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Shamans and the development of Social Masks

 

The growing dissociation of new social persons (social masks) from a single primitive mask that brings them together occurs due to the specialization processes that require increasingly complex economic actions. From the mask of the shaman, compatible with the masks of man or woman, but not with the child mask, unfold the social masks of the founding hero, the priest (priestess), the poet, or depositary of narrative memory, the doctor, the meteorology controller, and even the holy king.

The shamanic powers are either the result of a search or of a spontaneous happening within a human lineage, 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 lineage 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 (metaphysical determination) take. Those metaphysical narratives link human experience with the representation of life and the world that arises from the unity of the Anima mask. The shaman performs this not 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. “Shaman” is a transpersonal mask and his/her actions are transpersonal.

As heir and reproducer of the identity narratives, he handles a much broader vocabulary than the rest of his/her 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, plants, mineral entities, gods, demons… and even non personal entities, places, akashas. 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.

The shaman is the Lord or Lady of the Liminal Worlds, where rationality and the manas mind (everyday mind for survival and practical actions) are not the only mind forces at work.

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