Shamanism, Animism, Trance States
The shaman is the intermediary par excellence.
He (or she) has a direct link to the gods.
If the priest whispers, the shaman shrieks.
Nothing quiet or shy, reserved and restrained here,
but an outsized gut- wrenching call to larger forces….
often accompanied by music and dance.
Unlike the priest, the shaman has a certain intimacy with the ‘other’,
almost a familial intimacy, allowing him easier access.
For the shaman can slip into the person of the god-spirit itself.
To make his vision our vision, to bridge the gap.
Their beings intermingle.
For a moment the shaman sees
as it sees, allowing him to speak for the other.
Especially in societies that live close to the earth and partake of the earth’s natural rhythms and where an animistic vision of life prevails,
the shaman leaps the distance between us and them,
their very bodies the medium of transformation.
The trappings of the shaman, the paraphernalia used to set this process in motion, are rarely, if ever, the courtly implements of an orthodox priest; rather they come from the natural world the shaman inhabits:
straw and grass, smoke and fire, horns and wooden masks.
Masks are terribly important for they symbolize the temporary obliteration of the shaman’s normal self
and the entry into the Other.
Shamans generally enter into a trance state at these times.
A scientifically certifiable altered state,
in trance there is a departure and a return,
allowing the individual to do things he normally could not do,
either because they are socially forbidden
or because they are generally painful.
Although the shaman tends to maintain greater control of the situation than the ordinary trance participant (who often requires a helper to keep them safe) there is always a risk.
As the conduit to the divine, either benevolent or malevolent,
the shaman is always in danger.
That distinguishes him from ordinary priests whose role is generally to conduct rites, and who, however much they entreat, remain separate from divine power. At a safer distance.
For while the priest is, in Jerome Rothenberg’s phrase, a ‘technician of the sacred’; the shaman, for however short a time, becomes the sacred.
Granting an element of the heroic and of the hero’s quest to the shamanic calling.
For one must ask:
Will he come back? Or will he be trapped in this otherness forever?
