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Shamanic Initiatory Crisis Death and Rebirth

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Spirit world interactions that stimulate psychological development are exemplified in a universal aspect of shamanism, the death-and-rebirth experience. Seeking of the sha-manic role is often motivated by a psychological crisis characterized by illness or insanity provoked by the spirits who have selected the individual to be a shaman. This crisis generally leads the initiate to experiences interpreted as death. They may occur spontaneously or in cultures where people actively engage in the shamanic vision quest, and this death-rebirth experience occurs in the context of training. In either case, the death-rebirth crisis typically involves a sequence of illness and suffering from attacks by spirits that leads to an experience of bodily death and dismemberment. The dismemberment generally takes place following a descent to the lower world, where spirits, often in animal form, attack and destroy the victim. Subsequently, they reconstruct the pieces, adding their powers to the reborn shaman.

These initiatory experiences have been characterized as involving neurosis, psychosis, and hysteria. This is a misunderstanding, reflecting ethnocentric attributions of pathology to ASCs by using views of normalcy referenced to the rationality of ordinary consciousness. These experiences are not schizophrenic or derived from other pathologies (Noll, 1983) but do involve emotional turmoil and distress that may entail a temporary crisis resembling a brief reactive psychosis (Walsh, 1990). In some cultures, shamanic initiatory experiences are evaluated as pathological, but the general expectation is that they are the basis for important personal development.

The shaman's death-rebirth initiatory crisis involves natural symbolic forms of self-reference and self-development. The death-rebirth phenomenon is manifested cross-culturally because it reflects natural processes of self-transformation that occur under conditions of overwhelming stress and the fragmentation of the ego that results from internal conflict (Walsh, 1990). Shamans are often driven to their profession by a chronic illness or affliction, and its resolution requires that they become new kinds of people—healers— to overcome their own health problems. Consequently, a "death" of their current identity (as a "normal" but ill person) is necessary for a new identity to develop as a healer. The dismemberment experiences they see are "autosymbolic images" reflecting breakdown and disintegration of their own psychological structures and senses of self (Laughlin et al., 1992).

The death-rebirth cycle reflects, first, the fragmentation and, second, reformation of the self. This process of psychological transformation results from the inability of the psyche to maintain its integrity. Conflicts lead to destruction of the ego, experienced symbolically as death; rebirth reflects a psychological reorganization. These reformulations of the self are guided by innate drives toward psychological integration. The threatening and destroying spirits are symbolic representations of aspects of the self that are not useful for the new identity.

Shamanic development involves manipulation of symbolic constructs and neurological structures to restructure the ego, producing changes in attachments, affect, and other psychological processes. Shamanic development transforms the self, producing a restructuring at a new level of identity. Restructuring of the ego is promoted by holistic imperatives toward psychointegration, providing a dramatic alleviation of psychosomatic and emotional problems. This self-transformation produces the widely reputed exceptional health of shamans through their individuation and self-actualization.

Shamans as Psychopaths? Despite the similarity between shamanistic ASCs and some pathological states (see Ackerknecht, 1943; Silverman, 1967; Noll, 1983; Siikala, 1978; Hultkrantz, 1978), evidence indicates that shamanic experiences are not pathological. Shamans are generally among the healthiest and best-adjusted members of their culture and are not seen as pathological from the perspectives of their own culture. A central difference is the voluntary nature of the shamanic ASC and the deliberate actions taken to induce it that makes it distinct from the involuntary conditions experienced by a person suffering from a psychopathologic disorder. Differences in characteristics of shamanic states and schizophrenia refute arguments that acute schizophrenia underlies shamanic ASCs (Noll, 1983). Shamanism differs from schizophrenia in the different kinds of experiences and responses, including

• Volition, the willful entry into the ASC
• The shaman's continued social functions and deliberate communication during an ASC
• The shaman's ability to discriminate shamanic experiences from those of everyday life

Even when ASCs include hallucinatory experiences, the experiential qualities of shamanic ASCs differ sharply from those of schizophrenia. Shamanic ASCs involve the expression of positive affective experiences and intensification of emotion, in contrast to the emotional flattening of schizophrenia. The shaman's considerable skill in emotionally manipulating patients contrasts with the schizophrenic's lack of control.

Epilepsy has been attributed to shamanic ASCs because of shaking, tremors, and seizures. Epilepsy refers to disorders characterized by electrical discharge patterns, generalized symptoms of the brain's failure to inhibit normal discharge patterns. Seizure characteristics are found in shamans only during ASC induction and not at other times, rejecting an organic explanation for their presence in shamans. Dissociative disorders such as hysteria and hysterical neurosis often attributed to shamanism have clinical characteristics that do not correspond to shamanic ASCs. For instance, the loss of conscious awareness and amnesia characteristic of hysterical neurosis is not found in shamanic ASCs.

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