CHARISMA AND EVIL

Charles Lindholm

Department of Anthropology

Boston University

So far as I can determine, charisma is the only technical

sociological term that has entered into the general vocabulary.

In contemporary English usage, politicians, athletes, movie

stars, and others who are notably appealing and successful are

routinely described as ‘charismatic.’ The entrance of charisma

onto ordinary public discourse perhaps indicates a need for a

word that can seem to explain individual success in a system

where status in achieved, not ascribed, but where the reasons for

achievement are opaque. Charisma in this sense is a shorthand

expression telling us why one politician is beloved, another is

not; why one athlete is sought out to endorse products while

another, equally talented, remains obscure; why one actor is a

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star, another a journeyman, why one person lights up a room,

another dims it.

By definition, personal charisma is not to be acquired by

training and effort - the usual methods for achieving success in

our competitive and rationalized society. True, it can sometimes

be inherited – the popular appeal of the Kennedy family is an

example. But this is very much a secondary and even

institutional form of charisma. Likewise, charisma can be

attached to high office, but this too is a secondary form. The

crown does not make the man who wears it charismatic – it only

makes him powerful (Greenfeld 1985). To be captivating, high

office or a great name must be undergirded by a compelling

personality.

However, even though the term charisma is used in a positive

fashion to describe the otherwise inexplicable appeal of certain

persons, it also refers to individuals who arouse fear and

horror. Sinister cult leaders, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones,

who apparently have an uncanny capacity to influence others, even

to point of inspiring their followers to commit murder or

suicide, are always called ‘charismatic’. The mystifying power of

2

such leaders is ‘explained’ as a malevolent manifestation of

extreme personal magnetism, which overwhelms and eventually

corrupts and destroys those whom it attracts.

This negative usage is puzzling, since charisma, as

originally introduced to social theory by Rudolf Sohm, was a

Christian religious term with wholly positive connotations – it

explained why Jesus’ disciples gave up their wives, families, and

occupations to dedicate themselves completely to him. The reason

was simple. They intuitively recognized him as the Messiah

because of his God given gift of grace - his charisma - which

revealed to those with the eyes to see that he was indeed sent to

redeem humanity. For those who follow Sohm’s definition,

charisma is inextricably attached to Christian theology and the

Jesus cult. By definition, evil persons cannot be charismatic

(Friedrich 1961).

Weber on Charisma

How did this positive term come to be attached to the

diabolic? This transformation makes sense when we to consider

how Max Weber developed the concept of charisma in his historical

sociology, from whence it diffused into ordinary discourse.

3

Following his value neutral approach to social science, Weber

appropriated the concept from Sohm but resisted its Christian

moral implications. Instead, he wished to define the gift of

grace in a way that would permit comparative research. To begin,

he distinguished between three types of authority 1.) rational-

legal - the organized codification of values 2.) traditional - an

unthinking adherence to custom 3.) charismatic - loyalty to a

specific person. These correspond to the three basic motivations

for action: cognitive, habitual, and emotional (Weber 1978: 215-

6).

Weber’s theoretical orientation, centered on the

implications of consciously held meaning systems, led him to

focus almost completely on the permutations of the means-ends

calculations and scenarios for action occurring in various

forms of rational-legal authority, but he recognized that in

“prerationalistic periods, tradition and charisma between them

have almost exhausted the whole of the orientation of action"

(1978: 245). In other words, most of human history was

dominated by opposing action orientations that are outside the

4

realm of reason, until their age-old antagonism was subdued by

the triumph of capitalism’s instrumental rationality.

For Weber, charisma has a special affinity for times of

crisis, when the familiar framework of tradition has failed. To

escape chaos, people take refuge in "their belief in the

extraordinary quality of the specific person" (Weber 1972: 295).

Under these conditions, whatever the leader commands is accepted

simply because of his charisma, not because the order makes sense

or fits within any preset meaning system. As Jesus says: “It is

written, but I say unto you.” In Weber's historical sociology,

charisma erases a moribund worldview, replacing it with a new one

enunciated by the Prophet.

Although Weber was primarily concerned with typologizing and

contextualizing the novel ethical meaning systems provoked by the

Prophet's revelations, he was also well aware that for the

masses, and especially for the excluded and impoverished,

commitment to the movement was based not on the Prophet’s ideas

or values, but to his person and his magical promise of immediate

experiential salvation. He is the message, and those who believe

in him feel themselves saved in the here and now (Weber 1978:

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467, 487). In other words, for the followers, the Prophet’s

miraculous presence is transformative, and so inspires loyalty

and obedience.

In a complex society, rationalization and

institutionalization eventually supersede the immediate

redemptive experience of the leader’s personal charisma, as the

priest, the bureaucrat, and the teacher take over from the

Prophet. However, in simpler societies charisma is a regular

part of social life. According to Weber, the charismatic

relationship in such societies occurs in two contrasting types:

the religious charisma of the shaman-prophet, and the political

charisma of the berserker-warrior.

The berserker inspired awe among his comrades, arousing them

to greater heights of daring, but his frenzy did not have a

future, since he embraced his own death, from which he could

never return except in legend. He was a hero, but not a viable

commander in chief. Actual war leaders in small-scale societies

tend to be pragmatic figures combining skill in fighting with

discipline and calculation, and so attract a following willing to

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submit to orders. The frenzy of the berserker is primarily a

tribute to the chief’s institutional patriarchal power.

Socially significant charisma was located instead in the

shamanic religious figures whose spiritual support legitimated

the warrior's conquests and the chief’s traditional authority. 1

Like the berserkers, they too gained charismatic status by

embracing death – but unlike berserkers, they returned alive from

their death-like trances, carrying messages from the beyond and

providing succor for their people. They attracted a devoted

following not simply because of their services, but because their

highly theatrical entrance into trance contagiously excited and

revitalized onlookers, making the shaman the center of a magical

healing cult (Weber 1978: 242, 400-3, 535-6, 554, 1112, 1115.

1972: 279, 287).

Weber was especially fascinated by the relationship between

the shaman’s ecstasy, his capacity to cure, and epilepsy, with

its chaotic eruption and subsequent collapse. As he writes,

1 Some warrior chiefs do have charismatic spiritual capacities

themselves. The type case is the Prophet Mohammed, who was not

only God’s Messenger, but also a practical general.

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"ecstasy was… produced by the provocation of hysterical or

epileptoid seizures among those with predispositions toward such

paroxysms, which in turn produced orgiastic states in others"

(Weber 1978: 535). The shaman’s ecstatic transformation,

preceded by convulsions, was understood and experienced as “a

journey into the world of dead” where the hidden spirits could be

forced or cajoled into revealing their empowering secrets

(Ginzburg 1991: 24).

The conjunction between epilepsy, trance and charisma seems

odd given our modern medical conception of grand-mal and petit-

mal epileptic seizures as electrical storms in the brain that

eliminate consciousness while causing gross motor spasms. But

Weber's model (one common to his era) broadly imagined epileptic

- or, more properly, epileptoid - seizures as closely akin to

hypnotic states and to hysterical fits. Winkelman (1986), among

others, has argued for a parallel between shamanic trance,

temporal lobe epilepsy, and other forms of what Sacks (1985) has

called mental superabundances, or disorders of excess, wherein

sensations of energy and vitality become morbid, illness presents

itself as euphoria, and heightened spiritual communion occurs

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along with the experience of self-loss. It is indeed the case

that cross-cultural studies of shamanism show strong incidence of

overtly epileptoid manifestations such as trembling and

convulsions, especially in the early stages of shamanic

initiation. Evidently there may be both a predisposition and an

element of imitation and training at work in achieving shamanic

trance, and the trance itself may have a considerable overlap

with some mild forms of disturbance of the temporal lobe.

The shaman’s ability to achieve the desired state of

ecstatic transformation was amplified by various learned

techniques such as rhythmic dancing and singing, mortification

and self-mutilation, intoxicating drugs, isolation,

sleeplessness, repetitive chanting and oratory, among others.

Seizures were followed by the journey to and from the other

world. Having confronted the spirits, the shaman awakened from

his trance, no worse for the wear. Inspired by the shaman's

performance, onlookers could also attain a lesser subjective

sense of heightened emotion, self-dissolution and spiritual

revitalization. In so doing, they momentarily escaped from the

ordinary miseries of isolation, pain, and the fear of death.

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Shamans thus had the power to enliven, amaze, and cure –

they were the first actors, the first magicians, and the first

doctors. While entranced, they journeyed into the realm of the

spirits, communicated with the dead, struggled against demons,

and became the vehicles of the gods. From this perspective, the

imagery is of this original charismatic figure is one spiritual

empowerment, not of evil. Yet there was a dark side implicit in

the shaman’s ecstatic transformation.

Shamanism and the Practice of Ecstasy

In his portrait of the shaman, Weber drew upon what was

already an extensive and well-known scientific and popular

literature on the topic. The very word, ‘shaman,’ used by the

Siberian Tungus, derived from the Sanskrit sramana, had already

become a generic term for indigenous ecstatic healers well before

the end of the eighteenth century, mainly due to German and

Russian accounts from the arctic and elsewhere in the ‘primitive’

world.2 As Flaherty (1992) has extensively documented, these

2 See Shirokogorroff, 1935 (reprint 1980), Flaherty 1992. The

nouns der schaman, die Schamanka, and das schamanentum were in wide use

in eighteenth century Germany

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early explorers’ and commentators’ responses to shamanic

performances ranged from sympathy to repulsion. Many thought the

shamans were mere charlatans, manipulating the dim-witted and

superstitious locals for their own ends. Others, more

historically oriented, believed that they were witnessing the

remnants of ancient Greco-Roman mystery religions. Artists and

writers as varied as Diderot and Goethe took the shaman as the

prototype of artistic genius, capable of creatively surmounting

ordinary reality and transporting the audience to a higher level,

“where they themselves could experience the profound mysteries of

birth, life, death, and regeneration” (Flaherty 1992: 14). In

contrast, devout Christian observers described shamans as

benighted ‘devil worshippers,‘ an attitude that led many shamans

to either go underground or to refute their beliefs in deference

to the power of their conquerors.

If attitudes toward shamans varied, so did the ways they

were defined, since their practices and beliefs varied

considerably from place to place, region to region, and even from

practitioner to practitioner. The larger scholarly question was

whether all those who enter possession trance (common in Africa

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and African diaspora religions) should be classified as shamans,

or should the designation properly belong only to those who

undertake spiritual journeys to the underworld while entranced

(characteristic of Asia, Europe, and the Americas)? 3 This

important historical debate still rages, but need not detain us

here. Rather, for the sake of this paper, let me provisionally

include in the broad category of shaman all those religious

figures who share one crucial characteristic: an ability to enter

transformative ecstatic states of communion with superhuman

powers. As Weston LaBarre noted: "the real difference between

shaman and priest is who and where the god is, inside or out"

(LaBarre 1970: 108). Where priests beseech the gods, shamans

embody them, albeit temporarily.

The capacity to become one with the gods is metaphorically

revealed in the way shamans were conceptualized by the people

with whom they lived and worked. For instance, the shaman's

ability to overcome the boundaries of the self and enter the

domain of the spirits was typically symbolized by an ability to

3 See Ginzburg 1991 for the most thorough of recent arguments for

this interpretation.

12

read minds, change shape, see at a distance, use x-ray vision,

predict the future, and travel out of the body. While in trance,

the shaman was also regularly believed to unify with a spirit

familiar in the animal world. Significantly, this animal was

often a man killer, such as a lion or wolf, indicating the

shaman's great power. At the same time, this identification

symbolically marked out shamans’ ambiguity as a mediator between

society and the untamed forces of the wilderness, and their

status as both protectors and potential attackers. Simply put,

those who could cure by embodying the spirits could also kill by

the same means.

The process of becoming a shaman also illustrates the moral

ambiguity of the role. The ferocity of the initiatory phase

varies individually and cross-culturally, but very often the

spirits are said to rend the initiate, tearing the flesh from his

bones, dipping him in boiling oil, eviscerating him and breaking

him into bits - all vivid symbolic representations of the

decomposing of the self that is the precursor to charismatic

immersion. An account from Nepal gives the flavor of one

shaman's initiatory visions:

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I did not know what was happening. I began to shake

violently and was unable to sit still even for a minute....

I ran off into the forest, naked, for three days. My

grandfather and the other spirits...fed me earthworms and I

had to eat them or die....I saw many evil spirits, some with

long crooked fangs, others with no heads and with eyes in

the middle of their chests, still others carrying decaying

corpses. They attacked me and, before I knew it, they were

all over me devouring my body (quoted in Peters 1982: 23).

During this stage, under the influence of visions of

disintegration, initiates typically manifest symptomatic behavior

such as withdrawal, extreme depression, hallucinations,

hysterical seizures, depersonalization and so on, to the extent

that they often appear to be "insane", or at least seriously

mentally disturbed. Nonetheless, in every culture where shamanism

occurs, the people themselves clearly distinguish between the

authentic shaman's mental state and the truly insane, whom the

Siberian Tungus say are afflicted with a "shadowed heart." This

distinction is made even though the actions of both may be

similar, and in spite of the fact that "insanity" (often

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culturally defined as spirit possession) is the precursor of the

shamanic gift in an initiate.

But the differences between a shaman and someone who is

driven insane by spirit possession are crucial. Those

unfortunates who have been possessed by a spirit and who, in

their frenzy, speak forbidden words, run naked into the forest,

and who exhibit great strength and stamina in their convulsions,

are simply acting out the whims of the deities who inhabit them.

In contrast, the shaman, even though he begins his career in the

same way as a possessed lunatic, and may show the same signs of

insanity, gains control over the possessing demons, and can

therefore enter a dissociated state when desired and leave it

more or less at will (Noll 1983). In acquiring this ability, the

shaman tames the possessing spirits and is cured of being under

their thrall. Entering the role of shaman is a movement from an

initiatory phase of identity disintegration through painful self-

reconstruction, and on to rebirth as a transformed practitioner

able to control and reveal the potent spirits that fragment

other, weaker, souls. "His ultimate triumph is over the chaotic

experience of raw power which threatened to drag him under. Out

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of the agony of affliction and the dark night of the soul comes

literally the ecstasy of spiritual victory" (Lewis 1971: 188).

Like the initiation process, the typical shaman's

performance has a recognizable sequence, moving from imitation of

trance to a real, but controlled, frenzy, to a death-like

collapse and the entrance into the netherworld, and then a

triumphant return to daily life. This drama of death and rebirth

is a repetition of the shaman's personal conquest over the

supernatural forces that threatened to engulf the fragmented self

during initiation. This drama of death and rebirth speaks not

only to the disease of the patient, but also to the existential

dilemma of every person. As the audience members witness and

participate in the shaman's convulsions, fragmentation, collapse,

and reintegration, they too achieve an escape from their own

mortality, if only vicariously and for the moment. It is because

of this extraordinary capacity to induce a vitalizing collective

experience that the shaman is perceived as "one who commands an

extraordinary share of what is most desirable... the impersonal

vital force that makes powerful people powerful" (Salomon 1983:

425).

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To recapitulate, the shaman is classically portrayed by

Western explorers and commentators as a person possessed by

supernatural forces, who enters and leaves ecstatic trance

states, displays powerful emotions, travels to and from the

spirit world, and reenacts a psychic struggle with the hidden

forces of chaos, which are eventually controlled and used both

for collective healing and for the destruction of enemies. As

noted, an intimate association with the fearsome world of the

dark necessarily makes the shaman an ambivalent figure: both a

force of good, and a potential source of destruction, since

whoever controls the power of chaos can also unleash it. If this

is the case, what are the conditions in which the shaman

portrayed as a hero and healer or, contrarily, as a malevolent

force?

Ecstasy and Evil: Three Paradigms

The anthropologist Lawrence Krader (1978) has argued

persuasively that the degree to which shamans in the Arctic are

perceived as good or evil is a result of two interrelated causes.

One is the social level at which the shaman acts, the second is

the disruptive and anxiety producing influence of colonialism, in

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this case, Russian colonialism. In Krader's formulation, the

shaman traditionally performed both at the public level as a

representative of the whole group in relations with the external

world, and at the more intimate local private level as a magical

personal healer. His status under these circumstances was very

high.

According to Krader, colonial intrusion and dominance

inevitably relegated the shaman to the private sphere, where he

no longer had any relation to the regulation of impersonal large

group concerns such as herding, control of the seasons, location

of good hunting grounds, protecting war parties, and so on. His

former status was delegitimized just as the mystical laws of the

universe, which he formerly enunciated while entranced, were

subordinated to the rational laws of the colonial administration

enforced by police. Instead of being the spiritual leader of his

people, he became merely a magician, paid to heal the sick. And,

as the shaman was stripped of his power in the world, the society

itself was stripped of its mythical charter, and made aware of

its inferiority to and dependence on the colonial administration.

The contempt Christian colonists and converts expressed at the

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shaman’s antics accelerated this downward trajectory. For the

Christians, the shaman became a figure to be scorned, rather than

a source of awe.

Krader argues that in the course of the process of

disenchantment and rationalization the Arctic shaman lost his

highly esteemed capacity to mediate for his group with the

personalized natural forces of the external world. He was

reduced to curing and divination among his close neighbors.

Having lost his prestigious position and public role, the now

impotent shaman was tempted to try to regain power by

manipulating and controlling the internal affairs of the small

local group, just as he formerly was credited with manipulating

the animals and elements. But where control over the dangerous

external world was greatly valued, the attempt to magically

control neighbors in the local tent group was met with fear and

hatred. Individuals felt themselves threatened by the shaman's

illegitimate use of supernatural power for his own ends and he

soon became reviled as a `black' figure.

Krader's portrayal of the different levels of the shaman's

activity, and the evaluation placed upon that activity in the

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post-colonial period, shows the shaman as an individual always

potentially double, positively viewed in his use of ecstatic

spiritual power for the public interest, negatively viewed when

that power was used to gain the practitioner's private desires

and increase his personal status. 4 This double character is

validated in multiple ethnographic contexts. When the positively

valued public role no longer is available, the shaman's `white'

aspect is nearly obliterated, and he loses his position as a

respected group leader and is instead feared and hated by those

around him.

A similar point is made in a more abstract fashion in Mary

Douglas's famous analysis of the relationship between

classification systems, social complexity, pressure to conform,

and a propensity to ecstatic states . Comparing the Nuer and the

Dinka, two Sudanic peoples who are prone to trance, Douglas

begins with the premise that "the human body is always treated as

an image of society and that there can be no natural way of

4 This dichotomy is akin to Durkheim's distinction between

religion, which is collective and moral, and magic, which is

personal and immoral (Durkheim 1965).

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considering the body that does not involve at the same time a

social dimension" (1970: 93). The shaman’s trance and convulsive

ecstasy are, of course, bodily processes of the most intense,

vivid sort, permitting a blurring of boundaries between self and

other, a loss of personal identity and a deepened expression of

emotion. Douglas attempts to correlate social attitudes toward

these experiences with structural variables, particularly

focusing on cultural ideas about the necessity for maintenance of

boundaries and social control.

She argues that societies with more complex and inclusive

public systems of classification and a high degree of social

conformity and boundary maintenance demanded of individuals will,

correspondingly, have a negative attitude toward possession

trance and other ecstatic states, since these states involve a

loss of conscious control of the body, and an escape from

structure in the effusive formlessness of the paroxysm. In other

words, ecstatic trance offers a challenge that highly structured

societies meet with derision and disgust, if not with outright

persecution. Conversely, "the weaker the social constraints, the

more bodily dissociation is approved and treated as a central

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ritual" (1970:130). Thus the ecstatic state of the shaman is

portrayed as repulsive and is socially denigrated within any

rigid and relatively complex local social structure that finds

the shaman's trance to be a challenge and a threat to its

stability.

Her analysis is borne out ethnographically in Siberia, the

heartland of shamanism, where the simplest egalitarian societies,

such as the Chukchee, do not have professional shamans. Rather,

almost everyone has some capacity for trance, which is entered

into quite easily (Bogoras 1909). In contrast, in more complex

social formations, such as the Tungus - which has relatively

complex, well developed clan structures, differentiated

ascriptive roles, and complicated cosmologies - the shamanistic

spiritual practitioner is set apart as a priest-like professional

role requiring elaborate, expensive and weighty paraphernalia.

Becoming a shaman among the Tungus also requires a considerable

degree of arduous training, a great deal of pain and the risk of

social opprobrium (Shirokogoroff 1935). In even more complex and

hierarchical social formations, according to Douglas's model,

charismatic ecstatic is likely to be increasingly stigmatized as

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insane and evil in complex, internally hierarchical societies

where bodily dissociation is denigrated. Under these

circumstances, the shaman’s performance will attract only those

whom society judges to be inferior, deranged, malevolent, and

destructive.

The socially generated distaste for the shamanic figure and

fear and hatred for the ecstatic experience he offers has been

analyzed as well by I.M. Lewis, who has undertaken an extensive

anthropological survey of the relationship between ecstatic

states and social organization. Lewis's sociology of ecstasy

aims at revealing the structural factors and social processes

that correlate with and explain the delegitimization of charisma.

Lewis agrees with Krader and Douglas (and Weber) that the

enthusiasm of ecstasy is less and less welcomed as society

becomes more complex and more reliant on systematic rationality

and an organized priesthood. Such a world must denigrate the

immediate experience of ecstatic possession in favor of

institutionalized authority relations. The shaman, formerly

revered as the possessed incarnation of the gods becomes instead

a demeaned status, whose personal capacity for ecstasy is

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negatively valued in a rationalized structure where positions are

achieved by training, not by spiritual election. Nor is the

shaman favored in traditional societies that feature highly

developed ascriptive social statuses, since in such settings all

roles are parceled out according to rank, heredity, etc., without

regard to the intrinsic ability of the individual. The shaman's

ecstatic capacity, being purely personal, is necessarily

devalued.

Employing a variety of comparative materials, Lewis argues

that in a society with structural complexity and ascribed

positions of authority it is primarily the weak and downtrodden

who are susceptible to charismatic experience, using the bodily

sensation of ecstatic possession as a means for asserting

transcendence over the oppressive force of the dominant system.

This form of possession provides the oppressed a way of

offsetting their subordination. “We may be weak and despised in

this world of appearance, but we rule in the world of the gods.”

This is one of the reasons that shamans in more complex, more

rationalized and more populous societies are likely to be female,

while in small-scale social formations they are almost always

24

male. As Ohnuki-Tierney comments: "When a society is small,

shamanism often receives high cultural valuation and shamans are

not confined to certain personality types, certain statuses in

the society, or one biological sex. In a larger society,

shamanism is culturally insignificant and consequently is an

arena for the socially marginal, including women" (Ohnuki-Tierney

1980: 225). 5

For the marginalized and impoverished, possession trance

also provides a personal ecstatic experience of inner expansion

and empowerment valued in and for itself as a bodily pleasure.

In Victor Turner's apt phrase, ecstatic states are subjective

revelations of the power of the weak. In their formlessness and

emotional intensity, they provide moments of `anti-structure' and

‘communitas,’ obliquely opposing a rigid and uncharitable world

that deprives many persons of any sense of power and influence,

offering instead the vitalization that is the radiant core of

trance (Turner 1982).

5 Because shamans are usually male, I have used the male pronoun

throughout.

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These trances are induced by shamanic figures who act as

curers and organizers of group rituals among the weak and

disenfranchised. Ordinarily, such charismatic shamans are

ignored by the privileged, except when they are used as spiritual

physicians. The curers who have their roots in the ecstatic

experiences of the disenfranchised are attractive as healers

because, in Lewis's model, the elite have an uneasy conscience

over their dominant position. Their malaise leaves them

psychologically prone to spiritual afflictions thought to emanate

from anti-social malevolent spirits and from witchcraft directed

at them by those they oppress. The shaman, as representative of

the spiritual powers of the weak, is believed to have the power

to control these hostile forces. But as we have seen the power to

cure, derived from the experience of ecstasy, can also be

envisioned as a power to harm by those who benefit from the

rationalization of society, and the curer is liable to be

denounced as a witch.

The shaman's ability to become a witch has great social

ramifications, because along with an ability to threaten the

existing order is the parallel capacity to become the Prophet of

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an alternative worldview. The witches reviled by the privileged

for their imputed personal supernatural power can be the hope of

the alienated, for the same reason. In this instance, the

shaman’s spiritual influence stands against the institutionalized

authority of the ruling order. He has the potential to tame and

embody the spirits feared by the establishment, to reject the

world as it is, and to offer the disaffected an ecstatic

communion through immediate and vivid contact with an infectious

personal extraordinary power. It is in elucidating the

potentially revolutionary quality of the ecstatic's relationship

with the social that Lewis makes his primary contribution, for if

Krader shows how shamanism is double-sided, and may easily become

witchcraft, and if Douglas reveals the larger structural

principles at work in the attribution of evil to charismatics,

Lewis shows the reverse movement. He reveals how witches can

become revolutionaries.

Two Examples

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The !Kung San Bushmen of Africa's Kalahari Desert are highly

mobile hunters and gatherers with a very simple technology. 6

Among the !Kung, there is only one specialized role, that of the

shamanic curer who has learned to master the inner vital energy

the !Kung San call n/um. The healer uses this energy for curing

6 The !Kung speak a language in which tongue clicks are phonemes.

(!) is a click with the tip of the tongue against the roof of the

mouth, (/) is a click with the middle of the tongue.

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Douglas, Mary 1970: Natural Symbols. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Durkheim, Emile 1965: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.

New York: Free Press.

28

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brought on by all-night parties of dancing and singing.

But even though the healer is a specialist, he or she is

hardly an unusual person. In the past, fully half the men and

ten percent of the women become healers, and all of the !Kung

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Friedrich C. 1961: Political Leadership and the Problem of

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29

take part in the healing ceremonies, which occur as often as once

a week, and even more, since experiencing !kia is considered to be

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the central area of the camp in the late afternoon. Once the

women are gathered, the dancers then begin to circle them. The

women sing and clap rhythmically and, as the evening wears on,

the singing, clapping, and dancing intensify, the mood is

heightened, and the dancers are bathed in sweat. Some now begin

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to go into trance; a process that can occur gradually, marked by

epileptoid trembling, staggering and eventual collapse, or

suddenly, as the performer shrieks and somersaults out of the

dancer's circle or even into the fire. Whether gradual or rapid,

the sensation of entering !kia is painful, but the result is

empowering. As one shaman says:

“In your backbone you feel a pointed something and it works

its way up. The base of your spine is tingling, tingling,

tingling, tingling, tingling. Then n/um makes your thoughts

nothing in your head.... Your heart stops. You're dead.

Your thoughts are nothing. You breathe with difficulty.

You see things, n/um things; you see spirits killing people.

You smell burning, rotten flesh. Then you heal, you pull

sickness out. You heal, heal, heal. Then you live. Your

eyeballs clear and you see people clearly” (quoted in Katz

1982: 42, 45).

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Like people in other shamanic cultures, The !Kung do not

regard the sequence of death and rebirth they experience in

trance as a metaphor. Instead, they say that "It is the death

that kills us all.... (but) healers may come alive again" (Katz

1982: 116). As is true elsewhere, those initiates who cross the

boundary of the self show signs of derangement. They become

hysterically violent, falling into epileptoid fits, rolling in

fire, hitting people, throwing coals, running wildly into the

bush, and acting in anti-social ways.

The unrestrained chaotic behavior of the novice shows that

he is in touch with vital powers, but his paroxysm is dangerous;

it undermines the social world, and must be brought under

control. Among the !Kung, this is achieved as those more

experienced in trance press themselves to novices, shake in

rhythm with them, rub them with sweat or perhaps cool them with

water, teaching them to restrain and channel their n/um and to

control !kia, so it can be used for healing. The result is a

development of the initiate's capacity to re-enact in public his

own psychic death and rebirth. Once a person has become an

expert at achieving this ecstatic liminal state, he can then go

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quickly into trance, sharing n/um with the collective by rubbing

them with healing sweat, pulling disease from them by the laying

on of hands.

There is a definite, though sometimes disputed, hierarchy of

healers: some can slip easily into !kia and are more efficacious

at curing than others. However, these distinctions are

meaningless in ordinary life, since even the greatest experts

have no influence outside the realm of the dance. Their

expertise is regarded simply as an innate personal capacity -

like good eyesight - that can be used to benefit the community.

They are not thought sacred themselves, and must work and live

just like everyone else.

But when the Bushmen come under the sway of the hierarchical

and complex Bantu society a transformation occurs almost

immediately. Under these circumstances, some expert male !kia

dancers become full-time specialists at evoking n/um, touring

with their own travelling troops of musicians, healing the sick,

both Bantu and Bushmen, before excited and adulatory audiences.

Such a person is no longer "first among equals.” Instead, he has

a new, permanent status as the living symbol of Bushman pride who

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has “the potential role of the charismatic political leader with

far-ranging authority" (Guenther 1975: 165). Thus, the

determinedly egalitarian Bushman collectivity, under external

domination, has given rise to a quasi-deified leader who can

heal, but also can destroy, and who is both adulated and feared

by the Bantu and by his own people.

Norman Cohn's portrait of Medieval Europe provides another

example of the manner in which a shaman-witch's appeal can become

more insistent, more polarizing, and more rebellious when the

social order is complex, rigidly hierarchical, and alienating to

a large number of marginalized and oppressed people (Cohn 1970).

As Cohn shows, under these circumstances, Medieval visionaries

attracted followings by offering the excluded, weak, and

destitute a sense of supernatural power through their practice of

healing while in ecstatic states of spiritual communion. As we

have seen, in simpler societies, where shamanizing is

commonplace, such experiences are an expected part of ordinary

life. But in Medieval Europe the Catholic feudal order totally

repudiated any form of immediate ecstatic experience as a threat

to church and state. As a result, the charismatic necessarily

35

stood athwart the entire accepted social universe and was reviled

as a witch and devil-worshipper, to be burned at the stake (see

Ginzburg 1991 for more).

In response to repression, the temptation was for the healer

to conceive himself as a Messiah, come to "decree for his

followers a communal mission of vast dimensions and world-shaking

importance.... a mission which was intended to culminate in a

total transformation of society" (Cohn 1970: 60). This millennial

belief, substantiated by the followers' experiences of the

miraculous powers of the leader and validated by a Christian

eschatology of salvation and damnation, stimulated the devotees

to selfless acts of heroism. They fought to the death for their

beliefs and were able to withstand torture and extraordinary

suffering, all for the sake of the transcendent new world their

leader promised them.

This same promise also favored, as Cohn makes clear, utter

ruthlessness and cruelty, since the follower's "every deed,

though it were robbery or rape or massacre, not only was

guiltless, but was a holy act" (1970: 85). In fact, medieval

Christian charismatic movements, in pure form, had no potential

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for compromise. Sharing an apocalyptic vision and inner

conviction of infallibility, derived from the actual experience

of revitalizing transfiguration, the followers sought to destroy

all who did not accept the revelation. As one Medieval rhyme put

it, "the Children of God, that we are, poisonous worms, that you

are" (Cohn 1970: 87). These polarizing Messianic movements were

either totally annihilated by the armies of the state, or else

gradually fizzled out through a process of rationalization.

Conclusion

Charismatic shamans who enter into ecstatic trance and

commune with spirits attain their power because of their emergent

public capacity to enter the ecstatic dissolution of trance,

commune with spirits, and thereby express and conquer the most

fearsome human reality: the disintegration of the self in

insanity and death. Where society is small, closely knit,

personalistic, and egalitarian, these shamanic figures are

revered as healers and spiritual leaders. But even under these

circumstances, they are also always viewed with a degree of fear,

since those who can cure can also kill.

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The balance shifts from positive to negative when

charismatic figures and movements occur within highly

rationalized social configurations that are structurally hostile

to immersion in immediate communal transcendent experience. It is

not charisma itself, but the cultural, institutional, and

ideological context in which it occurs, that determines the way

it will be experienced, expressed, and evaluated (Lindholm 1990,

1992, 2003). In more complex societies, the shaman is a demon to

those in the mainstream, but beloved by the alienated disciples

who wish to obliterate the old order. It is no surprise that

today, in our complex society, the popular notion of charisma, as

introduced by Weber, is used to explain the allure of monsters.

ENDNOTES

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