01 May 2009
The subject of shamans and shamanism arose on this forum and I copy an interesting discussion of Siberian shamanism and the work of Silvia Tomášková, an associate professor and director at the University of North Carolina. She is the author of "Traveling Spirits: The History of Shamans and the Prehistory of Gender". Abridged from, Sorcerer, Seer, Psychopomp by Margarite Nathe.
This, obviously, relates to the ongoing discussion on mediumship and spirits in the BKWSU, here and elsewhere.
In my own experience, I recall discussion both withneighbours of the Om Mandli sect and their description of the events which included recollections of the women "howling and screaming" during the early seances. I think we should correct call meetins with BapDada, "mass seances", possibly the largest ever held within a spiritualist religion. We will all remember similar "official" stories of children going into possessive trances for up to 7 days which are also recorded in newspapers, court proceedings etc of the time.
Far from necessarily being a "believer", I am expressing my findings. I have also had indepth personal discussions with an Indian/African/Arabic spiritualist from Zanzibar about her induction into mediumship, and others with Western spiritualists, which correlate very similarly to the above that I offer as reasonable good documentation of the phenomena and a good place to further our discussions about such matters and how they effect and reflect onto the Brahma Kumari experience.
I warm to the position taken in these matters by anthropologists rather than sociologists or pseudo-psychologists.
Margarite Nathe wrote:In their diaries, which anthropologists call “ethnographic records,” the Westerners wrote vivid descriptions of a couple of different ways in which the Siberian peoples chose new shamans. One method called for the tribe members to choose someone based on some sickness, physical mark, or even special powers — these could include predicting the weather, healing animals, and precociously resolving conflicts, Silvia Tomášková says. The other method, while less straightforward, illustrates why no one ever volunteered for the job of shaman.
In this process, the spirits selected a new body — usually that of a boy or girl just reaching sexual maturity — to house a dead shaman’s soul. Then the spirits began whispering, calling, and eventually just outright threatening the poor kid. At this point, the fledgling shaman stopped resisting the spirits’ demands, collapsed into hysterics, had visions, and promptly fell asleep for up to nine days.
While this may sound like typical teenage behavior, here’s where it gets really dramatic: during the new shaman’s long sleep, the spirits cut him into pieces and counted his bones to make sure his body contained at least one extra. After this somewhat painful induction, the new shaman was a fast expert in communing with the spirits whenever he wanted, either by acting as a medium and mouthpiece, or by sending his soul from his body directly into the spirit realm.
These are talents that made a shaman pretty handy to have around, which is probably why the Tungus people sometimes went so far as to make their shaman the leader of their clan.
Tomášková mentions that in the nineteenth century when Russia fell into political turmoil, the government isolated its political trouble-makers (which included a whole lot of lawyers), to Siberia to serve out twenty-year sentences where it imagined the exiles wouldn’t influence or even have contact with other people.
“These exiles were all very educated urban people who realized, ‘I’m here in Siberia, there’s no need for lawyers,’” Tomášková says. “So they learned the language and wrote extensive ethnographic accounts of the people.” Those lawyer-written chronicles are far more scientific, detailed, and useful to anthropologists today than the (earlier) mapmakers’ diaries, she says, because the writers actually tried to analyze and understand the native Siberian people and their customs.
Tomášková says, is that the story of shamanism is bound to the roots of all human culture.
This, obviously, relates to the ongoing discussion on mediumship and spirits in the BKWSU, here and elsewhere.
In my own experience, I recall discussion both withneighbours of the Om Mandli sect and their description of the events which included recollections of the women "howling and screaming" during the early seances. I think we should correct call meetins with BapDada, "mass seances", possibly the largest ever held within a spiritualist religion. We will all remember similar "official" stories of children going into possessive trances for up to 7 days which are also recorded in newspapers, court proceedings etc of the time.
Far from necessarily being a "believer", I am expressing my findings. I have also had indepth personal discussions with an Indian/African/Arabic spiritualist from Zanzibar about her induction into mediumship, and others with Western spiritualists, which correlate very similarly to the above that I offer as reasonable good documentation of the phenomena and a good place to further our discussions about such matters and how they effect and reflect onto the Brahma Kumari experience.
I warm to the position taken in these matters by anthropologists rather than sociologists or pseudo-psychologists.