Review: Shamans, Healers & Medicine Men by Holger Kalweit

Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men [1987/92] – ★★★★★

A comprehensive, endlessly perceptive, & inspiring book on shamanism.

“Shamanism…is not a somehow obscure or incomprehensible or mysterious magical path, but a simple heightening of the emotional experience of the world; “the goal of the shamanic path of initiation is to broaden and deepen the normal emotionality that we all know” [Kalweit, Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 219].

This book, translated from the German, is by Holger Kalweit, a German ethnologist and psychologist who studied shamans and shamanism in different corners of the world, including Hawaii, the American Southwest, Mexico and Tibet. With concrete examples drawn from the Ainu, Siberian, Yahgan and other shamanic traditions, Kalweit delves into the very heart of shamanism and explains detailly the nature of being a shaman, “a possessor of profound knowledge that cannot be grasped in words”. From shamanic training, testing and rituals inducing trance to shamanic healing powers, and duels and competitions, Kalweit touches on many topics and hardly stops there, elucidating further on such concepts as consciousness, reality, dreaming and on a variety of parapsychological phenomena, including “magic”, visions and near-death experience.

Holger Kalweit starts his book with these words: “there are three things our culture has forgotten: basic health, healing, and holiness …”these concepts have the same goal: sanity, integrity, completeness, salvation, happiness, liberation, magic” [Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 1]. The path of shamans is to simply bring themselves into harmony with nature’s laws, to engage in “spiritual re-shaping”. The author says that “there are as many forms of shamanic training as there are cultures with shamans”, but broadly “[s]hamans participate in two worlds…their physical mother is responsible for their first birth; for their second, the godfather may be a cosmic life-giver, a god, or a spirit [Kalweit, 1987/92: 18].One chapter in this book section is titled “Lightning Shamans”, where the talk is about shamanic initiation by a lightning bolt. For example, in the Siberian Buryats’ tradition, “the lightning shaman is imbued with the power of the lightning bolt” and in the tradition of the indigenous people of the Andes, the appearance of a lightning signals the initiation experience of a shaman [Kalweit, 1987/92: 46].

Kalweit is an author who is acutely aware of colonialism, intellectual and scientific imperialism, ethnocentricity and all kinds of prejudice that can plague anthropological study and research, and draws differences between the Western, traditional, reason/logic-oriented views on various phenomena and the tribal, more emotion/intuition/spirituality-oriented views on the same concepts. Kalweit’s point is that it is wrong to put one above the other since both, in equal measure, form part of the normal human experience of the world. For example, the West is quick to designate shamanic behaviour as abnormal or pathological, which is an incorrect way of thinking. However, the relation between the two does exist, writes Kalweit: “the psychotic is…no shaman, but shamans pass through psychotic episodes, venturing as they do to the edges of being’s abyss – and psychotics pass sporadically through shamanic episodes, have genuine shamanic insights and glimpses into the higher world” [Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 213]. He also states that though the West sees the path of shamanic initiation as “degenerate”, in tribal societies, the path is accepted and encouraged [1987/92: 54], and “the high cultures of Asia see the transformation of human consciousness…[as] something holy and worth striving for” [1987/92: 53].

“…magic is neither a cultural fantasy of primitive people nor a complex of symbols and metaphors; rather, it is the natural means of exploration of a much more complex structure of consciousness than that currently used by the modern sciences in their exploration of reality. Magic is not below our present level of knowledge but beyond it. Magic is a state of cognition that psychology has yet to attain [Kalweit, Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 189].

There were a number of chapters in the book that recalled to me The Way of Zen [1957] by Alan Watts, especially chapters that talked about trance, a state of deep-hypnosis which may be brought about by drumming, a rhythm, a chant. The vital component of entering a trance-like state is “courage to let oneself go completely”: the West “have always struggled between letting go of the self and keeping a tight rein of waking consciousness to establish security through reason.” [1987/92: 78] Referencing William James and Aldous Huxley, Kalweit talks here about the many benefits of reaching this mystic state, including help with learning new languages, realising one’s creativity and “gaining access to a field of consciousness beyond a three-dimensional space” [1987/92: 80]. Apparently, sportsmen during important sporting competitions and people coming very close to dying (or experiencing other very stressful or emotional events) sometimes spontaneously experience these states too, which open to them a whole different world.

As I am particularly interested in the nature of consciousness, it was fascinating for me to read paragraphs devoted to it, too: “our consciousness is neutral; it knows neither good nor evil; it is beyond human value criteria. The powers with which shamans work are neither black nor white, neither positive nor negative. They are applicable to all human objectives”[Kalweit, Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 191]; “consciousness is…independent of the brain….[it] is the origin and the future of all that is living, an expression of a higher order of space and time, of a limitless essence” [1987/92: 33]; The author puts a strong case forward against the mythologizing and discrediting altered states of consciousness. He says that they should not be designated to the ego level [1987/92: 82, 213] and some people do experience different levels of consciousness without being aware of it: “children remain unconsciously caught up in their experience; psychotics are persecuted and tortured by it. Shamans elegantly master both worlds, the normal and the altered, and are intermediaries between the two” [Kalweit, Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 220].

“Ecstasy, trance, and enlightenment are an abolition of time. Time is our greatest enemy, the most damaging of all illusions” [Kalweit, Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 241].

Kalweit’s book is certainly a more accessible book than previously reviewed by me Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy [1951] by Mircea Eliade. If Eliade’s book explains beliefs, traditions and practises of shamanism across different cultures and regions of the world more or less systematically, Kalweit’s book goes into greater depth on each of the core ideas implicit in, and reasons behind, shamanic beliefs and rituals.

Kalweit’s conclusive remarks and predictions are quite bold, too: “the journey to other spiritual words…is an indispensable part of the psychology of the future, of genuine shamanic therapy” [Kalweit, Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 221]; “we…may hope that the anthropology of the future, in investigating the higher potential of humanity through the example of the shaman, will develop a genuine understanding of the “other world” rather than persisting in the antiquated “charlatan theory” [1987/92: 34]. Kalweit is a proponent of transpersonal anthropology that could be contrasted with tradition anthropology. Whereas the latter views shamans “from the outside”, transpersonal anthropology involves “broadening our ideas and our range of experience and calling us to tread in the footsteps of the shamans” [Shambhala Publications, 1987/92: 262].

🧿 Overall, Shamans, Healers, and Medicine Men is one eye-opening and persuasive book on shamanism, detailing how the tradition should be viewed, studied and understood.