Devil, Madman, Saint, or Sage?
The Eye of the Beholder
Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that…it is a witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive.
—Anonymous 10
What has been the most controversial topic in the study of shamans? Answer: their mental health.
Shamans have been demonized, pathologized, or sanctified with wondrous abandon. However, as Western culture has evolved, so too have the diagnoses given them. Roberte Hamayon suggests that this evolution has gone through three major stages. These she calls devilization, medicalization, and idealization, reflecting the ascendancy of religious, medical, and popularizing viewpoints.141 While an oversimplification,351 these three stages provide a useful framework.
Devilization
Early reports came from Christian clergy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. French priests in South America found healers and spiritual consultants who may or may not fit our technical definition of shamanism. Nevertheless, the priests saw “people of evil custom who have given themselves over to serve the devil to deceive their neighbors”365 and who “drink that rude potion of tobacco.”24 This disapproval of the “rude potion of tobacco” did not stop one of the priests, André Thévet, from introducing it to France, thereby leading to the addiction and death of millions.
But it was a seventeenth-century Russian priest who was exiled to Siberia, Avvakum Petrovich, who first published the word shaman. The expedition’s leader consulted a Siberian “villain of a magician,” and the villain assured the leader that a proposed war raid would be successful. Displaying less than full Christian charity, the enraged Reverend Petrovich prayed:
May not one of them return! Dig a tomb for them there! Send them evil, Lord, send it to them! And lead them to their loss, so that the diabolical prophecy not be accomplished.285
Petrovich apparently got his wish, which did not exactly endear him to the survivors. However, such was the power of the church that Petrovich’s view of shamans became the norm.
Medicalization: Psychiatric Perspectives
Shamans remained demons for centuries. However, with the rise of psychiatry, shamans became disturbed rather than evil. To start with some of the kinder diagnoses, the shaman has been described as a healed madman and a trickster. The labels hysteric, neurotic, epileptic, and schizophrenic have been applied liberally, while the shaman has also been called a charlatan, a “veritable idiot,” or “an outright psychotic.” The French psychoanalytically trained anthropologist George Devereux put it bluntly: “The shaman is mentally deranged….In brief, there is no excuse for not considering the shaman as a severe neurotic and even as a psychotic.”70 Such statements now seem painfully ethnocentric, but they held sway for many years.
In short, shamanism has often been dismissed as the unfortunate product of primitive minds, and seriously disturbed ones at that. The question of the shaman’s psychological health is therefore no small matter; in fact, the status of this tradition hangs on it. It will therefore be crucial to carefully assess the medical evidence for the diagnoses given to shamans.
Of course there is no reason to assume that shamans are a homogenous group. In fact, psychological testing suggests they are not.89 They may no more display a single personality type or neatly fit a single diagnosis than do all Western doctors. This may seem an obvious point, but it is amazing how often it is overlooked.
In making our assessment, we cannot examine the shaman’s behavior alone. Rather, we need to consider the interaction between the shaman’s behavior, our Western diagnostic assumptions, and the psychological skills and cultural perspectives of the researchers making the diagnoses. In addition, two shamanic behaviors need to be assessed carefully since they were frequently interpreted as pathological. The first of these is the initiation crisis, which we have already discussed.
The second is the shamanic journey. Here the shaman enters an altered state of consciousness (ASC), then experiences leaving the body and journeying to other worlds. The journey contains several experiences likely to arouse suspicion in Western researchers. The first is the ASC, the second is the rich imagery and visions that accompany it. Another suspicious experience (to Western minds) is the presence of spirits and the shaman’s belief that these spirits are real. These, then, are the shamanic experiences and behaviors that have most often fostered pathologizing interpretations.
But what about the observers who make these interpretations? What about their possible biases and blind spots, such as biasing effects of Western cultural and psychological perspectives? Other concerns include early anthropologists’ lack of psychological expertise and of personal experience of shamanic training and altered states.
DIAGNOSTIC BIASES
Today’s anthropologists have developed considerable sensitivity to the ethnocentric dangers wrought by the distorting lens of cultural bias. When other people are judged by our own beliefs and standards, then all too often their behavior is interpreted as primitive or pathological. This was certainly true for shamanism.
The negative picture of the shaman, primarily (though not exclusively) found in the earlier anthropological literature, is the expression of a Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. That Zeitgeist assumed that the Western rationalistic-positivist ideology was the norm against which other cultures and institutions were judged. Non-Western systems of explanation, where they deviated from these Eurocentric positivistic norms, were considered an abnormal expression of “poor reality testing.”188
For example, a Westerner who reported seeing and being persecuted by spirits might well be diagnosed as psychotic, since these experiences are not part of our usual cultural reality. However, in shamanic cultures they are the norm. Indeed, the person who did not believe in the possibility of spirit persecution would be considered strange. “What in shamanistic behavior may appear hysterical or psychotic to the Western psychiatrist is to the people concerned a time honored ritual.”210 Small wonder that some early researchers, blinded by their own cultural assumptions, labeled the shamanic initiation crisis and shamanic journey as psychotic episodes.
Lack of medical and psychological expertise also produced flawed interpretations. Because they did not know exactly what to look for, some anthropologists’ reports lack crucial information that would allow us to determine the precise nature of shamanic experiences and whether they are pathological or not. For example, shamans’ visionary experiences were commonly described as “hallucinations” or “neurotic dreams,” without more precise description or explanation. Similarly, the supposed epilepsy that can occur during initiation crises was sometimes labeled as simply “fits,” a description that makes accurate diagnoses impossible.
A recently recognized problem can arise when researchers have not themselves engaged in shamanic practices. This is a special problem with shamanism for two key reasons, both of which relate to the centrality of ASCs.
1) In shamanism, as well as other authentick spiritual disciplines, altered states of consciousness play a crucial role.l
2) It can be extremely difficult to comprehend ASC experiences without direct experience of the state.
Without direct experience, talk of ASC experiences can remain at the level of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant famously called “empty concepts,” concepts devoid of the richness, meaning, and significance that only direct experience can impart. This deficit can be dangerously distorting, as the psychologist Richard Noll pointed out:
Devoid of the personal experience of ASCs (altered states of consciousness), yet quite familiar with the altered states of the diagnostic manual, the incredible sagas of shamans must indeed seem psychotic to an interpreter who only considers experiences in an ordinary state of consciousness to be valid, mentally healthy phenomena.260
This is an example of what Michael Harner calls “cognicentrism,” the tendency to interpret (and denigrate) alternate states from the limited perspective of our own state.146
Unfortunately, this tendency has been particularly marked in psychoanalysis, the perspective initially most often used to interpret shamanic experiences. Psychoanalysis has made enormous contributions to our understanding of mind and behavior, but like any psychology it contains its limitations and blind spots. Its major focus has been on sickness and early development, and as the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow said, “It is as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.”225 Consequently, there has been a tendency for healthy behavior to be interpreted in terms of early or pathological development. Richard Noll concludes that the anthropological result has been a “virulent influence of Freudian psychoanalytic tradition in culture and personality studies in nurturing unnecessary psychopathological interpretations of cross-cultural behaviors.”261
The risks of misunderstanding other cultures become particularly dangerous when altered states are involved. Until quite recently Western psychology and anthropology recognized only a limited range of normal states: primarily waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming sleep. States falling outside this narrow range were automatically considered pathological. Richard Noll points out that “states of consciousness that are altered in some fashion are traditionally viewed as pathological merely because they deviate from…the ordinary states against which all other states are contrasted.”260
This view has now changed dramatically. The range of healthy states of consciousness is considerably broader than previously imagined, and studies of other cultures and contemplative traditions have revealed a startling plasticity of consciousness. States of remarkable concentration, calm, clarity, and sensitivity are among the many identified in recent years.398
However, these are recent recognitions. For many years even states of exceptional joy or compassion were often pathologized. Mystical experiences, for example, were interpreted as neurotic regressions, ecstatic states viewed as narcissism, and enlightenment dismissed as regression to intrauterine stages.399 Witness the painful example of a classic psychiatry textbook, which stated that “the obvious similarities between schizophrenic regression and the practices of yoga and Zen merely indicate that the general trend in oriental cultures is to withdraw into the self from an overbearingly difficult physical and social reality.”7
In short, Western psychiatry has a long history of viewing mystics as madmen, saints as psychotics, and sages as schizophrenics. And this in spite of the fact that saints and sages may represent the heights of human development and have had the greatest impact on human history. So, at least, said the philosophers Bergson and James, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as the psychologists Maslow and Wilber.407 The historian Arnold Toynbee posed the question, “Who are…the greatest benefactors of the living generation of mankind?” He answered, “I should say: Confucius and Lao Tzu, the Buddha, the Prophets of Israel and Judah, Zoroaster, Jesus, Mohammed and Socrates.”372
This historical argument against equating mystical and pathological states now has considerable scientific support. Several hundred studies make it quite clear that the altered states induced by meditation and yoga, for example, are healthy and valuable.398 As Ken Wilber stated emphatically, these states can be equated with pathology “only by those whose intellectual inquiry goes no further than superficial impressions.”410
In summary, religious experiences and states of consciousness have all too often been viewed as pathological because of cultural bias, lack of psychological expertise, psychoanalytic emphasis on pathology, and ignorance of the potential range and value of certain altered states. Fortunately, this situation has begun to change.
Idealization
With the popularization of shamanism in the West has come idealization. Where some clergy saw demons, some popularizers see saints; where psychoanalysts found neurotics, enthusiasts find spiritual masters. Indeed, the depths of pathology formerly attributed to shamans are almost matched by the heights of sanctity now accorded them by extreme enthusiasts. Among other things they have been called yogis, psi masters, and “masters of death.”189 We will dissect such claims later. For now it is enough to point out that in idealizing shamanism, enthusiasts “brush aside its dark truths,”36 and that there are dangers in any extreme view.