PART TWO

The Humanist View Becomes Rationalist: From “Esteemed Jugglers” to “Impostors”

In the 1700’s, when observers from the Enlightenment came upon pagé, angakkut, or shaman, they tended to see impostors. This was a relatively progressive view in those days. Previous observers had mainly perceived such people as “agents of the Devil”—a serious charge in times of witch-hunting. By judging shamans as impostors, Enlightenment observers implied that shamans did not really communicate with the Devil. This took away the witch-hunters’ justification for executing people.

Despite this progressive move, from condemnation to mere debunking, most eighteenth-century observers had difficulty understanding shamans. The Russian imperial government sent numerous scientific observers to explore Siberia; a scientist like Stepan Krasheninnikov wrote that he found shamanic notions “absurd and ridiculous.” Nevertheless he reported on them extensively.

In her excellent book Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century, Gloria Flaherty comments on this ambiguity:

 

The eighteenth century was too deeply involved with the occult to have us continue to associate it exclusively with rationalism, humanism, scientific determinism, and classicism. Manifestations of irrationalism, supernaturalism, organicism, and romanticism appeared uninterruptedly throughout. It was precisely the tension between those who limited themselves to enlightenment of a purely rational sort and those who included serious consideration of what was derogatorily called the night-side of nature that informed the very way in which Western European knowledge was advanced. That relentless tension helped revolutionize human thought, and affected the shape the world was to take.

 

Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of the Enlightenment, expressed an ambiguous view of shamans. As a professed atheist (who had benefited from a Jesuit education), Diderot saw shamans as “impostors” and “jugglers,” but he also thought “the supernatural occasionally enters into their operation,” and “they are sometimes quite close to the mark.”

Many early rationalist observers did not suspect that shamans were doing anything other than deceiving their fellows with song and dance, tricks, and sleight of hand. But some, like Johann Herder, realized that the activities of shamans had to do with the power of the imagination and of the human mind. Two centuries later, other investigators would pick up where Herder left off.