses and heals, and it has the added benefit of deepening and strengthening the bond with the Animal. Because the Power Animal is the most important of all the GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, being dismembered by them is worth seeking out regularly, and dismemberments with other Animals are a way of receiving their healing gifts, learning about them and forging a connection with them.¹³

So the death and rebirth that a traditional initiation brought about in one long ordeal is practised here regularly, as a mini death and rebirth, in the safety of the Lower-World. Rewilding Yourself has an exercise for it. See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?

Is dismemberment just a hunter’s image? #

Scholars have argued about this. Many earlier ethnologists read the shaman’s dismemberment as a reflection of the hunter’s everyday work of cutting up, cleaning and cooking animals; Vitebsky, for his part, observes that for a hunting society bones are the very core of life.¹⁴ The psychologist Holger Kalweit disagreed, calling that link a superficial and accidental analogy: for him psychic dismemberment is “a universal transcultural and transpersonal symbol”, and the fact that the initiate is so often dismembered by animals simply reflects the way of life of particular peoples. He also notes that dismemberment is only one of many ways of reaching the same change.¹⁵

A wider argument concerns whether there was ever one worldwide pattern of initiation at all. The picture of a single, universal shamanic initiation owes much to the scholar of religion Mircea Eliade, whose approach is criticised for drawing material from very different cultures into one model. See Who was Mircea Eliade, and what do critics say is wrong with his idea of shamanism?

How is a shaman’s initiation different from initiation into Adulthood? #

Everyone in a hunter-gatherer culture went through an initiation at adolescence, designed to take apart the identity built in childhood and replace it with one rooted in Soul.¹⁶ Becoming a shaman was something more. In tribal cultures the training to become a shaman was long and arduous, generally began in early life, and was lived out in a culture which wholly supported it.¹⁷ The rite of passage into Adulthood has its own answer: see What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?