“We have lost our immediate feeling for the great realities of the spirit—and to this world all true mythology belongs,” Carl Kerenyi warns us. Joseph Campbell echoes this thought when he observes that today we live “in a terminal moraine of myths and mythic symbols,” a massive accretion of fragmented forms left by previous ages that we lack the power to rearticulate. Not only are the forms shattered but the sensibility that produced and understood them has also withered. Shamanism, one of the earliest and most basic expressions of this sensibility, has in particular suffered from this disability. Despite the progress made by modern Western culture in our encounter with and effort to understand the riches of the many civilizations that ethnology and archaeology have revealed over the past century, a cloud of opprobrium has long hung over the figure of the shaman. To the religious missionaries who often first encountered this figure, his “religious practices seemed more nearly to place him within the camp of the Devil. To practitioners of the emerging science of medicine, with its rigid presuppositions, these archaic healers seemed to be ridiculously inept and often counterproductive. And to minds dominated by the materialist paradigms prevailing since the Enlightenment, the worldview of the shaman, which often seemed to fly in the face of plain material facts,” was simply incomprehensible.
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