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<P align="justify"> Shamanism is a t … <P align="justify"> Shamanism is a term, originally taken from a Russian word used to describe a phenomenon of the religions of Siberia, which has now become established in international usage. It means a form of culture that revolves around the central position of the shaman, a religious expert who acts as an intermediary between man and the forces of the other world. The original word was derived from the word saman of the Maschu-Tungus languages of central Siberia and the Nivkh language of eastern Siberia, where it means a person who can shamanize, i.e. who literally knows how to chant sacred shamanistic incantations, cast spells, effect cures and make journeys in a state of ecstatic trance from one world to another. In shamanistic cultures, these are innate gifts and abilities which may be painful for the person who possesses them, but which are valued by the community. The shaman of the Siberian peoples may be either a man or a woman. Among the shamans there probably early on existed a division of tasks and a hierarchy which was manifested in a specialization in different shamanistic skills. The respect enjoyed by the shamans was not dependent on their sex but on what they knew and remembered. Among the Saami, however, shamanism seems to have been a male institution; references to female shamans are found only in the late tradition.</P>
<P align="justify"> The concept became more generally known and its meaning broadened as a result of Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaiques de l écstase, a work published by Mircea Eliade in 1951. According to Eliade, shamanism is an archaic technique of ecstacy and one of the most original forms of religion . Signs of shamanism are found in rock art, and it has been considered to represent the religious culture of hunter-gatherer societies of the Palaeolithic Age. A proof of its antiquity is the fact that the phenomenon is found among the primitive peoples of both the Old and the New Worlds.</P>
<P align="justify"> The concept of shamanism is not without problems with respect to the study of comparative religion. It is burdened by the scholarly tradition of the nineteenth-century Ur-religion hypothesis with its emphasis on [[Evolutionism|evolutionism]] and diffusionism. When the word shaman(ism) was translated from Russian into English and German, its meaning took on a nuance reflecting the point of view of the Christian missionaries who defined it. The expression of basic pagan religion was made into an -ism, a primitive belief, in order that the missionary work might receive greater justification. Thus the name of the phenomenon became established as shamanism, although this term is not found in the earliest documents, such as the diary of Avvakum Petrovitch, the Archpriest of the Old Believers, which describes the activities of the shamans he witnessed among the Evenk people in the 1760s. The Russian word <i>shamastvo</i> shamanhood expresses the comprehensive, ecologically highly ethical set of values of shamanistic cultures without the above-mentioned associations of the word shamanism .</P>
<P align="justify"> The concept of shamanism has also proved to be semantically problematic in scientific use. The one-sided emphasis on trance as a criterion of shamanism has led many scholars to regard it as a universal feature, although this phenomenon is certainly not found in the same form everywhere, or even at all, in all shamanistic cultures of the world. Indeed Åke Hultkrantz considers that Arctic shamanism differs from other forms of shamanism found in southern Asia, the Far East and America.</P>
<P align="justify"> Ecstasy is one of the characteristics of shamanism.It means the use of various trance-inducing techniques in order to make contact with other worlds or other states of reality. Moreover, the shamanistic view of life emphasizes the existence of more than one [[The soul|soul]], of which the free soul can in a state of trance or a dream leave the body and return to it when its spiritual journey is complete. Another central aspect is the view of the universe as existing on three planes, with the shaman as an intermediary between the celestial world, our human world and the underworld ([[Saami cosmology|Cosmology]]). In this he has assistant animal spirits; these are manifested in the Saami culture by the supernatural wild reindeer, fish and bird, which are essential for the journey of the shaman s soul, and into which he was believed to be able to metamorphose. Moreover, shamanistic cultures have their mythologies, and the old shaman must initiate his successor into the mysteries before the latter is ordained into the sacral position of reverence among the community. At this stage, the shaman receives a ritual costume and the insignia and the accouterments of his role, which vary according to the culture: a drum or other musical instruments, a mask, belt, shoes, headdress, staff, sleigh, idols, images of the assistant spirits, and so on. In many cultures, the decoration of the skin of the shaman's drum ([[Meavrresgárri, the shaman drum|Meavrresgárri]]) constituted his map for his journey to the other world; among the Saami it varied locally, as does the technical structure of the drum. The use of the drum was not the sole prerogative of the Saami shaman; its use for predicting the future was a practice available to every man.</P>
<P align="justify"> Shamans commonly used monotone drumming and frenzied dancing in order to attain a state of ecstasy. They also sometimes used narcotic substances like the fly agaric fungus (amanita muscaria). Fasting was also one of their methods of preparation. In addition to dancing to his own drumming, the Saami shaman chanted shamanistic incantations; this form of chanting was such an important part of shamanism that it was prohibited together with the shaman s drum during the missionary crusade to Lapland in the eighteenth century and in the preaching of the [[Laestadianiam|Laestadians]] in the nineteenth century.</P>
<P align="justify"> The Norse sagas, which originate from the Viking Age (A. D. 800-1250), locate the home of shamanism as the province of Finnmark in northern Norway, whose inhabitants ( Finns ) were famous for their magical skills, with the result that in the sagas Finn might be used to refer to a Finnish person, a Saami or a sorcerer (shaman). In the twelfth century, warnings were even issued in the Parliament of the Norwegians against travelling to Lapland for fear of the sorcerers. A history of Norway written in the same century contained a detailed description of how Norwegian Christians experienced the flight of an entranced Saami shaman s soul in order to bring back to life a Lapp woman who had just been pronounced dead. In his difficult journey to the other side, the sorcerer battles with another shaman who had caused the death of the victim, metamorphosing into the shape of a whale before returning to this world and awakening the woman from the dead.</P>
<P align="justify"> The first work to deal with Saami shamanism on a broader scale was written in Sweden for political reasons and published during the country s period as a major European power in the seventeenth century. As the troops of King Gustav II Adolph swept into Europe, rumours there spread about Lappish sorcerers who helped them on their invincible path. Therefore, the State Chancellor of Sweden, dela Gardie, initiated a project to obtain and promulgate information about Lapland in order to quash this false rumour. For this purpose, Johannes [[Schefferus, Johannes|Schefferus]], who was invited from Alsace to be Professor of Rhetoric in the University of Uppsala, was commissioned to undertake this task, and his work [[Lapponia (a book)|<i>Lapponia</i>]] appeared in 1673. Schefferus himself never went out into the field; instead he collated the reports of clergymen and officials working in Lapland. With regard to the study of Saami shamanism, the commission itself makes the treatment a cursory one, although there are drawings of the drum and of the rites.</P>
<P align="justify"> Most of the information about the Saamis pre-Christianview of the world was obtained through the missionary crusade ([[Missionary history of Lapland|Missionary work: history]]) to Lapland, which intensified at the end of the seventeenth century. It was inspired first by orthodox Christian ideals, then by Pietism and finally by the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment. There are considerable problems attached to the reliability of the sources. Since the information concerning the drums and their use was collected in the middle of, indeed as part of, the intensive conversion of the people of Lapland, the shamans and their families, in order to save their lives in the northern wave of witch hunts, were reluctant to give information, which resulted in a more profane interpretation of the markings and meanings of the drum than was actually the case with shamanism. Some shaman s drums have survived from this period, and Ernst [[Manker, Ernst (engl. ver.)|Manker]] made a careful inventory of them, although one must regard Manker s interpretations of the markings on the skins of the drums critically. The drums mainly come from Swedish Lapland because most of the drums in a collection made under the leadership of Thomas [[Von Westen, Thomas (engl. ver.)|von Westen]] from the Lapps of Norway, which then belonged to Denmark, were destroyed in a fire in Copenhagen in 1787.</P>
<P align="justify"> The Age of the Drums ended when missionary work intensified to such an extent in the period from the 1670s to the 1740s that shamanism disappeared into the mountains and fells to become the secret religion of the last pagans, although there was still oral information in the twentieth century about the existence of the possessors of the drums . </P>
<P align="justify"> The main duties of the Saami shaman, noaidi, included effecting cures, ecstatic prophesy and working magic to ensure success in hunting. In addition, he sometimes played the role of sacrificial priest if the circumstances particularly demanded a [[Sacrificials|sacrifice]]. The Saami shaman did not act as a psychopomp, a conductor of the soul of a dead person to the next world, which was generally one of the functions of the shaman in Siberia. The following is an extract from Nicolaus [[Lundius, Nicolaus, Swedish Saami priest|Lundius]] description in the 1670s, in which he used the word Lapp to refer to the shaman:</P>
<P align="justify"> [When the shaman is summoned to cure a sick person, first a sacrifice is made and ] after the sacrifice he [the shaman] begins to drum. As he drums, he falls to the ground and lies there as if dead, and his body is hard and rigid like a stone. He lies there for an hour, and he has told those present that after an hour they must chant. As they chant, he then rises from the dead, takes hold of the drum, puts it to his ear, strumming on it quietly every so often. When he has played the drum in this way for a while, he sits and meditates again for a moment. Then he begins to recount where he has been: he relates that he has been under the earth; he says that under the earth there lives a people who walk with their feet against out feet, and that this people is very handsome. A magic spirit has taken the soul of the Lapp to these people, and the Lapp says that the underground people have in their possession some object belonging to the sick person, be it his headdress or his boot or his mitten. If the Lapp is now powerful enough to regain the object, the sick person will become well again; if not, then he will continue to suffer from his illness. These underground beings know beforehand that the Lapp is coming to them below the earth, and the Lapp says that they prudently close their doors. Surely, however, the Lapp finds some crack through which he can crawl. When he then journeys back, the magic spirit transports his soul swiftly through mountains and valleys so that stones and sand strike him like rain and hail.</P>
<P align="justify"> Ecstatic divination meant the use of ecstasy to obtain information about things like the whereabouts of stolen or lost property. It must be distinguished from the afore-mentioned use of the drum for prophesy. Saami folklore has legends about conflicts between powerful shamans (e.g. [[Peaivvas|<i>Peaivvas</i>]] of Kemi Lapland) and their clans; these stories usually related to the shamans role in working magic to ensure good fortune in hunting; the shaman captured the soul of the prey and led it to the hunting grounds of his people. The shamans sometimes also directly battled with one another in the form of their auxiliary spirits, usually wild reindeer. Like that of shamans elsewhere, the status of the Saami shaman was high, and people also sought council from him in situations other than those that warranted purely shamanistic expertise.</P>
<P align="justify"> The craze for shamanistic training that raged in various parts of Lapland, for example Karasjok, Inari and Jokkmokk, in the late twentieth century was not rooted in the traditional shamanism of Lapland, nor were shaman s journeys that were arranged in conjunction with it performed according to the models of Saami shamanistic rituals. Rather it represented a kind of neo-shamanism, which reflected the influence of the Core Shamanism school of the American Prof. Michael Harner and J. Horowitz, who led Nordic séances in Copenhagen. On the other hand, N-A. [[Valkeapää, Nils Aslak (engl. ver.)|Valkeapää]] found inspiration for his writing and his chants in the Saami mythology that he was so familiar with. A classic example of Valkeapää s oeuvre in his illustrated anthology of poems <i>Beiaivi, áhčážan</i> The Sun, My Father (1992), which resounds with the voices of the old shamans of Lapland, albeit couched in the language and metre of modern verse.</P>
<BR><BR>dern verse.</P>
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