(Jrt)
Shamanism
Shamanism or Shamanism is a symbolic mediation between human beings and the spirits of surnature. This mediation has an economic function in the community: managing random. It is the shaman who embodies this function as part of a close interdependence with the community recognizes it as such.
Shamanism in the strict sense has its source in traditional societies Siberian. However, there are similar practices among many peoples, beginning with the Mongols, which are all natives of Siberia, but also in Nepal, China, Japan, Korea, among North American Indians, among Americans of Latin America, among Africans, Australia.
Perhaps
The word shaman or shaman is known from the seventeenth century. He entered officially in the French language in 1842.
Saturday is a root meaning Altaic agitated stirring the hind limbs. "Saman" is a word of the language toungouse which means dance, jump, shake, agitated.
Ojun means the shaman among Yakoutes it means jump, jump, play.
The Turkish equivalent is kam where drift Russian kamljat, chamaniser and kamlanie, shamanic meeting.
Among the Buryats, boo murgel means encornement (confrontation) shaman.
The general idea is that imitation of animal species, including those that are prized in the hunting deer and poultry.
Next Bertrand Hell is the shaman, or "those who know" or those who "jumped, agitated, dance."
Ethnology and shamanism
The category "shamanism" poses a problem to anthropologists. What can we call shamanism, when you use that term to refer both practices of Tungusic as those of European cities? To answer this question, one must review the history of the word and what it implies.
"Shaman" was introduced in the eighteenth century and borrowed from toungouse (Siberia) by the Archpriest Avvakum. Roberte Hamayon (The hunt for the soul, 1990) characterizes the Siberian shamanism as well: it is a "mediation procedure, rudimentary and good all-assuming a specific conception of man, and the World society "and the relationship between them. The concept of sharing is at the heart of shamanistic thought: there is a particularly crucial connection between hunting, the alliance and shamanism, so it proposes that shamanism in itself is rooted in the life of hunting, because A report of necessity based on what seems to characterize shamanism at the most general level: managing the uncertain. This is achieved through an exchange with the spirits during the trance.
Shamanism is a pipe, a more efficient, technical, returned in the whole of society. It serves as a coping with situations poor and difficult, for its flexibility, pragmatism (contrary to established religions), and its availability.
The essential features of shamanism, in hunting companies, are allying with the spirits of surnature, the journey of the soul, managing the random by the ratio between Shaman and minds, but also fluidity, because shamanism is not something static since joined.
The institution shamanic beyond the Siberian region. All continents are affected and we are also seeing movement New-age in North America, Europe and France, with the emergence of a neo-shamanism.
That being prepared for placing elements, practices, institutions, under the category "shamanism" must be the discipline. Thus, at the International Congress on shamanism of 1997, it was able to attend communications raising the problem of "development practices shamanic then say, with Europeans in search of the exotic", and in this respect two opinions' opposed, one denying the "shamanic" (D. Vazeilles), the other saw no reason to ban illegitimate that name since, according to C. Kappler, Europe had until the Middle Ages "also shamanistic practices," citing Jeanne Favret-Saada (The words, death, spells), thus combining witchcraft in shamanism.
The debate, far from being finished, remains a problem. In applying the term "shamanism" to other companies, it is necessary to justify that choice by a precise description of the facts and practices that form the model that we want to compare the model toungouse. To use the "shamanism" by way of analogy, we must be able to compare models between them.
Shamanism and religion
The nature of shamanism has not finished making much ink! The scientists, anthropologists and scholars various there was little interested in the ideology of shamanism, some refusing to discuss its possible religious nature.
Shamanism is apprehended as from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the first observers to Siberia. It is the contact with the spirits who is considered, in the late nineteenth century, as the phenomenon of religious basis. In the twentieth century, Mircea Eliade, influenced by the mysticism of the Russian Orthodox Christianity, linked the complex shamanistic (beliefs, rituals and myths) to religion. Especially the ecstatic experience, which is defined as the basic religious experience. But that concept is currently very controversial, some seeing it as a sham science, others preferring the term trance, the only one to involve an element musical.
Ake Ake Hultkrantz this shamanism as a religio-cultural complex magic and concludes: since the supernatural world is the world of religion, shamanism plays a role religious, and it is not forbidden to assume that all experiments ecstatic at the renewals of religious origin dates back to ancient times shamans.
Wilhelm Schmidt considers shamanism like magic, even as a religious degeneration. For Bertrand Hell, shamanism, like possession, is placed under the sign of the effectiveness practical and pragmatic, thereby joining Marcel Mauss to the magic that is the manipulation of immanent forces, whereas religion is more attached to the metaphysical, and a transcendence beyond better.
Others consider shamanism as witchcraft (Roland Dixon), even as a sham maintained by the shaman.
Conversely some authors explain how the religion of the peoples of northern Siberia as the shaman!
The observation by doctors and colonial administrators, and the therapeutic aspect of the conduct of the shaman have any doubt about this religious, joining the failure of sociological theories to define it as such, especially because of the absence of doctrine, liturgy and clergy.
The contemporary anthropology brings shamanism rather a way of organizing experiences of individuals shamans. For Roberte Hamayon, Shamanism is rooted in the life of hunting, and, as such, is conditioned "by the empirical data that is the unpredictable nature of the appearance of the game", "Thought is interpreted as shamanic building capacity for symbolic act on this hazard "... "Changes in the place and nature of hazard control the evolution of shamanism". At the heart of shamanic rituals Buriat, there is the game, a game whose outcome ritual recalls the ups and downs of life hunting, "which rejects transcendence and imposes otherness". It is noteworthy that the Buryats were defined themselves as shamans people, as opposed to gods for people to differentiate Russians during colonization.
Finally, the issue of assimilation or not shamanism to religion has helped to (re) ask questions about the nature of religious phenomenon, thereby leading to a reconceptualization of it.
If we take the term shamanism strict sense in the sense toungouse, then its scope is severely limited and does more than this company. It should actually identify traits toungouse of shamanism, and then on s'autoriserait to apply the term to all the institutions that share exactly those traits listed. Probably it would then all if a portion of Siberia, but certainly not all groups for which we talk about shamanism. However, if one takes the principal, then we can use the term shamanism, it becomes a category, and shamanism toungouse a model. Because what we can compare the models are derived from these companies, not the companies themselves, nor their rituals.
The cult of the celestial deer
It Spitsyne which revealed to the public the discovery of shamanic plaques cast in bronze, named plates Perm, on the banks of the Kama and the Ob, in the Urals. They date from the Middle Ages.
Recouvertes figurations of half-human, half-deer, elk heads, dragons, beasts and birds fur, some human mask on the chest. The bipedal creatures with animal figures were called by Spitsyne souldé.
On some of them, this is figuration of two women-élanes, standing on a huge dragon and training, using their heads élanes, the celestial vault in which one can see either small silhouettes Human, a male silhouette topped with a mask élane.
For some of these plaques, a parallel has been done by AV Schmidt, with oral literature set in 1926-1927 Lapp and recounting the legend of the man-reindeer [9]. For Boris Rybakov [10] the worship of heavenly deer, also found on some of these plates, is widespread among the peoples of Siberia: in the Evenki Toungouzka ago élane the heavenly Bougady Enintyne among Kéty it is the goddess Tomane, among Selkoupy ago Yliuonda Kotta. The cult of the two heavenly master of the world, women semi-semi-deer is also widespread (Nganassanes, Evenki, Dolgans, Nivkhi Sakhalin Island).
Women-Rennes:
Upon entering, the shaman saw two naked women, like reindeer: they were covered with hair, wore wood on the head. The shaman near the fire, but what he had taken for the fire, it was the sun's rays. One of the women was pregnant. She gave birth to two fawns ... The second woman also mit to two fawns ... These fawns must become the ancestors of wild and domestic reindeer.
Quoted by quoting Boris Rybakov Anissimov.
The shamanic headdress decorated with a nose élane is evidenced also by the archaeological data. It is found on a sculpture of bones from the necropolis Mesolithic of the island in the Renne Onéga (Vth millennium BC) and an umbrella officiating amounting to the celestial world, surrounded by two women, the head oriented shaman. Spitsyne identifies the helmet souldé plates Perm. It is found also in the island Renne of the Barents Sea, in the peat of Chiguir in the Urals, near Palanga on the shores of the Baltic.
For Boris Rybakov, the cult of the celestial deer, closely linked to shamanism, is attested to the Mesolithic and there are five thousand years ago, during the period of folklore bronze from the seventh to eleventh centuries century, and the myths collected in Siberian cosmogonic nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its geographical spread is the whole ethnic tongouze, and samoyède urgic but extends much further délà based its conclusions (Europe and Asia). By contrast, according to this author, makes no basis to assume that had existed among hunters from the glacial era. Although pictures of deer are frequent in Paleolithic art, they are indistinguishable from the mass of other animals. On perhaps the only exception, the God Cornu could be eventually, according Rybakov, a simple hunter who set him a reindeer skin to approach a herd, as part of a disguise. The interpretation of anthropologist Margaret Murray, following which the Horned God is invoked in a shamanistic ritual seems controversial.
The shaman
The shaman is a complex who were wanted to see a healer, a sorcerer, a priest, a magician, a diviner, a medium or possessed.
* There are actually versatility within its remit. These are made in a very specific ritual, in his community. They vary from one region to another, but also from one period to another. The most important are:
- Do harm to an enemy
- Treatment of nervous and mental diseases
- Therapeutic functions
- Naming a child
- Bring down the rain
- Bring game
- Regain a lost
* To communicate with the spirits, the shaman goes into a trance during the rituals. They are characterized by a body and a particular mental state, whose tremors are the most evocative (a spirit is present in the body of the shaman). The trance is always associated with a musical and its etymology there is the concept of transition and change. Finally, trance done in the service of faith. It is considered that the shaman sometimes goes too connected with the afterlife through dreams or visions (Vision Quest)
* The shaman ritual is not fixed, there is a customization of its practice. Each shaman done differently from others, there is no liturgy and he has a talented staff to serve as a hereditary.
* The expression of the shaman when it is in contact with the spirits gives an appearance of madness. In fact it is misleading. The shaman is normal outside of meetings. His behaviour during the ritual will affect neither the authority nor his sense of responsibility. Have entrusted to the shaman functions vital to the life of his community.
Shamanism hunting
Shamanism fighter designed to meet a critical need: to find game. Some peoples of Siberia and North America living from hunting have retained his post primitives. It is believed that the animals are animated by spirits. The shaman joined them in the world of non-sensitive "surnature." To do this, it must itself be transformed into animal and marry the daughter of the mind game donor (the spirit of the forest), which serve as a guide. This spirit has often in the form of a deer. The gesticulations of the shaman, that the Europeans are sometimes mistaken for the folly, are nothing more than a manifestation of his animal nature. From his wife, using seduction and trickery, he obtained the promise of game animals, animals that will give hunters their lifeblood. But hunting is an exchange: the minds of hunters are eaten themselves, which will cause them disease and led to an inevitable death. The role of the shaman is not normally be remedied. It must only ensure that the exchange occurs, but in order to delay as much as possible the expiration of the exchange, ie the second phase of the exchange, through a manipulation.
Shamanism breeding
Shamanism is marked by changes and mutations when hunting gives way to agricultural activities and livestock. The survival of the community depends not more animal spirits, but of a human minds, particularly those of ancestors. The spirit world, previously confined to the forest, stretches upward and downward, toward what would become Heaven and Hell. This phenomenal world is often not perceived as a ladder to bars or sometimes a tree with its branches and its roots. The shaman is the one who has the ability to rise and fall along these different levels of reality to Heaven or Hell, to meet with entities of the upper and lower worlds (spirits), and to bring his trip counselling, care and powers "magical" expansion of consciousness.
For example, to perform a task, the first between shaman in a state of altered consciousness through trance and ecstasy caused, for example, by the techniques of visualization, breathing, music, dance or the use of psychoactive plants. This is supposed to enable it to enter the World non phenomenal. It is often assisted by one or more minds allies (animals, plants, objects or even ancestors) and must cope with the disease to his patient, which can be viewed as a monster or an evil spirit. It uses a set of techniques chosen for its location and its culture, and that can go to the aspiration of the evil spirit to the gift of energy ... At the end of the process, the patient is often assumed to have recovered a piece of his soul that would have been stolen, or having to break away from his body a bad spirit.
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