Shamans and the development of social persons

 The growing dissociation of new social persons from a single primitive that brings them together occurs due to the specialization processes that require increasingly complex economic actions, in which the information and/or work required to reach their state of operational optimization when they are made by a larger number of people. From the person of the shaman, compatible with the persons of man or woman, but not with the child, the social persons of the founding hero, the priest (priestess), the poet, or depositary of narrative memory, the doctor, the meteorology controller, and even the holy king. 

In this second case, the shamanic powers are either the result of a search or spontaneous, which from the point of view of the professionalism of the economic action of shamanism is irrelevant, since it is the work of a specialist for communication with the Anima Mundi. In fact, the hereditary transmission of social persons is not exclusive to shamanic professional practice. The shaman is not an individual person any more than the social person of the old man can be. In the case of the shaman, the effectiveness of his arts depends precisely on not being individual, on his belonging to an oral tradition that contains specific information, both economic and of primitive determination, which has grown in many generations, accumulating knowledge about plants, the seasons, animals, and in general, about everything that the life of the tribe needs. The shaman is the creator of the specific form that narratives of primitive determination take, which link human experience with the representation of life and the world that arises from the unity of the Anima person, but does not do so as an individual, but as a multiple personality in a double sense: as heir to some narratives that have been synthesized by the different people in the group, shamans and non-shamans, and as a ritual setting for dialogues with the spiritual people of the group.

As heir and reproducer of the identity narratives, he handles a much broader vocabulary than the rest of his community, a vocabulary that, precisely for the reason of not being fully shared, is not suitable for ordinary communication, and has a ritual and specialized use, which supposes a radical break between the social person of the shaman in ritual actions and the actions of daily life. Being the ritual scene of conversations with people from the mythical plane of the Anima Mundi, the shaman is a person split into many others, of ancestors, animals, or gods. A symptom of this schizophrenia, sought after and desired as well as forced by the shamanic activity itself, are the epileptic episodes that frequently occur in the shamanic world. The link between shamanism and epilepsy (considered in antiquity as a sacred disease) has been established since the first European studies on the phenomenon, although only recently has neurology linked epilepsy with schizophrenia in both senses.