Chapter Ten—
Shamanism, Possession, and Ecstasy:
Australia and the Tropics

Like myth, which looks to the undetermined future as well as the sacrosanct past, spirit mediumship, especially in less standardized forms culminating in oracular speech, provides an essential counterpart to the putative closure of ritual by its continual opening toward unrealized potentialities of human existence. The practiced medium's voluntary solicitation of a condition that surpasses her ordinary powers and leads her toward an intrinsically unpredictable goal thus exhibits the form of a spiritual quest as a purposeful exploration of the transcendent unknown.

Yet the uncertainties of this formalized quest are severely circumscribed by its practical function within the institutional structure of tribal religion. The information imparted during trance most often pertains, as Lessa writes of Ulithi (1966b, 51), to such immediate concerns as "the feasibility of an ocean voyage, the safety of relatives away from home, the cause of an illness, the attitude of a loved one, the approach of a typhoon." The future revealed through the medium's words or the diviner's interpretation of signs is a very constricted future holding out no prospect of fundamental change beyond restoration of health or increase of fortune; for in tribal thought the future, as we have seen, is in general an underdeveloped forward extension of the overshadowing past.

The medium's personal transformation by possession trance is a temporary change without major consequence (in most instances) for daily life. Her self-perception as the passive implement of a power beyond her control reduces, moreover, the extent to which she actively participates in shaping its responses (thus in shaping the future), and increases

her tendency to fall back on cultural stereotypes restricting both the uncertainty that initiates the quest and the transformative encounter with the new that is its goal. Only in exceptional cases does the recognized medium fail to enter trance and transmit the spirit's words—and without risk of failure the quest through spirit possession can never go far toward transcending the ancestral certainties of ritual to which it remains, in many tribal religions, firmly linked.

The Shaman as Ecstatic Master of Spirits

In some cultures, however, instead of awaiting descent of a spirit summoned to possess his body and speak through his mouth, the medium himself sets out, or sends helping spirits under his command, to another world in search of what cannot be found in his own. This figure, in whom the spiritual quest becomes a fully active pursuit of transcendence, we shall call the shaman, using a term which for many writers is synonymous with medium.

Thus for Nadel (25) the shaman "is a passive medium when possessed; but through his ability to induce possession, he is also a master of these supernatural powers." This criterion derives from the studies of Kroeber (1907, 327) and from those of Shirokogoroff (1935a, 271), who saw the Tungus (Evenk) shaman, from whose language the word derives, as "a master of spirits , at least of a group of spirits." But control over possessing spirits is characteristic of all disciplined mediums, so that any distinction based on mastery alone is one of degree. To that extent, Lewis is justified in including, like Nadel, the African medium in his understanding of the shaman (188–89) as "not the slave, but the master of anomaly and chaos," whose hard-won control of affliction he repeatedly re-enacts. The shaman, so defined, is a medium able to induce possession at will and for controlled ends by spirits whose helpless victim he, like others less in command of anomaly, once was. He cures others' afflictions by mastering his own and thus becomes a doctor by having ministered, when a patient, to himself.

This understanding of shamanism, endorsing its identification by earlier anthropologists such as Frobenius (2:561) with the "religion of possession" practiced, for example, in the bori cult, did not go unquestioned. Thus for Oesterreich (305) the "original Shamanism" of northern Asia consisted not in possession but in visual phenomena; to call possession states shamanism was "a misuse of words" (309). And Eliade, in his monumental study Shamanism , distinguished the shaman (1964, 5) not by visionary but by ecstatic trance, "during which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld."

Ecstasy, as Eliade conceives it, is sharply differentiated from possession. The shaman's mastery is shown not in voluntarily inducing possession by spirits who control him during trance but in his own control over spirits through whom he communicates with the beyond without becoming their instrument. Shamans do sometimes appear to be possessed, Eliade concedes (6), but these exceptional cases often turn out to be only apparent. The shaman is always an active agent and never merely a vehicle, as is the medium, for another; his ecstasy, far from annulling the self, frees it to realize to the fullest powers normally beyond its reach.

Thus the "specific element" of shamanism, Eliade concludes (499), is not the shaman's embodiment of spirits but the ecstasy of ascent to the sky or descent to the underworld. This criterion has by no means been universally accepted. Findeisen characterizes the shaman (7) as a possession priest (Besessenheitspriester ); and Lewis takes explicit issue (50) with Eliade's division between spirit possession and shamanism. The two regularly occur together, he remarks (51), "particularly in the Arctic locus classicus of shamanism"; the Tungus evidence of Shirokogoroff, for example, "makes nonsense of the assumption that shamanism and spirit possession are totally separate phenomena" (55–56). If the shaman, as Lewis affirms with Firth, is a voluntarily possessed master of spirits, all shamans are mediums who "function as a 'telephone exchange' between man and god."^[1]

But if possession is sometimes part of the shaman's experience (as Eliade never denied), it is not definitive as it is for the medium. "There are certainly transitions with combinations of both phenomena, shamanism and mediumism," Paulson writes in concurrence with Eliade, "but basically there is a great difference in kind between them. Possession is more a characteristic of mediumism, the 'soul-journey' (the dispatching of the so-called free-soul, i.e., the person himself), however, a characteristic of shamanism" (Bäckman and Hultkrantz, 21). The shaman may appear to be seized by an alien spirit but he typically remains wholly himself while becoming other. In imitating the voice and gestures of his helping spirits or of the divinities he visits, he engages in a dialogue in

[1] The very passage from Eliade (reaffirming his distinction between ecstasy and possession) which Lewis dismisses as "nonsense" on the basis of Tungus evidence occurs in the context of Eliade's argument (1964, 499–500) that Tungus shamanism as portrayed by Shirokogoroff is in its present form "strongly influenced by Lamaism" and "cannot be considered a 'classic' form of shamanism, precisely because of the predominant importance it accords to the incarnation of 'spirits' and the small role played by the ascent to the sky." In citing Firth's criterion of the shaman as a "master of spirits," Lewis likewise fails to note that Firth preferred to use shamanism "in the limited North Asiatic sense" (1964, 298), and found "spirit possession and spirit mediumship in Tikopia but not shamanism" (1967a, 296).

which he is the central actor; even if he falls into catatonic trance, his soul is thought to retain its conscious existence in the supernatural regions to which it has traveled. After waking, the shaman can precisely describe his soul journey, Paulson observes (1964, 138), whereas a possessed person has no memory of what happened during possession, since he was then a wholly different being.

Medium and shaman, then, though by no means categorically distinct, differ significantly in the beliefs most typical of them. The medium's personality or self is thought to be obliterated by the spirit that displaces it, even when seizure is voluntarily induced; the shaman's is thought to remain intact and in charge of its destiny even when it assimilates the identities of others, and its mastery of spirits extends into trance itself, where it is always an active agent, never merely the instrument of powers beyond it. Where possession plays an important role in shamanism, as among the Tungus and some other Siberian peoples, it most often does so, as Hultkrantz remarks (Bäckman and Hultkrantz, 25), during the future shaman's call, when spirits (often those who will become his helpers) may seem to drive him insane and even "kill" him in order to resurrect him as a newly empowered being. During the shamanistic seance, on the other hand, most apparent "possession" is deliberate impersonation of spirits under the shaman's command, even if the step between imitation and possession, as Hultkrantz cautions, is very slight.

Eliade's definition of the shaman as one whose soul ascends to the sky or descends to the underworld excludes, however, not only the medium but Oesterreich's visionary shaman, leaving out "the many cases in Siberia and North America where the shaman does not depart from his body, but waits for the arrival of the spirits" (Hultkrantz 1973, 29). Hultkrantz therefore suggests (Bäckman and Hultkrantz, 20) widening the concept of shamanism to include not only extra-corporeal flight but clairvoyant experience, which may accompany or precede it. Inasmuch as these remain distinct, we may differentiate a "weak" and a "strong" form of shamanism embodied respectively by the visionary and the ecstatic (Hultkrantz 1979, 87).

Visionary inspiration presupposes the widespread primitive belief in mobile spirits, including human souls capable of wandering abroad during sleep or after death; the shaman communicates with such spirits not only spontaneously in dreams, like others, but in trance under his disciplined control. Ecstatic shamanism even more particularly rests on belief in soul dualism and a detachable "free-soul" typical, Hultkrantz contends (1973, 30), of regions conspicuous for "strong shamanism," since "only the shaman's free soul can transcend the boundaries of the dead

without risking his life."^[2] The ultimate ecstasy of return from the dead is the fullest expression of the shaman's mastery of spirits: his ability, without losing his own identity, to assimilate the transcendent and thereby infuse the actuality of his world with the indeterminate potentiality of others beyond it.

Shamanism must be regarded, Hultkrantz writes (Bäckman and Hultkrantz, 28), as a continuous historical complex centered in northernmost Europe, northern and central Asia, and the Americas—homes of the ancient hunting and herding cultures of Arctic and sub-Arctic Eurasia and their extension, in recent millennia, into the New World. The fact of historical and geographical continuity need not imply, however, that any pure or "original form" of shamanism can be discovered or ever existed. A complex entails coexistence of many components, none of which can be isolated as uniquely essential. We can identify, in cases like the Tungus, intrusions or accretions from (for example) Lamaist Buddhism, but no pristine substratum intruded upon; for shamanism has never existed, so far as we know, without the accretions. Tungus shamanism, like any other, is "classic" in its very contamination. The widespread prevalence in the Americas of shamanistic practices clearly analogous to those of Siberia strongly suggests that forms of shamanism were brought to the New World millennia ago, but this probability need not imply that historically attested Siberian shamanisms are more nearly "original" than those of America; indeed, the relative isolation until recent centuries of most American tribes outside the Peruvian and Mexican spheres from influence by "higher" agricultural civilizations makes the opposite hypothesis equally plausible, though no doubt equally meaningless and certainly no more verifiable.

Shamanism cannot be restricted, moreover, to the "continuous historical complex" of northern Eurasia and the Americas. Paintings of human figures in bird or animal guise from such caves as Les Trois Frères in France suggest the tantalizing possibility that something resembling historical shamanism may have flourished in western Europe during the last Ice Age or even (as imagination takes flight) that it may have been common to paleolithic hunting cultures; if so, the "historical complex"

[2] Hultkrantz 1953 and Paulson 1958 set forth the evidence for an ideology of soul dualism (or "dualistic pluralism") in North America and North Asia, arguing that the duality between "body soul" or "life soul" and "free soul" or "dream soul" (the individual alter ego which survives after death) is more primitive, especially in regions where shamanism prevails, than belief in a unitary and indivisible soul. The tendency of these two supposedly basic categories to subdivide in many different ways, however, and the existence of similar beliefs in dual or multiple souls in non-shamanistic regions, suggests that caution is in order before accepting their impressively documented hypothesis.

of shamanism might once have been coextensive with the human race. Such a possibility (like hypotheses of universal ancestor worship, mana, totemism, dying corn gods, or primal hordes devouring their fathers) can no more be entirely discounted than proved. But the questionable evidence of a few painted figures no less plausibly interpretable as gods, sorcerers, or mediums than as shamans hardly justifies so sweeping a conjecture as La Barre's (1970, 163–64) that the supernatural "is patterned simply [!] on the human master of animals," who is "simply the human shaman himself," thus the ultimate object of all human worship.

On the other hand, where no historical continuity with Eurasian-American shamanisms is probable, parallel practices may have arisen along with or after the agricultural rites and spirit possession cults too easily assumed by Eliade to be later intrusions. Even where mediumship is so prevalent as in tropical India, the Hill Saora "shaman," like his Siberian counterpart, may send his tutelary on a "spirit-hunt in the other world" to find the agent responsible for a sickness and argue with it in propria persona (Elwin 1955, 242–43). And in Africa, the only continent where ecstatic shamanism is rare, according to Eliade (1961, 153), the shamanism of the Zinza of Tanzania—distinguished from traditional mediumship by "lucid" possession in which the shaman engages in dialogue with the spirits and reports without loss of identity what they tell him—is a recent development associated with newly introduced bacwezi spirits (Bjerke, 139–40, 148–49).

These examples suggest not only that spirit possession and shamanism may coexist, as they often do, but that shamanism may develop from mediumship and not only, as Eliade seems to assume in speaking of shamanic "vestiges" in Polynesian mediumship, the other way round. Both the recent origin of Zinza shamanism outside any major historical complex and its rapid growth during a few decades of cultural crisis confirm the untenability of any search for a single evolutionary line uniting the various shamanisms practiced in different parts of the world since an antiquity long beyond apprehension. No doubt shamanism was once far more widespread than now, but nothing justifies the assumption that it universally preceded other forms of religion.

Australia: In Quest of the Lingering Dream

If the ecstatic quest for transcendence is rare in Africa, where mediumship developed in close connection with ancestor worship and agricultural rites, it is common among the totemic hunting and gathering tribes of aboriginal Australia. Here the sparsity, over centuries and millennia, of external religious influences (except on northern coastal tribes by nonshamanic Melanesians) strongly suggests an origin inde-

pendent of any known complex elsewhere—or a connection so immemorially ancient as to be past all but hypothetical, not to say imaginary, reconstruction.

The remarkable conservatism of Australian religion, with its "metaphysical emphasis on abidingness" (Stanner 1979, 36–38), is rooted in the formative time widely known as the Dreaming. The tribal "ancestors" of this long gone yet hauntingly present age, whether human beings or totemic animals, were endowed with a primal creativity deriving from ability to project their dreams in a visible landscape "considered to be an integral part of the reality of eternity" (Strehlow 1970, 134). In this ancestral time, the Aranda altjiringa, reality was as mobile as dream. "The living Aboriginal, on the other hand," Nancy Munn writes (147), "is faced with a fait accompli, " a fixed topography offering no possibility that his dreams, too, might create or transmute reality. Through ritual, which perpetuates that past by making it present, man maintains contact with the ancestral beings who have never abandoned the world they formed. Thus ritual gives purpose to men's lives (though far less to women's), but this purpose no longer embraces the possibility of changing an inherited world that admits no variation, hence no future.

Yet the fact that creatively autonomous ancestral beings have never abandoned the tribal lands and may be reincarnated (among the Aranda and some other tribes) in living men through initiation shows that even in societies so conservative as these the seeming closure of ritual does not preclude transcendence. The purposeful quest of the First People for a homeland is re-enacted by every living tribesman both in his physical wanderings through a countryside saturated by myth and in the spiritual journey infallibly mapped by ritual. The powers of the mythical ancestors, including self-transformation, are latent in every man who, in tribal initiations normally undergone by all adult males, approaches the creative potential of the original Dreamers.

Australian, like Polynesian and African, myths tell of a time now lost when inhabitants of earth could visit the sky and return. But whereas in most African tales the heavens, since that primal breach, have been inaccessible to all except an occasional half-divine trickster, and in Polynesia ascent to the sky was attributed to mythical but not living beings, in Australia a few respected elders designated by special initiation as most advanced in knowledge of the Dreaming, the "clever men" called by Elkin "aboriginal men of high degree," were thought in some tribes to be still capable of journeying to the skies in spirit as the First People had long before done in the flesh. These medicine men are not only mediums but shamans, able after their initial possession to "fly through space unseen, and ascertain what is happening at a distance" (Elkin 1978, 298). They are intermediaries who retain their hard-won mastery

as they venture forth in quest of fuller contact with the spirits than is given, outside participation in ritual, to their fellow tribesmen.

According to Spencer and Gillen's classic account (1899, 523–25) of the Aranda (Arunta) medicine man, in a cave south of Alice Springs a man who wishes to become the spirit-double of a Dream Time ancestor lies down to sleep. At daybreak, a spirit pierces his neck and tongue with an invisible lance, then replaces his internal organs and implants magic stones in his body. Coming to life again, the man returns to his people and after several days of odd behavior paints himself with powdered charcoal and fat: "All signs of insanity have disappeared, and it is at once recognized that a new medicine man has graduated."

Although in some respects, such as replacement of the internal organs and insertion of magic stones, the Aranda medicine man resembles others in aboriginal Australia, shamanic elements are less prominent than in many tribes. The celestial dimension, to begin with, is almost entirely absent in the accounts of Spencer and Gillen, who took pains to rebut the Rev. C. Strehlow's contention (Spencer and Gillen 1927, 2:593) that the word Altjira (from which altjiringa derives) referred not to multiple "totem-gods" but to a "good God" whose sovereignty extends over Heaven. The findings of C. Strehlow, like those of Howitt, who reported similar beliefs in a heavenly "All Father" in southeast Australia, were thus in large measure discredited by those who held, with Spencer and Gillen, Herbert Spencer, and Frazer, against the dissenting voices of Andrew Lang and later Wilhelm Schmidt, that belief in a High God was an evolutionary construct never achieved by primitive Australians (see Eliade 1971, ch. 1). Whether or not C. Strehlow's reports were contaminated, as Spencer and Gillen thought, by missionary influence, at least some Aranda shared the belief of many tribes in a sky world inhabited by spirits from which man had been cut off in a distant past. Thus T. G. H. Strehlow (1964, 2:725) reports an Aranda belief "that men had to die only because all connections had been severed between the sky and the earth." When avenging spirits chopped down a tree linking them, the bridge to unending life was destroyed forever.

Only in his initial quest for power does the Aranda medicine man remotely resemble the ecstatic shaman, for as Spencer and Gillen remark (1899, 530), he is no more favored than other members of his tribe in communicating with spirits who neither descend to possess him, nor appear in visions, nor carry him off to the heavens. Having obtained his powers, he becomes not a shaman but a magician. A very different account was given by Howitt in his roughly contemporary studies of the rapidly vanishing religions of southeast Australia, for more than a century the center of white settlement on the continent. Here, among the Kurnai, Wiradjuri, and other tribes, medicine men acquired power not

only by dreaming, inheritance, or insertion of quartz crystals but by sleeping near a grave or visiting the "sky-land," to which they magically ascended by a cord or spiderweb to the heavens. Nor were these feats confined to the southeastern region; outside central Australia, according to Elkin (1954, 304), most postulant medicine men journey to the sky. Thus in the northwestern Forrest River district, a continent away from Howitt's tribes, a medicine man receives power from the rainbow snake, mediator between earth and sky, after ascending in the pouch of an older medicine man in the form of a skeleton. Unlike most mediums (and many Siberian shamans), in this and other Australian tribes one becomes a medicine man not by sudden onslaught of madness, illness, or unsolicited dreams, nor by inheritance alone, but through a deliberate quest for transcendent power.

A Bandjelang clever man of northern New South Wales told Elkin (1978, 141) that in his making he went to the mountains and fasted for two or three months. In tropical Arnhem Land, the main object of the medicine man's making is to seek a vision of bird-like spirit children while fasting alone in a solitary place (22–23); elsewhere this place is sometimes a tomb, water hole, or (as among the Aranda) sacred cave. Even when his office customarily passes from father to son, the candidate's powers are not simply given but must be won and continually renewed by perilous journeys to the world beyond. To a great extent, especially in tribes like the Aranda where personal communion with the spirits virtually ceases after his "making," the aboriginal medicine man (like the rarer medicine woman) resembles the sorcerer in other tribal societies, displaying his powers through essentially magical, therefore mechanically compulsive, techniques. But the fundamental shamanic component of interchange between the human and spirit worlds, if not always clearly dominant over the magical element (as the Aranda example reminds us), permeates Australian religion. Only because his powers are not innate and his magic not automatically effective, like those of many witches and sorcerers, does the Australian medicine man so often renew his contact with the spirits dwelling under the earth or in the sky.

The doctor, Elkin writes (32), must himself be magically cured and resurrected before he can cure others by the spirit power he now embodies. His self-transformation—in contrast to the typical spirit medium's recovery of a self theoretically unaltered by the experience of possession—is equivalent to death and rebirth, often renewing him in body as in spirit by replacement of his internal organs. Insofar as he deliberately seeks to become a medicine man, the Australian is therefore consciously pursuing the indeterminate goal of his own transformation into a being that he cannot, to begin with, fully envisage. This transforma-

tion, Elkin remarks (306), "explains why he seems so strange when he returns to his people. He now lives on a different plane from them, though in all ordinary relationships there is nothing specially noticeable about him."

He has gained spiritual power not through drugs or violent frenzies (14) but through quiet receptivity, meditation, and recollection; his powers are not a psychopathic aberration but the extension to a "high degree" of the sacred condition shared by all initiated members of his tribe. Yet because he has striven to go beyond the given in his quest for a never wholly predictable visionary knowledge that brings him into contact with the totemic ancestors of the dream time, he dwells on a different plane from those who have never been dismembered and renewed, nor left the body behind in the rapturous spirit's heavenly flight. The transmuted medicine man, Eliade remarks (1971, 157), "lives simultaneously in two worlds: in his actual tribal world and in the sacred world of the beginning, when the Primordial Beings were present and active on earth." He alone of the living is a link between them; he allows society to adjust to perpetual change while maintaining the appearance of sameness because he incarnates, in his restless quest to surpass the given, the primal creativity that has never entirely vanished from the seemingly static world to which it gave form in the Dreaming. His is the realm, in Elkin's words (1950, 282), of "the apparently contingent and unexpected, especially in the sphere of sickness and death," those inevitable accidents of human life whose issue can be foreseen with certainty by no man.

Tropical Shamans of Malaysia and Indonesia

In parts of the Pacific islands and southeast Asia, where spirit mediumship is widely practiced, the ecstatic quest for transcendence has likewise flourished. In the isolated, unusually democratic Polynesian island of Niue, the taula-atua might be possessed by gods or ghosts, but could also send his own gods to recover a sick person's lost soul (Loeb 1924, 393–97)—a triumph characteristic not of the medium as instrument of the spirits but of the shaman as their master. In several Melanesian societies, a professional dreamer was thought to visit the dead in sleep and bring back the soul of a sick infant held by a deceased relative (Codrington, 208–09).^[3] And in New Caledonia a Kanaka tribesman may climb up

[3] On an extremely general level, the flying witches of Melanesia (and of Africa or Europe) can be compared to shamans, as Layard has done in paralleling "flying tricksters" of the New Hebrides to Siberian shamans; common traits include, in his view, initiatory death and resurrection, metamorphosis into animal form, flight through the air, epileptic symptoms: and homosexuality. But shamans differ fundamentally, as Layard notes, from witches in their vocation of healing and fighting against demonic forces and death. One might speculate that witchcraft has been especially prominent in regions like Melanesia, Africa, Europe, and the Pueblo and Navajo Southwest where ecstatic transcendence, denied the communally sanctioned expression of shamanism, has taken illicit forms.

to a platform of his house where he seeks visions in a deliberate quest for transcendent knowledge (Leenhardt, 28).

But it is in the Malay peninsula and Indonesian archipelago that the prevalent spirit mediumship of these regions most strikingly intermingles with practices similar to those of northern Eurasia. The Malay belian actively combats his spiritual foes. If not quite a master of spirits (since the possessing tiger-spirit is thought to act through him), he is far more than a "telephone exchange" for their messages, and although his familiar spirit is inherited, he may establish communication with it through tuntut (Endicott 1970, 16), a vision quest involving solitary vigil beside an open grave or in the dark forest.

Possession by a tiger may not be indigenous to the Malay belian but borrowed from the shamanistic Negrito or Senoi (Endicott 1970, 22; cf. 81). The Negritos belong to a stock thought to have been among the first inhabitants of southeast Asia but confined in recent centuries to the Andaman Islands and pockets of peninsular Malaysia and the Philippines; like the Australians, they are mainly hunters and gatherers. The Andamanese, when first observed by E. H. Man in the late nineteenth and by Radcliffe-Brown in the early twentieth century, were among the most primitive peoples on earth, lacking not only agriculture and domestic animals (even the dog until 1858) but knowledge of making fire. The shamanism of their medicine man is visionary rather than ecstatic; through dreams he communicates with spirits of the dead and performs cures (Radcliffe-Brown 1922, 177).

Among the less isolated Negritos or Semang of the Malay peninsula, the crystal-gazing hala is in some respects, like his Andamanese counterpart, a visionary shaman; in others, he more nearly resembles ecstatic shamans elsewhere. The word hala signifies transformation into a tiger (Schebesta, 121); ability to change into so potent a spirit betokens mastery of extraordinary spiritual power. At nocturnal ceremonies he ascends on incense to the sky while singing songs in voices ascribed to celestial chenoi spirits (136–40); here he gains power to transform himself into spirit beings without loss of his own identity. Shamans of neighboring tribes were able to free a person's soul carried off by disease, sending familiar spirits to retrieve it from captivity (Evans, 219–20); thus they performed the supreme shamanic task of penetrating and returning from the world of the dead.

Ecstatic ascent to the heavens is especially prominent in Batek Negrito shamanism. The Batek, Endicott writes (1979, 91–96), believe that a personal shadow-soul can leave the body to make contact with the spirits in dreams. But the most effective communication with the hala' asal ("original superhuman beings") is trancing by a shaman, whose shadowsoul can fly anywhere in the universe (145), guided by songs to its destination. It may also make earthly journeys in its tiger-body in search of information from the spirits. At a session held several times a year (154–55), a Batek shaman sinks into trance after singing with eyes shut how his shadow-soul journeys to the sky or through deep pools to the underworld, where it visits the hala' asal and the dead. "It also just travels about, marvelling at the wonderful sights." Unlike the dreamer (or medium of other cultures), the shaman determines what hala ' to visit and chooses the topic of discussion as his soul ranges in quest of transcendent knowledge.

Chinese mediums of Singapore find a shamanic counterpart in the female "soul-raiser" (Elliott, 137–39) who calls up the shen Kuan Yin to help her seek out the souls of the dead. Trembling violently and speaking alternately in her own voice, the sing-song chant of Kuan Yin, and the "horrible growl" of the dead, she reports the goddess's progress through the gruesome underworld and the ghosts' responses to questions from relatives, engaging in dialogue with her familiar spirit. But it is in the Indonesian archipelago above all that the juxtaposition of shamanism (both visionary and ecstatic) and spirit mediumship reveals the multiplicity of its forms. The seer of the Mentawei islands off Sumatra ascends in a boat (the communal house) to the sky, borne by eagles to the spirits who are the sole source of visionary knowledge (Loeb 1929, 78). But the most striking instances of shamanism in this great island chain are found not in prevalently Muslim Sumatra or Java,^[4] but in tribal Borneo (Indonesian Kalimantan and Malaysian Sarawak and Sabah) and Sulawesi (Celebes).

In the myths of the Bare'e-speaking Toradja of Sulawesi studied by Adriani and Kruyt, people could visit the gods when heaven and earth were close together (Downs, 10), and even now the upperworld is sometimes accessible by a coconut palm or other means. Along with elaborate agricultural rituals and initiatory head hunting, ecstatic shamanism was central to Toradja religion, and was open to all women (and men who dressed and acted as women) with talent for it, even an occasional slave

[4] In the village religions of east central Java described by Geertz (1960, 19–21), malignant spirits may answer a curer's questions through the possessed victim's mouth and agree to depart in return for food and drink, but neither spirit mediumship nor shamanism appears in highly developed forms comparable to those of other islands, including nearby Bali.

(47).^[5] Shamans, whose chief function here as elsewhere was to retrieve souls of the sick captured by spirits, could journey in search of advice from celestial deities; their excursions, described in "litanies" composed in a nearly incomprehensible shamanic language (48), became common property of the tribe. The Wana of Sulawesi, also visited by Kruyt and recently studied by Atkinson, dress in rags to search for forest spirits, since power originates in the wilderness. Their shaman sees in controlled waking states what others see only in dreams; in the elaborate mabolong ceremony he and his spirit familiars "travel to distant realms in pursuit of lost aspects of a patient's being" (Atkinson, 123), although journeys to a celestial "Owner," Atkinson surmises, may be a recent development influenced by Christianity and Islam (159, 197).

In Borneo spirit possession and ecstatic shamanism continually intermingle. Even where the former predominates, the medium, far from passively awaiting the spirit, may boldly set out to seek it in worlds remote from her own. Especially in the northwestern state of Sarawak, shamanism is highly developed. For the Berawan (Metcalf, 58–62), illness results from loss of the soul, which the shaman must recover. To the strumming of a stringed instrument the shaman enters a trance in which her soul "makes astral journeys to locate the soul of the sick person and to wrest it away from whatever has seized it." Other shamans operate without soul flight (260–61), but their skills derive from personal inspiration, and what they teach of spirit worlds is not fixed dogma or invariant ritual but inquiry into what can never, in a world of intrinsic uncertainty, be finally known.

Among the Sea Dayaks or Iban of Sarawak, Erik Jensen writes (55), religion is almost synonymous with divinely sanctioned ritual order (adat ). But the Iban, as Geddes describes them (3) in contrast to the Land Dayaks (or to conservative peoples like the Zuñi, Tallensi, and Aranda), are "restless innovators for gain, prestige, or sheer enjoyment of change." This restlessly searching aspect of their experience finds religious expression in a shamanism based on divine revelation communicated by a mobile soul (semengat ) wandering to the spirit world during sleep (D. Freeman 1967, 316); for dreams, as a basis for religious belief, produce, as Freeman observes (1975, 285), "not 'ordered pattern,' but innovation and change."

Such revelations may be spontaneously communicated, but when the soul is captured by a malignant spirit, the services of a shaman (manang ) are required. Shamans, both male and (less commonly) female, fall into three classes (Freeman 1967, 316, 320): novice, fully initiated shaman,

[5] Downs notes (48n.) that Adriani and Kruyt termed those whom he calls shamans "priestesses." Cf. Wales, 63.

and transvestite shaman. The shaman's position may be passed from father to son, but no one becomes a shaman without being "summoned in a dream which is said to involve experiencing himself in a new way, commonly the dress of the opposite sex. . . . The spirit calling the Iban," Jensen writes (144), "remains his familiar spirit, his contact, his guide, and helper in the spirit world." In the last century manangs ranked second to village chiefs, and might be chiefs themselves (Ling Roth, 1: 265), but their recent social standing is more equivocal. Most suffer from a physical handicap such as blindness and are stigmatized as failures in terms of normal Iban values. Skepticism toward them is common, yet the most prestigious manangs are highly respected members of the community.

The manang's treatment of disease takes various forms, of which the ecstatic journey to recover a patient's departed soul is the most potent. During the pelian ritual, held in the longhouse at night, the manang journeys over water to the land of the dead in search of an errant soul, which he retrieves in trance and restores to the sick person's head. When all else fails, a victim of serious illness may seek a personal encounter with spirits to whom, in the vision-quest known as nampok, he offers food and sacrifices a cock on a solitary hillside or in a graveyard. He beats out on his drum a summons for the spirit, who rewards him, if he stands his ground, with a charm to guide him through life (Jensen, 124). In this way not only the shaman but the ordinary Iban could acquire divine power through possession of a guardian spirit or personal totem.

Nor was recovery from illness the only goal of the vision quest. "A man who was fired with ambition to shine in deeds of strength and bravery, or one who desired to attain the position of chief, or to be cured of an obstinate disease, would, in olden times," Ling Roth observes (1: 185), "spend a night or nights by himself on a mountain, hoping to meet a benevolent spirit who would give him what he desired. To be alone was a primary condition of the expected apparition," for society's laws and conventions had to be left far behind in order to achieve this communion with the cosmic order on which all things human depend. Here the restless need for continual innovation permeating Iban culture (if not indeed human nature) culminates in a deliberate personal quest for transcendence of the individual self through solitary encounter with a kindred if ultimately unknowable other.