Mircea Eliade (1907 to 1986) was a Romanian-born historian of religion whose book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (French 1951, English 1964) was among the chief influences in making shamanism a worldwide idea. He defined the shaman by the “technique of ecstasy”, the soul’s flight to the sky or to the world below. Critics say he built his picture from books, not fieldwork, treated a Siberian model as universal, and ranked the flight upwards above the journey down, a bias Therapeutic Shamanism also rejects.
Who was Mircea Eliade? #
A scholar of religion, born in Romania, who for many years taught comparative religion at the University of Chicago.1 He wrote widely on myth, ritual and the sacred across the world’s religions. His best-known books are Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and The Sacred and the Profane (1957). In the second, he wrote that for traditional peoples the sacred breaks into ordinary life at particular places and times, and that sacred space is organised around a “Centre” where “The three cosmic levels, earth, heaven, underworld, have been put in communication”, by a pillar, a ladder, a mountain or a tree: the axis mundi.2
What was his idea of shamanism? #
That the heart of shamanism is ecstasy, a trance in which the shaman’s soul is believed to leave the body and travel to the sky or to the world below. As the anthropologist Michael Winkelman reports it, for Eliade this soul journey was the defining mark of the shaman.3 He drew his classic picture from the peoples of Siberia and Central Asia, with a cosmos in three tiers joined by a world tree or world mountain.4 In The Sacred and the Profane he also describes “the initiatory sicknesses of future shamans”, a crisis of illness, death and rebirth that marks the calling.5
He made two more claims that matter. He held that the ascent to the heavens was the oldest and purest form of the shaman’s journey, and that possession, where a spirit enters and speaks through the person, was a later and lesser development.6 He also wrote about shamans as spiritual specialists, not as madmen, at a time when many writers treated them as mentally ill. The historian Andrei Znamenski credits him with this, writing that Eliade “completely parted with pathological and materialistic interpretations” of the shaman.7
His influence was enormous. Michael Harner, who went on to develop core shamanism, credited Eliade with bringing to light the worldwide consistency of shamanic practice.8 See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism?
What do critics say is wrong with it? #
Several things, each put forward by particular writers.
Critics say it came from the library, not the field. Eliade worked from written sources, and wrote in an autobiographical fragment that he had never felt capable of a “purely scientific” work of ethnography. Znamenski reports that many scholars now treat his shamanism book as “an impressionistic and Romantic treatise”, and that he relied on other scholars’ written ethnographies of Siberia.9
Critics say it treats one model as universal. The religious studies scholar Graham Harvey writes that Eliade’s three-tiered “allegedly archaic cosmology” is “an imposition on the diversity evident in the materials he manipulated”, and, citing the historian Ronald Hutton, notes that even in Siberia the scheme fits some peoples, such as the Evenki, but not others.10 The anthropologist Piers Vitebsky writes that “The idea of the pure or ideal shaman, as posited by Eliade, becomes increasingly difficult to sustain”.11
Critics say it ranks up above down. According to Znamenski, Eliade treated the journey to the heavens as archaic and the journey down as a later addition, describing it in terms of “infernal” travel and demons. “Critics contended that in prioritising the upper world over the lower world, Eliade betrayed his Christian bias.” Znamenski adds his own qualification, that Eliade was never simply a Christian scholar.12
Critics say it grades shamanism by purity. Vitebsky criticises the way Eliade sorted shamanic practices into pure and degraded forms, and did not look at how they are actually used and felt by the people who practise them.13 The psychologists Etzel Cardeña and Stanley Krippner prefer a definition of shamanism that includes both soul flight and possession.14
Some of his conclusions have found support. Winkelman, who criticises Eliade’s methods, found in a cross-cultural survey that the patterns Eliade described do appear together widely in hunter-gatherer and small-scale farming and herding societies.15 A 2018 study by the anthropologist Manvir Singh, on why shamanism appears in so many societies, also draws on Eliade’s survey as evidence that shamanic practice recurs across the world, although he finds that traits such as soul journeys, which Eliade found far beyond Siberia, are too narrow to define shamanism.16 See Why does Manvir Singh think shamanism is universal? Cardeña and Krippner, for their part, note that cross-cultural studies support Eliade’s view that possession came later than soul flight. Soul flight is found mainly among hunter-gatherers, and possession mainly in settled, more hierarchical societies.17
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see it? #
It draws on the same broad map, of Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer, Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and 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, which comes to modern practice through Harner, and it uses the axis mundiAxis mundi. A real, physical place in nature where the veils between the worlds are thin; the world-axis (World Tree) from which a shamanic journey is entered. Read the full answer, the place where the worlds meet, as the starting point for a journey. The English word ‘shamanism’ “is from the Tungus tribe of the Siberia/Mongolia region”.18
But it rejects the ranking of up over down outright. “Shamanism is an entirely non-hierarchical spirituality and way of looking at the world. It is entirely free of the idea that up is good and down is bad. In shamanism, the Upper-World is not a better place than the Lower-World.” The idea is “a spell, a curse even”.19 It goes back to the turning away from shamanism: “We fell into the sickness of thinking that ‘up is good and down is bad’. Consequently, we turned away from the Lower-World, seeing it as lesser, tainted and corrupt, and even as being evil.”20 The sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this “told us to cut off from the Lower-World”, so that “the Christian priests, for example, told us that the Lower-World was Hell”.21
In practice, Therapeutic Shamanism reverses Eliade’s order of priority. “To grow a healthy and balanced shamanic practice we start by establishing a strong Lower-World connection first, then a strong Upper-World connection, and only then do we embark on middle-world journeying.”22 See What are the three shamanic realms?
