Shamanism—Medicine Men and Priests

90:1.1The shaman was the rank­ing med­i­cine man, the cer­e­mo­nial fetish­man, and the fo­cus per­son­al­ity for all the prac­tices of evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion. In many groups the shaman out­ranked the war chief, mark­ing the be­gin­ning of the church dom­i­na­tion of the state. The shaman some­times func­tioned as a priest and even as a priest-king. Some of the later tribes had both the ear­lier shaman-med­i­cine men (seers) and the later ap­pear­ing shaman-priests. And in many cases the of­fice of shaman be­came hered­i­tary.

90:1.2Since in olden times any­thing ab­nor­mal was as­cribed to spirit pos­ses­sion, any strik­ing men­tal or phys­i­cal ab­nor­mal­ity con­sti­tuted qual­i­fi­ca­tion for be­ing a med­i­cine man. Many of these men were epilep­tic, many of the women hys­teric, and these two types ac­counted for a good deal of an­cient in­spi­ra­tion as well as spirit and devil pos­ses­sion. Quite a few of these ear­li­est of priests were of a class which has since been de­nom­i­nated para­noiac.

90:1.3While they may have prac­ticed de­cep­tion in mi­nor mat­ters, the great ma­jor­ity of the shamans be­lieved in the fact of their spirit pos­ses­sion. Women who were able to throw them­selves into a trance or a catalep­tic fit be­came pow­er­ful shamanesses; later, such women be­came proph­ets and spirit medi­ums. Their catalep­tic trances usu­ally in­volved al­leged com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the ghosts of the dead. Many fe­male shamans were also pro­fes­sional dancers.

90:1.4But not all shamans were self-de­ceived; many were shrewd and able trick­sters. As the pro­fes­sion de­vel­oped, a novice was re­quired to serve an ap­pren­tice­ship of ten years of hard­ship and self-de­nial to qual­ify as a med­i­cine man. The shamans de­vel­oped a pro­fes­sional mode of dress and af­fected a mys­te­ri­ous con­duct. They fre­quently em­ployed drugs to in­duce cer­tain phys­i­cal states which would im­press and mys­tify the tribes­men. Sleight-of-hand feats were re­garded as super­nat­u­ral by the com­mon folk, and ven­tril­o­quism was first used by shrewd priests. Many of the olden shamans un­wit­tingly stum­bled onto hyp­no­tism; oth­ers in­duced au­to­hyp­no­sis by pro­longed star­ing at their navels.

90:1.5While many re­sorted to these tricks and de­cep­tions, their rep­u­ta­tion as a class, af­ter all, stood on ap­par­ent achieve­ment. When a shaman failed in his un­der­tak­ings, if he could not ad­vance a plau­si­ble al­ibi, he was ei­ther de­moted or killed. Thus the hon­est shamans early per­ished; only the shrewd ac­tors sur­vived.

90:1.6It was shaman­ism that took the ex­clu­sive di­rec­tion of tribal af­fairs out of the hands of the old and the strong and lodged it in the hands of the shrewd, the clever, and the far­sighted.