Shamanic Trickery: The Tricks of the Trade
Truth is so very precious, man is naturally economical in its use.
—Mark Twain
To add insult to injury, shamans have not only been diagnosed as disturbed, but have also been dismissed as charlatans. However, whereas the evidence for disturbance is debatable, the evidence for trickery is clear. Yet as we will see, there can be much of value in these tricks and more to them than simple deceit.
THE VARIETIES OF SHAMANIC TRICKERY
Since shamans’ reputations rest largely on their ability to display supernatural powers, it is not surprising that they may be tempted to lend the supernatural a helping hand. This they do in several ways.
One approach is to employ spies who can assess a potential patient’s health and help the shaman determine whether to take the case. This is no small decision, since if the patient should die, the shaman loses his reputation and, in some tribes, his life.311 Spies can also provide personal information about patients that can later be revealed by the spirits.
Shamans also use tricks to add dramatic flair to their treatments. When sucking out spirit intrusions, the healer may hide an object such as a worm or a bloody tuft of hair in his mouth and then spit it out as proof of therapeutic success. Eskimo shamans of St. Lawrence Island in Alaska may pretend to first crush a stone to sand and then reform it back into a stone.400 Long observation of Eskimo shamans led the anthropologist Bogoras to conclude that
there can be no doubt, of course, that shamans, during their performances, employ deceit in various forms, and that they themselves are fully cognizant of the fact. “There are many liars in our calling,” Scratching Woman said to me….Of course, he was ready to swear that he never made use of any of these wrong practices. “Look at my face,” he continued, “he who tells lies his tongue stutters. He whose speech, however, flows offhand from his lips, certainly must speak the truth.” This was a rather doubtful argument, but I refrained from making any suggestions.29
Shamans may also pretend to do physical battle to vanquish evil spirits. Rasmussen witnessed this:
During our stay at South Hampton Island I was witness to such a case, where a Shaman named Saraq went out to fight against evil spirits, but I discovered that he had taken some Caribou blood with him beforehand and rubbed himself with this without being discovered by anyone else. When he came in, he stated that the shaman who had been out with him had been unable to hold the evil spirit, but he, Saraq, had grasped it and stabbed it, inflicting a deep wound. It had then made its escape, but the wound was so deep that he could not conceive of the possibility of it surviving. All believed his report, all believed that he had driven the evil spirit which had been troubling the village, and no one was afraid any longer.299
Acquiring such tricks may be part of an apprentice’s training. For example, a Kwakiutl apprentice from the Vancouver area of Canada learns:
A curious mixture of pantomime, prestidigitation, and empirical knowledge including the art of simulating fainting and nervous fits, the learning of sacred songs, the technique for inducing vomiting, rather precise notions of auscultation and obstetrics, and the use of “dreamers,” that is, spies who listen to private conversations and secretly convey to the shaman bits of information concerning origins and symptoms of the ills suffered by different people. Above all, he learned the ars magna of one of the shamanistic schools of the Northwest Coast: the shaman hides a tuft of down in a little corner of his mouth, and he throws it up, covered with blood, at the appropriate moment—after having bitten his tongue or made his gums bleed—and solemnly presents it to his patients and the onlookers as the pathological foreign body extracted as a result of his sucking and manipulations.212
Dangerous Trickery
These are harmless tricks that might even be helpful inasmuch as they bolster faith and inspire a placebo response. However, not all trickery is benign. Some shamans have been reported to give toxins or psychedelics to their patients in order to make the disease and its cure more dramatic.311 A Jivaro shaman may bewitch disliked neighbors and then refer them to his shaman partner for treatment.147 Shamans may even attempt to kill and Rasmussen reported:
If now a shaman desires to injure a person by magic, someone who he does not like and of whom he has grown envious, he will first endeavor to obtain some object belonging to the person concerned; this he takes and speaks ill over it and keeps on speaking ill over it hoping thus to pass on the evil to the person he desires to hurt and should he discover a powerful destructive force, which may lie concealed in a grave, then he must rub the object he is speaking ill over into the grave. This may give rise to sickness, madness or enmity ending in homicide.299
Small wonder that shamans have been such ambivalent figures, revered and sought for healing, while feared and hated for their malevolence.
QUESTIONS RAISED BY SHAMANIC TRICKERY
Clearly, some shamans may engage in all manner of trickery, and this raises the following questions:
1) Do all shamans engage in trickery and deceit?
2) Is part of the trickery done for the benefit of the patient and tribe? In other words, is some of the trickery a kind of pious fraud?
3) Are shamanism and all shamanic practices ineffective and fraudulent, as some people have claimed, or are there also practices that are therapeutic and valuable?
4) Do shamans use more trickery than other healers and professionals?
5) Do shamans deceive themselves as well as their patients?
Let’s begin with the question of whether all shamans engage in trickery and deceit. Though trickery is widespread, many anthropologists have been impressed by the sincerity of shamans and their desire to help. There is also the question of whether trickery should be regarded as fraudulent when a healer believes that using it helps the patient. In short, there is no reason to assume that all shamans are tricksters.
EXPECTATIONS OF HEALING
Can shamanic trickery benefit patients? Research shows that the expectations of both patient and therapist tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies and that faith in a physician can exert a powerful placebo effect. Indeed, the environment, the physician’s status, and the rituals involved in giving and taking medicine can sometimes be as important as the drug itself. Psychiatrists treating depression or anxiety are well aware that they had better exude confidence to ensure that their drugs work optimally.
Sharp observers that they are, shamans may have reached similar conclusions. They may radiate confidence to remove their patients’ doubts and perhaps also their own. Rasmussen, for example, described a shaman who stated that “I believe I am a better shaman than others among my countrymen. I will venture to say that I hardly ever make a mistake in the things I investigate and what I predict. And I therefore consider myself a more perfect, a more fully-trained shaman than those of my countrymen who often make mistakes.”299
Shamanic tricks and abundant self-confidence may increase patients’ expectations and therefore their likelihood of being cured since:
Plainly, the shaman’s tricks serve as a symbol of his healing power. They impress the audience with his magical skill and knowledge, and provide a concrete visible representation in the form of a worm, or bloody down of the patients’ illness. In that the tricks reinforce the belief of the patient and the community in the shaman’s power, they add tremendously to the force of his suggestion and the patient’s expectant faith in the healing process.
We need have no doubt that the healing rituals, relying heavily as they may do on the power of suggestion, are effective. Their value in aiding the recovery of emotional and physical illnesses has been repeatedly observed and amply recorded.400
A special case occurs when shamans operate in ASCs. For example, a shaman may pull out a worm he has hidden in his mouth and announce that it is the patient’s illness. An outsider, understandably enough, might dismiss the shaman as an outright charlatan.
However, the shaman in an altered state has a very different view. In his visionary state, he may see the illness sucked into the object in his mouth so that this object now has both ordinary and supernatural aspects. As Michael Harner explains:
He then “vomits” out this object and displays it to the patient and his family saying “now I have sucked it out. Here it is.” The non-shamans think that the material object itself is what has been sucked out and the shaman does not disillusion them. At the same time, he is not lying because he knows that the only important thing about the tsentsak (spiritual force or helper) is its supernatural aspect, or essence, which he sincerely believes he has removed from the patient’s body. To explain to the layman that he already had these objects in his mouth would serve no fruitful purpose and would prevent him from displaying such an object as proof that he had affected the cure.145
So from the shamans’ perspective, at least some of their “tricks” are essential parts of the healing process, done primarily for the patient’s benefit.
BEYOND TRICKERY
Are trickery and deceit all there is to shamanism? While some critics have thought so, several lines of evidence argue otherwise.
First, there is the enormous durability of the tradition. Shamanism has thrived for millennia, and it is hard to imagine a tradition surviving for so long in so many cultures unless there were effective components to it. Certainly, anthropologists have been impressed by the sincerity of many shamans.
Many shamanic techniques make good psychological and scientific sense. As we will explore in later chapters, shamans draw on an array of individual and group techniques also employed by psychotherapists, while pharmaceutical companies are investigating traditional healing potions.
Importantly, shamanism presents a coherent worldview that offers an explanation of the cause and cure of illness. Within this worldview, shamanic practices seem logical and appropriate to both shaman and patient. This is crucial since a shared understanding of the cause and cure of illness provides what is called a “healing myth”: a curative context that fosters the placebo effect and healing. What is essential is that this healing myth is plausible to both patient and therapist.104
DECEPTION AND THE HEALING PROFESSIONS
Do shamans deceive more than other healers? Few of us could claim that we never use dubious means to bolster our personal or professional image. Indeed, “there is hardly a legitimate everyday vocation or relationship whose performers do not engage in concealed practices which are incompatible with fostered impressions.”119
Certainly the shaman is not unique in using placebo effects both consciously and unconsciously. It has been said that “the history of (Western) medical treatment for the most part until relatively recently is the history of the placebo effect.”331 Indeed, a considerable amount of the effectiveness of current psychotherapy may be due not to the cherished theories and techniques of the therapist, but to her empathy and the warmth of the relationship. In this regard shamanism and psychotherapy have much in common.400
Shamans and psychotherapists may both deceive themselves. Both may mistakenly believe that their cures are due to specific techniques, such as unearthing and interpreting childhood traumas in psychotherapy or extracting and battling spirits in shamanism. Yet much of their effectiveness may stem simply from the warmth and support of a caring relationship.423
Moreover, both shamans and therapists must face the fact that their techniques are not always effective. Both are repeatedly confronted by a distressingly large number of patients and illnesses that they cannot help, and both may sometimes lose faith in their craft.
Yet shamans, like healers of all kinds, confront powerful social and psychological forces pushing them to maintain faith in their trade. After all, they have invested significant amounts of time and resources in their training, and their income and status depend on it. Faced with this painful conflict, both shamans and psychotherapists may resort to self-deception to bolster their faith in their own effectiveness.400 These self-deceptions may include a variety of psychological defense mechanisms such as rationalization, repression, and selective memory. With the help of rationalization, a failure to cure may be explained away by attributing it to outside forces such as patient resistance or spirit malevolence. Repression and selective memory enable shamans and therapists to forget failures, while recalling their cures with vivid clarity.
These defenses are supported by the needs of the patients and society. People eager for help project healing ability onto the healer in a desperate attempt to believe that they can be cured. “It is difficult for a healer to doubt his own worth if he is constantly assured of it by his patients, their relatives and the whole community. If the social consensus is that someone has the power to heal, then he is a healer.”400
SUMMARY
Some shamans may use trickery and deceit but they are hardly unique in this. Conscious and unconscious bolstering of one’s professional image occurs in most professions. In fact, trickery is so much a part of human nature that it is portrayed across cultures as the trickster: a mythological figure who continuously deceives and upsets the traditional order and appearances.352
Shamans may believe in some of the techniques that seem like deceit to outsiders. In addition, shamanic trickery may not be entirely self-serving. Patients who believe they can be healed are more likely to recover. As Henry Ford supposedly said, “Those who believe they can do something and those who believe they can’t are both right.” Finally, some “tricks” may be ritually enacted symbols of deeper healing processes.