190. Cults: Shamanism
In the matter of religious cults, seven entries have been included in [Figure 35]: (1h) shamanism, and (1i) crisis ceremonies, especially for girls at puberty and the whipping of adolescent boys, two more or less synchronous traits; (6a) initiating societies, and (6b) masks—also about contemporaneous; (16) priesthood; and (22) human sacrifice and (23) temples.
The shaman is an individual without official authority but often of great personal influence. His supposed power comes to him directly from the spirits as a gift or grant. He himself, as a personality, has been able to enter into a special relationship, denied to normal persons, with the supernatural world or some member thereof. The community recognizes his power after it is his: the community does not elect him to his special position, nor accept him in it by inheritance. His communion with spirits enables the shaman to foretell the future, change the weather, blast the crops or multiply game, avert catastrophes or precipitate them on foes; above all, to inflict and cure disease. He is therefore the medicine-man; a word which in American ethnology is synonymous with shaman. The terms doctor, wizard, juggler, which have established themselves in usage in certain regions, are also more or less appropriate: they all denote shamans. When he wishes to kill his private or public enemy, the shaman by his preternatural faculties injects some foreign object or destructive substance into his victim, or abstracts his soul. To cure his friends or clients, he extracts the disease object, sometimes by singing, dancing, blowing, stroking, or kneading, most often by sucking; or he finds, recaptures, and restores the soul. Of the two concepts, that of the concrete disease object is more widely spread; that of the soul theft is apparently characteristic of the more advanced tribes; but the exact distribution remains to be worked out.
The territorial extent of shamanistic ideas and practices is from the Arctic to Cape Horn. The method of acquiring power from spirits, the nature of the disease object and its process of extraction, the conviction that sickness must be caused by malevolent shamanistic power, there being no such thing as natural death; these and other specific features of the institution are sometimes surprisingly similar in North and South America. In fact, they recur in peripheral parts of the eastern hemisphere—Siberia, Australia, Africa—with such close resemblance as strongly to suggest their being the remnants of a once world-wide rudimentary form of religion or religious magic.