Note 107.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

The initiation of the medicine-man or magician by spirits, often the spirits of the dead, is practically the universal belief in Australia. In this respect the Australian medicine-man is in line with many of his professional brethren elsewhere. In the island of Saghalien the Gilyak shamans are chosen vessels, to whom their tutelary gods reveal their high calling in vision or in trance. From the moment that this is done the gods install themselves as the new shaman’s assistants and perform his commands. Yet shamanhood is not regarded as a gift, but as a burden. To become a shaman, either a man must find favour with one of these assistant tutelary gods, or such a god must be bestowed upon him by his father or uncle. Conversion into a shaman forms a break in the life of the chosen, accompanied by many complicated psychical phenomena. The process in his own case was described by a shaman to a Russian anthropologist. For more than two months he was sick and lay without movement or consciousness. As soon as he revived from one attack he fell under another. “I should have died,” he said, “if I had not become a shaman.” He began to dream at night that he sang shaman songs. Visions appeared to him, and he was told to make a drum and the proper apparatus of a shaman, and to sing. If he were a simple man, the vision told him, nothing would happen; “but if thou art a shaman, be a real shaman.” When he awoke he found that it was thought the spirits had killed him, and preparations for his funeral rites had been made. But he got a drum and began to sing. This produced a feeling which hovered between intoxication and death. Then for the first time he saw his tutelary gods, and received from them instruction in his business as a shaman.107.1 Among the Koryak on the adjacent continent, “nobody can become a shaman of his own free will. The spirits enter into any person they may choose and force him to become their servant.” Such persons are “usually nervous young men, subject to hysterical fits, by means of which the spirits express their demand” that the patient shall become a shaman. Fasting, paroxysms, exhaustion succeed one another. Finally, the spirits appear to the patient in visible form, endow him with power, inspire and instruct him.107.2 In other words, they fill him with their mana.