Shaman’s sickness, or initiatory illness, is the name scholars give to the crisis through which, in many traditional cultures, a future shaman was said to be called, an illness or breakdown, often with visions of being taken apart, dying and being reborn, after which the person took up the shaman’s role. Therapeutic Shamanism recognises the pattern of death and rebirth at its heart, but holds that not all madness is a shamanic awakening, that shamanic cultures knew the difference, and that a dramatic crisis is not needed, since there are gentler, steadier paths that work just as well.
What is shaman’s sickness? #
It is a crisis that marks the beginning of a shaman’s life’s work. The scholar of religion Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, writes of “the initiatory sicknesses of future shamans, which have often been regarded as real attacks of insanity”. In his reading it is “a total crisis”, which can lead to the disintegration of the personality, and that chaos is the sign that the old self is dissolving and a new one is about to be born.1 See Who was Mircea Eliade, and what do critics say is wrong with his idea of shamanism?
The psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina Grof give the usual picture. The career of many shamans begins with “a dramatic involuntary visionary episode that anthropologists call ‘shamanic illness’”. The future shaman may lose contact with their surroundings and go through journeys into the world below, attacks and ordeals, often ending in experiences of death and dismembermentDismemberment. A transformation practice in which the Power Animal takes you apart (classically: eats, digests and regurgitates you), reformed and healed. A practice of trust, cleansing and death-and-rebirth. More about this, then rebirth and ascent. Completed, the crisis can be deeply healing, physically as well as emotionally, and the person “returns to the community as a fully functioning and honored member”.2
How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand it? #
As one form of a pattern found throughout shamanism, the death of an old self and the birth of a new one. Hunter-gatherer peoples understood that, 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, and that we can get lost in them. So all hunter-gatherer cultures held initiation ceremonies around adolescence, designed to dismantle the identity built in childhood and replace it with one rooted in Soul, as Soul is rooted in Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.3 The same pattern runs through the transformation practicesTransformation practices. The family of journey-practices in which the self is deliberately taken apart, reduced to something formless, and reformed: burials, burnings, dismemberments, sky burials, dissolvings, cocoonings, poisonings, shapeshifting. A mini death-and-rebirth: cleansing, loosening of identity, and preparation for the greatest transformation of all. Read the full answer, in which the journeyer is taken apart and reformed: “In a sense, they are a mini ‘death’ and rebirth.”4 See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared? and What is shamanic initiation, and what part does dismemberment play?
A shamanic awakening can also feel like a form of madness, largely because people having one in the modern world usually do not understand what is happening to them.5 Our culture has lost both the initiations and the knowledge that would make sense of such an experience. See What is ego death?
Is every breakdown a shamanic calling? #
No. It is often said in the West that all madness is really a form of shamanic experience or awakening. But it is not at all true that all madness is a shamanic awakening, and shamanic cultures clearly distinguish healthy shamanic experience from madness. A story makes the point. A young Westerner went looking for a shamanic teacher, walked out into the desert, and came back delighted to have found one: “he talks to trees”. The villagers knew him. He was not a shaman, they said; he was mad, because he did not know when to stop talking to trees.6
The question of whether shamans are, or were, mentally ill has a long history of its own. From the turn of the twentieth century, scholars began to stress the “hysteria” or “neurosis” of the shaman, and some Russian writers held that only a mentally disturbed person could become one.7 The ethnopsychiatrist George Devereux put it bluntly in 1956: “my position is that the shaman is mentally deranged”.8 Against that view, Eliade wrote about shamans as spiritual specialists rather than madmen; the historian Andrei Znamenski credits him with having “completely parted with pathological and materialistic interpretations” of the shaman.9 And the Grofs argued that many crises which psychiatry treats as illness are “crises of personal transformation”, which they called spiritual emergencies, able to heal if they are supported rather than suppressed. In the same book they gave the warning that goes with it, that alongside the error of treating mystical states as illness there is “the opposite danger of spiritualizing psychotic states and glorifying pathology or, even worse, overlooking an organic problem.”10 See Were traditional shamans mentally ill?, Were traditional shamans neurodivergent? and What did Stanislav Grof mean by a spiritual emergency?
Does a shaman have to go through a crisis? #
No. It is common in the shamanic community to hear that people come to shamanism, or to finding their Soul, through near-death experiences or similar traumatic events. That is sometimes true, because such experiences can involve the death of an old way of being, which allows a new one to emerge. But there are other paths too, gentler and steadier ones, which are equally effective.11
Paul Francis’s own path to his Soul was a traumatic one. His life fell apart, as he describes in Finding Your Deep Soul, and he came through it with the help of both psychotherapy and shamanic work. There is nothing about doing it that way that he would recommend, and it is not a path he would choose again. That is why, as a shamanic practitioner and a psychotherapist, he teaches shamanism in ways that are effective and yet manageable: grounded, trauma-free and free of unnecessary drama.11 See What is a calling?
What helps someone going through a crisis like this? #
GroundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this first, and the right kind of help. Healthy shamanic practice means keeping a foot firmly in this world as well as the other, and grounding is its bedrock. For anyone who is psychotic or having psychotic episodes, the starting point is grounding practices, and most definitely not journeying.12
Psychotherapy and shamanism each have their part. The idea that shamanism is better than psychotherapy is common in the shamanic community, and it is a wonky thought that leads people away from the help they really need. Psychotherapy is good at rebuilding a healthier middle-world self; shamanism can help us find our Soul. Neither is a good substitute for the other.13 See Is shamanic work safe if I have a mental health condition?, How is shamanic journeying different from psychosis? and Should shamanic work or therapy come first?
