Many Worlds
A sensible man prefers the inner to the outer eye.
—Lao Tzu 39
What is the nature of the shamans’ cosmos? There are numerous cultural variations, but also cross-cultural similarities.
One similarity is that the shaman’s universe is often three-tiered. It comprises an upper, middle, and lower world, and the upper and lower worlds may be multilayered. What makes shamans “cosmic travelers” is their experience of being able to traverse these multiple worlds at will. Eliade claimed that
the pre-eminently shamanic technique is the passage from one cosmic region to another—from earth to the sky or from earth to the underworld. The shaman knows the mystery of the break-through in plane. This communication among the cosmic zones is made possible by the very structure of the universe.83
“The very structure of the universe” to which Eliade refers is its interconnectedness. The three worlds are often linked by the axis mundi or world axis. Eliade pointed out that in diverse myths:
The essential schema is always to be seen, even after the numerous influences to which it has been subjected; there are three great cosmic regions, which can be successively traversed because they are linked together by a central axis. This axis, of course, passes through an “opening,” a “hole”; it is through this hole that the gods descend to earth and the dead to the subterranean regions; it is through the same hole that the soul of the shaman in ecstasy can fly up or down in the course of his celestial or infernal journeys.83
Three forms of the central axis are common to diverse cultures and myths. The first is the “cosmic mountain” at the center of the earth, such as the seven-story mountain that the Yakut shaman climbs.83 The second is the “world pillar” that often holds up the sky. Third is the “world tree”—symbol of life, fertility, and sacred regeneration—that the shaman climbs to other worlds. But whatever its form, the world axis symbolizes the connection between worlds, a connection that the shaman alone is able to traverse.
But the shaman’s worlds and levels are more than interconnected; they also interact with one another. Shamans believe that these interactions can be perceived and affected by one who knows how to do so and that the shaman, like a spider at the center of a cosmic web, can feel and influence distant realms.
All parts of this interconnected universe are seen as alive and conscious to some degree. In contemporary philosophical language, these would be the doctrines of hylozoism and animism. Hylozoism is the belief that all objects are imbued with life. Animism is the belief of tribal people that every object is invested with a mind or soul. When this same belief is held by Western intellectuals, it is renamed panpsychism. Needless to say, panpsychism is most unfashionable in these materialistic times, even though historically it has been supported by such first-rank philosophers as Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and Whitehead.
As metaphysicians, shamans tend to be ontological realists. Where Westerners might regard the upper and lower worlds as mental constructions, shamans regard them as independently existing realms. Michael Harner points out that for the shaman, “the mind is being used to gain access, to pass through a door into another reality which exists independently of that mind.”149 This is another example of the literal and realist interpretation of experience that often characterizes the shamanic worldview.
For the shamans’ tribespeople, this multilayered cosmos is a myth and article of faith. For shamans it is a direct experience. They alone traverse these layers and turn a cosmology into a road map, which they then use to acquire information and power. They alone, said Eliade, transform
a cosmotheological concept into a “concrete mystical experience.” This point is important. It explains the difference between, for example, the religious life of a North Asian people and the religious experience of its shamans; the latter is a personal and ecstatic experience.83
CULTURE, COSMOLOGY, AND INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE
Since shamans directly experience the realms described in tribal myth and cosmology, an obvious question is whether their journeys also shaped these myths and cosmology. Put more generally, this question becomes an extremely important one: To what extent do spiritual practitioners create their tradition’s cosmology from their experience, and to what extent is their experience created by, or at least molded by, their cosmology? Do religious practice and experience create beliefs, or do beliefs create religious experience? Which is chicken and which egg, or are they mutually co-creative?
Eliade argued that cosmology determines shamanic experience. But while he acknowledged that some epic stories may derive from shamanic journeys, he denied the impact of these journeys on cosmology.
The shamans did not create the cosmology, the mythology, and the theology of their respective tribes; they only interiorized it, experienced it, and used it as the itinerary for their ecstatic journeys.83
On the other hand, Michael Harner claims that what defines shamanism are its techniques and that the experiences they elicit allow practitioners to reach their own conclusions and cosmology.
Shamanism ultimately is only a method, not a religion with a fixed set of dogmas. Therefore people arrive at their own experience-derived conclusions about what is going on in the universe, and about what term, if any, is most useful to describe ultimate reality.149
So here we have two experts disagreeing. Eliade believed that preexisting cultural cosmologies determine shamans’ experiences. However, Harner claims that shamans simply do their practices, observe their experiences, and deduce their own cosmology largely independent of cultural conditioning. Who is correct, and how can we decide?
We have no research data so we will need to fall back on general principles concerning the relationship between individual experience and collective culture. The relationship turns out to be at the heart of postmodern thinking.
It used to be assumed that individual experience arose freely and autonomously and that all a person had to do to see unvarnished truth was to “look within.” Meditative disciplines and modern phenomenology are based on this assumption. Certainly much can be learned, and much insight, healing, and transcendence can be gained from careful introspection.
However, one of the absolutely crucial contributions of postmodernism—and one of the great intellectual advances in the twentieth century—is the recognition that individual experience is deeply, pervasively, and unconsciously molded by culture. Before experiences arise to awareness, they are constructed, filtered, and interpreted by the “cognitive unconscious” according to often unrecognized background cultural frameworks such as language, values, beliefs, and biases.411 In fact, a central thrust of the whole field of Critical Studies is to unveil unconscious collective biases such as those of, for example, culture, gender, and class, which create respectively ethnocentrism, sexism, and classism. (For a popular introduction, see Introducing Critical Theory.339)
In religious studies, a similar “constructivist” movement argues that religious experiences are also constructed and interpreted by prior cultural concepts categories.r In short, experiences in general, and shamanic ones in particular, are molded and interpreted by the individual’s culture and cosmology. Expectation evokes experience as, for example, with the technique of dream incubation where one attempts to dream about a particular topic.
Certainly shamans bring some beliefs and cosmology to their practice. After all, why would a shaman want to journey to the upper world without believing there was one? Furthermore, there are wide cultural variations in myths, and shamans tend to have experiences consistent with their culture.
However, pioneering explorers can have novel experiences that transcend the conventions of their culture and eventually transform it. These transconventional experiences remain grounded in some cultural contexts and presuppositions—such as linguistic categories and parts of the prevailing worldview—while breaking free of others. This is the process of “detribalization” by which an individual disidentifies from certain cultural assumptions. He or she is thus able to look at them rather than look through them and can then work on them to transform them and the culture. One goal of spiritual practices is precisely to foster this kind of liberation from conventional illusions. But one of the great traps unveiled by the postmodern critique was to assume that spiritual practices alone could reveal and liberate all cultural conditioning.411
Individuals such as shamans who break through into transconventional experiences can exert a transforming effect on culture. Their impact is a function of their social status and resultant “idiosyncrasy credit” and the openness of the social structure. In general, the greater an individual’s status, the more leeway he or she has to be idiosyncratic and challenge old ideas. Likewise, the less structured the social and religious institutions, the less they are likely to be threatened by individual religious revelations. Shamans generally have high status and reside in relatively simple societies, so their potential for modifying their culture and cosmology would presumably be high. Thus in the short term, shamanic experiences are clearly shaped by cultural cosmology, but in the long run, shamanic experiences may reshape and enrich this cosmology.