Minimalist wrote:
The most likely model for a shamanistic line is for each shaman to take an apprentice from the group and train him in the arts of the craft. If you identify two apprentices then, upon the death of the shaman, you have a power struggle because these were after all, people just like us ...
....While more effective, it does lead to the inevitable result that the shaman is not all that special in the group.
Ish?
Yes, nice theory Min. But it's not how it worked.
If you read (if I had a pound for everytime I said this, I'd be a millionnaire by now) Mircae Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy you'd find reports by anthropologists of shamans worldwide that go into great detail about how a shaman is selected (or was, back in the late 1800s and early 1900s).
Every single culture - from Australia to America, from Siberia to Lapland, from India to Tibet, from Indonesia to Norway - says the same thing. They say that the spirits select the apprentice shaman.
Potential shamans are usually identified from an early age because they are not like everyone else. They can tend to be reclusive, to have strange dreams ... basically, they're misfits.
But again, according to Eliade, every culture says that when the apprentice shaman is being trained, he goes through a dismemberment. This is not, obviously, an actual dismemberment (although some of the Neolithic graves are like art installations honouring this process) but is carried out by the spirits in the altered reality and so is painless.
This dismemberment is at the heart of the death and rebirth (resurrection) myth that eventually ended up a story about a Jewish carpenter who was crucified and rose again. It's a metaphor for the neophyte shaman dying to this world and being reborn as a shaman, a man or woman of power who is guided by the spirits.
But basically, the spirits choose who they are going to train and who they are going to dismember to become shamans.
It is no different today.
