Why have shamans been persecuted, and what happened to shamanism under states and world religions?

Why were shamans seen as a threat? #

Because shamanism needs no one in between. It is the direct, personal experience of Spirit, with no priesthood, no hierarchy, no sacred text and no creed, and nobody has to believe what a priest tells them.¹ The societies that grew up after the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer were built the other way round. With the first city-states, around six thousand years ago, came rulers and ruled, power held by a small elite, and dissent crushed by oppression, torture, organised religion and terror. 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 arose to justify and enforce that order. God sat at the top of the pyramid and the emperor was his living embodiment, so to question the emperor was to question God, and for the first time in human history the idea of ‘heresy’ was born, and with it the persecution of heretics.²

Those religions were also agents of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this. Their message was that people cannot trust their own instincts, their own bodies or their own soul, and must do and believe what the priests tell them.³ Ordinary people could no longer be in direct communication with spirit, but had to go through priests.⁴ Someone who could journey to the spirits on their own account, and teach others to do the same, stood outside all of that. See How has spirituality been used to justify domination?

Animism itself has never been the cause of persecution. No war has ever been fought in its name, and no minority group, tribe or culture has ever been persecuted because of animism. See Is Therapeutic Shamanism a religion or belief system?

What happened to shamanism as farming and states spread? #

At first, hunter-gatherer peoples simply lost the ground they lived on. Agriculture spread very quickly, but not because hunter-gatherers welcomed it; most accounts of their first encounters with farming record horror at the devastation. They had no choice, because farming destroyed the environment that made their way of life possible.⁵ In Britain, DNA studies show the last hunter-gatherers all but disappearing around six thousand years ago, replaced by incoming farmers who were themselves later all but replaced in turn.⁶ See What did James C. Scott show about early states and grain? and Who was Pierre Clastres, and what is “society against the state”?

Where states met shamans, two things tended to happen. Some states absorbed shamanic power into the centre. The anthropologist Piers Vitebsky describes how, in the Manchu empire, most kinds of shaman stayed in the forests of northern Manchuria, whilst the clan shamans who came to court evolved into little more than priests, unable to enter trance at all.⁷ Christina Pratt writes of ‘state shamans’, rulers who used trance in state ritual, among the ancient Maya and possibly in early China.⁸ Elsewhere shamans were pushed out. Under colonial rule, Vitebsky notes, chiefs were sometimes drawn into the structure of the colonial state whilst the shamans were forced to the margins and persecuted, or became the focus of resistance.⁷ Michael Winkelman’s cross-cultural research found that in many cases, once communities with shamans are drawn into larger and more complex societies, practitioners of the dominant religion label the shamans as witches, to take away their standing.⁹ See What is the difference between a shaman, a priest, a medium and a medicine person?

What happened under the world religions? #

In Europe, the sky religions turned the 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 into Hell. People were told it was full of demons and pain, anyone seeking out the Goddess was persecuted, tortured and even murdered, and all the knowledge of how to reach the Lower-World, journeying, power-plants, the drum and the rattle, ecstatic dancing, was rooted out. Those who held that knowledge were persecuted and killed so ruthlessly that shamanism in the West was effectively eradicated, leaving a broken lineage we are only now beginning to repair.¹⁰

The same pattern reached the far north of Europe late enough to be well recorded. By the late seventeenth century the Sámi of northern Scandinavia had been Christian for decades, baptised, married and buried by the Church, but many still used their drums and old sacred sites, and from the end of that century the Church and the authorities began an intense campaign of propaganda and coercion against them. The drums became the symbol of the conflict. To the Sámi they stood for their threatened culture, and to the clergy they were the very instrument of the devil. Drums were confiscated and burned, and people were imprisoned and flogged. One Sámi man, Lars Nilsson, who used a drum in a desperate attempt to bring his dead son back to life, declared in court that he would keep the custom of his forefathers whatever any authority forbade; he was beheaded and burned at the stake together with his drum, in front of his summoned kinsmen. A Lule Sámi tradition still remembers that period as the time when the drums had to be hidden.¹¹ Some scholars link a change in how the drums were used to the Sámi shift from a hunting society to reindeer herding.¹²

In Asia, Buddhism did something similar. In the seventeenth century Lamaist missionaries in Mongolia persecuted shamans so thoroughly that Buddhism has been the religion of Mongolia ever since, even though, as in Tibet and elsewhere, shamanic and Buddhist ideas and practices became closely intertwined.¹³ And across the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Siberia, the conquests that brought missionaries also brought genocide on an enormous scale; in Siberia, Russian colonists killed most of the Kamchadals and exterminated some peoples entirely.¹⁴ See How has spirituality been used to justify domination?

What happened under Communism? #

The Communist regimes of the twentieth century covered much of the heartland of Asian shamanism, and shamanism was persecuted along with the region’s other religions. Since there were no shamanist churches or temples to pull down, the persecution was aimed at the shamans themselves. In Siberia they were treated as local leaders and class enemies of the Soviet regime, and were often sentenced to exile; Vitebsky records that some were even dropped from helicopters and challenged to fly. In China shamanism was condemned as ‘feudal superstition’ spread by fake healers.¹⁵ The Soviets also restricted the drumming and the sound-making costumes that were central to the shamanic traditions of the peoples of the former USSR, and the elders say the loss of that music is one of the ways the new shamans are weaker than those of the past.¹⁶

How did shamanism survive? #

By adapting, by going underground, and by retreating to land nobody else wanted. Christina Pratt describes shamans across the world absorbing, assimilating and reinterpreting new belief systems again and again, mainly so that the dominant government or religion would tolerate them; many shamans in Tuva, for example, are also Buddhist priests. She also describes how, as shamanism was suppressed, its roles were taken up by different specialists, healers, priests, mediums and sorcerers, each keeping part of the shaman’s work except the journey.¹⁷ Vitebsky describes Buryats near Lake Baikal who joined the Orthodox Church to escape a Buddhist lama’s demands, and kept their shamanist figures beside icons of St Nicholas.¹⁸

Shamanism was not simply swept away by Taker culture. For a long time it was systematically and actively persecuted, and shamans were hunted down and killed. That it survived at all is owed to the people who held its knowledge and teachings through thousands of years of dark times and passed the torch on, acting as refugia, and the debt of gratitude owed to them is profound. See What are refugia, and how can we become one?

So much of the shamanism that survived is not the shamanism of hunter-gatherer times. Many of the shamanic societies that exist today, among herding peoples in parts of Africa, Mongolia, Siberia and Scandinavia, took up herding or farming long ago, and herding rests on a very different relationship with animals and the earth; in North America and Australia, colonisation came recently enough that hunter-gatherer knowledge can still be relatively intact.¹⁹ Surviving shamanism has been changed by the hierarchy, farming and Taker thinking it had to live alongside. So ‘traditional’ does not automatically mean healthy, and saying so is never a criticism of the indigenous peoples who kept it alive. See What are pre-Fallen, Fallen and post-Fallen shamanism? In the West, where the lineage was broken altogether, the core practices were recovered in the twentieth century, above all through Michael Harner’s core shamanism. See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism?

What did we lose when we lost our shamans? #

A lot. The shamans were the wisdom-keepers of their tribes, able to communicate with the AncestorsAncestors. The human Oversoul: the whole of humanity held as one Lower-World being. Distinct from individual dead ancestors (small a), who are not worked with in this approach. Read the full answer and so, in the end, with the Human Oversoul and its knowledge of how to live as part of the great tree of life; when we turned our back on shamanism, we lost that connection and began to lose our way.²⁰ We lost our psychopomps, so the dead were no longer helped to move on.²¹ And we lost the precise words shamanic peoples had for different beings and relationships, and this is why so many shamanic terms are now used loosely.²² See What did the Fall do to us?