Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
I'm Anne Strain-Champs.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
Every culture has stories of people with supernatural powers.
People who can fly or become invisible.
Hear the dead.
See the future.
In our culture, they're the stuff of superhero movies and paranormal fiction.
But what if we took them more seriously?
Anthropologist Manvir Singh has traveled all around the world to meet people
who seem to be able to enter alternative hidden realities,
who can talk to spirits and cast out demons,
the people we call shamans.
You have the altered states.
You have an engagement with unseen realities,
fighting ghosts, fighting witches.
You have services like healing and divination.
Sometimes it might be dancing and drumming.
Sometimes it might be hallucinogens.
Sometimes it might be darkness, ritual surgery, death and rebirth.
Sometimes it might be understood that your soul is leaving your body,
another soul is coming into your body. So yeah, I think there's some deep recurring heart that
echoes and manifests in different ways in different contexts. Manvir Singh calls shamanism the timeless
religion, because in one form or another, it's always been there. So we're going to hear the
conversation that he and Steve had. But before we get there, I really want Steve to tell you this
story. It goes back a long way of something that happened in his family. Okay, so you've heard this
story before, but let me try to encapsulate it. When I was seven, my family lived in Northeast
Brazil where my dad had a research project. And while we were there, my mother got really sick.
She had these blinding headaches. She had sort of partial paralysis that kind of moved between
her hands and her feet. And the local doctors could not figure out what was wrong. But then
our housekeeper, Maria, started having the same symptoms. And the weird thing was they would
switch back and forth between her and my mom. Alternating symptoms. Yeah. And now I
should mention that there's a strong Macumba tradition in this part of Brazil. It's kind of like the local
voodoo. And Maria knew some spirit mediums, and one of them told her that my mom had accidentally
insulted the local Macumba high priestess. I think she had borrowed a sewing machine and not
properly paid for it. And this high priestess cast the evil eye on her. And what do you do
at that point? You go to an exorcist. The whole family.
We did, yeah. So, one evening, we all piled into the car, drove down to a church in a beachfront
favela. My brother and I sat in the pews while my mother was taken back behind a curtain where
there were ritual prayers. There's a whole group of spirit mediums. And I don't really remember
all of this, but apparently there were a lot of strange sounds and shrieks back there.
And after a while, my mother came out, we drove home, and her symptoms were gone.
So she was cured?
Pretty much.
I mean, one explanation would be that it was all psychosomatic.
Yeah, it's an obvious explanation. My mother has always said that that is one possibility. She
doesn't know. I will say that later, my dad talked to a doctor and described what happened.
And the doctor just shrugged his shoulders and said, you have to accept the idea that there's no medical explanation for what happened.
The thing is, this was a long time ago.
As you said, you were seven.
But your family still talks about it.
So this experience clearly had a big impact on all of you and I think affected how you see the world.
It is part of our family lore.
And, you know, I've never known what to make of this story, but the idea that there is some other dimension of reality where really weird stuff can happen, that has always seemed like a possibility to me.
But I'd never actually thought about my mother's experiences having anything to do with shamanism until I talked with Manveer Singh.
The anthropologist.
Yeah, at UC Davis. And he is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker. And he's just written this great book called Shamanism, The Timeless Religion, which is based on his field studies in Indonesia and other places, where he spent a lot of time with traditional shamans trying to understand what they're doing.
And he has a theory.
He does have a theory. He thinks shamanism was probably the first, maybe the original religion, and he says you can see evidence of it in mainstream religions like Judaism and Christianity. He also thinks you could consider Jesus a shaman.
That is not something I read in the Bible, but okay, let's listen.
So you did a lot of your groundbreaking work in Indonesia, studying the culture of shamanism.
Can you sort of describe a little bit about where you went and how you immersed yourself in this world?
Certainly, yeah. So I have been working on an island off the west coast of Sumatra.
So west, west, west Indonesia, right on the edge of the Indian Ocean.
I work on an island called Siberut.
So I first went in 2014, and I had a backpack full of gifts, cigarettes, coffee, tea, sugar, all things that anthropologists on Sumatra had informed me to bring.
And I had the name of a person who I needed to find, Rustam.
And I get there, and I had a whole saga of trying to find Rustam.
I was misdirected.
There were suggestions that maybe Rustam had died.
But in a short time, he had heard that someone was looking for him.
Word travels remarkably fast.
So he lives maybe 14 miles from the port, but word had gotten to him that someone here
was looking for you, and that night he came and picked me up.
So it was an incredible summer, but also a very, scary isn't the right word, but overwhelming.
And you were specifically going there to study shamanism, is that right?
Well, I was going there to study indigenous religion and law.
And so shamanism was something I was very interested in, but I was also interested in
taboos, injustice.
In short, I was overwhelmed.
I left, but I came back, and that summer I just explored the southern part of the island with Rustam.
He took me all over.
And then I came back a third time, and that's when I actually, like, built a house.
I think that was the big one.
It was like, okay, this guy's going to be here for a while.
Wait, so you built a house?
Well, I paid other people to build a house.
Sure, right, right.
And house is even a bit of a—makes it sound more fancy than it actually was.
It was like a wooden hut that had two rooms and an attached kitchen.
But yeah, yeah, we built that.
It had a thatch roof.
It was really pleasant.
It was on a river.
Eventually, the river actually shifted, and a part of the house just collapsed into the river.
So why were you so interested in shamanism in particular?
So before I had gone, I was intrigued, I think, in the way that many people are intrigued by shamanism.
I was intrigued by altered states, by entheogens, but also by mythology, by religion.
But I didn't know so much about shamanism.
But that first summer I went and the sikere, the shamans of the mentawe, were really almost evocative individuals.
And part of that is because of how everyone else treats them.
A sikere walks in and you can kind of feel the social gravity.
I haven't spent much time around celebrities, but I wonder if it's kind of a similar thing where you can feel the social environment shift.
But then also they're very visually salient.
So the mentawe overwhelmingly have adopted clothes, but the sikere still wear loincloths.
They have tattooed their bodies.
They grew out long hair.
So you know immediately if you are in their presence.
Yes, yes, yes.
And then during their ceremonies, they paint themselves in turmeric.
And it's a common thing to say,
which essentially means like, oh, someone's handsome.
And then they'll say, no, no, I'm just doing some healing.
And then they'll wear leaves and they'll wear a special shaman headdress and a shaman necklace.
They're very striking.
That summer, I started to get glimpses that there was this very fascinating world in which they existed.
I would hear shamans sing their shaman songs.
I would hear them shaking their bells.
I would see children imitating them.
And then near the end of the summer, I saw a very brief healing ceremony.
So I came away from that summer incredibly intrigued.
Oh, my God, you know, I want to learn so much more about this.
Among them in Tawe, altered states are induced by drumming and dancing.
But in other places, it might be hallucinogens.
Over here, a part of becoming a shaman requires transforming your eyes.
In another place, it might be a death and rebirth ceremony.
It might be a ritual surgery.
Can you describe one of these ceremonies?
I mean, I'm sure you have seen a number, but what did it look like?
What was it like to witness one of these shamanic ceremonies?
They have many, many techniques.
You can think of an analogy with a doctor that you might find in a biomedical context
where depending on your ailment, they will try different things.
All shamanic healing ceremonies, or almost all, feature summoning the patient's soul, sweeping away good and bad spirits, potentially some herbal application, maybe a removal of a physical embodiment of the illness, some animal sacrifice that is for everyone to feast, but also a way to pay the shamans.
But then the quintessential thing that the Sikere do is called Lajo Simagre.
And that is later at night, people will come out.
They'll have drums, often python skin or monitor lizard skin drums.
They will play those, and then the shamans will dance.
And they'll dance in these circles.
So more than one shaman.
Yes, yes, yes.
Often more than one.
So sometimes you can have a single one to do more basic treatments.
But Lajo Simagre often involves multiple shamans.
And why would people be going there?
I mean, what were they trying to heal?
Let's say I suddenly am feeling sick.
I might suspect it's a number of things.
Maybe someone yelled at me and I feel like my soul had gone away.
Maybe I fell out of a canoe and I feel like my soul had been lost.
Maybe I think it's sorcery or black magic.
Maybe I haven't been sharing meat and the crocodile spirit has climbed into my house.
Maybe I ran into the forest spirit, this kind of trickstery forest spirit.
Maybe I have broken taboos.
And each of these ailments requires a different treatment.
Lajo si magre is for calling souls, but also calling good spirits.
And it's believed to be a dance that's so beautiful,
not only the way that the sikere dance,
but also they have a plate of magical herbs, essentially.
And it's believed that this is incredibly enticing.
And so as the spirits are coming to the dance floor,
then the shamans are entering trance.
And did people generally feel healed after this?
I would say often, but not always.
And this is something I tried to study more systematically.
So there's a professor at the Harvard Medical School, Ted Kapchuk.
He is one of the world experts on placebo.
And we had designed a study to actually test, do shamanic healing ceremonies, provide therapeutic benefits.
It's very, very hard to test, honestly, because it's like incredibly uncomfortable to walk up to someone who's like incredibly sick and say, like, can you do this pain scale?
Oh, yeah.
Right.
And so that felt very inappropriate.
We found another way of looking at it, retrospective.
We haven't analyzed it.
But I think just anecdotally, often you find therapeutic responses to the extent that people will often say they feel better because of these shamanic ceremonies.
And, of course, you always wonder, you know, did they really get healed or was it they wanted to get healed?
The expectation, the placebo, essentially, that, okay, I've been through this and I'm going to feel better.
I do feel better.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's an interesting question.
So I think the placebo could potentially be a mechanism for making them feel better.
I would also say something that I found so striking about these healing ceremonies is how jubilant and celebratory and festive they feel.
I think coming from, you know, I was a receptionist in high school in a hospital and my great uncle contracted cancer and died.
And my understanding of biomedicine and healing was always, you're much more somber.
But then I go to Mentawe and someone's foot seems like it's going to fall off and everyone is dancing and they're feasting and you're staying up all night.
And after the shamans dance, other people are dancing.
And so I think that just social affirmation can potentially be a source of healing.
And then I also think these are very powerful experiences.
And in a similar way to how a lot of therapy works, psychotherapy, including psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, I think they're powerful ways to change patients' narratives about themselves.
One being, you know, the crocodile spirit has attacked me, and now the shaman has engaged with the crocodile spirit.
They've removed it.
They've enticed it.
They've put it in the river.
Or, I feel like my soul had fallen out when you yelled at me, but now the shamans have done all of these things to call back souls.
And look, other people are falling into trance. The souls are here.
Again, I think it needs to be studied more systematically, but I think it's plausible that this is an important mechanism that's also playing.
So, what do you think the shamans are doing to enter these trance states?
I mean, they have to sort of transition into this, you know, really entirely different state of consciousness.
I'm assuming it probably takes a lot of practice to be able to do that, sort of on command.
What do you think is going on there?
Well, so it's very rare.
I can't even think of an example where you'll have a shaman immediately entering a trance state.
Instead, it's often after quite a bit of dancing and drumming.
And so I think what seems most plausible to me is that the mentawe, like many peoples,
have figured out essentially a cognitive technology that is dance and drumming
that after a while can induce trance.
And what you'll often see is you'll see the sikere entering trance.
And then it's one in the morning.
There's been music for a while.
You'll start to see other people also entering trance.
You'll see, you know, women in the kitchen entering trance.
You'll see, like, a woman who's sitting down, maybe the shaman's wife, entering trance.
So I think in that context, it's very much music.
And one of the points that you make in your book is that the stranger, and I guess you might say the more bizarre the behavior, the more compelling the shaman tends to be.
In other words, if the shaman just sort of looks like the rest of us, then it's not really, you know, people aren't going to take that much notice.
But the special power of the shaman is that they're so different from everyone else.
Certainly.
And there's constantly a discourse about whose trance is legitimate and whose is not.
I actually have a video where one guy, he's a new, this is during his initiation, and he enters trance first by clapping.
And you hear everyone laugh.
And I think the sense is like, that's not trance.
It looks like you just clapped and started shaking.
But, you know, there's another person there who is a much more experienced sikere and a much more respected one.
And even just watching it, it looks like something that's much harder to do performatively.
It looks like it's a different kind of state.
But there is a performance element to this.
I mean, if you're going to sort of connect with the people around you, if they're going to believe that you're the real thing,
I mean, which isn't to say that, you know, they're faking it or they're con men, but there is a performative aspect to it.
For sure.
I mean, working in Mentawai and studying shamanism more generally has made me really wonder or tussle with this performative dimension.
To take another example in Mentawai that you also find very common cross-culturally is sleight of hand.
So, like I said, what the Sikere will do is they'll also, among their many treatments, let's say my knee is hurting, they'll massage my knee and then they'll pull out what looks like a rock.
and you find this in many places
and anthropologists have done a lot of research
showing that in many cases
this is very explicit sleight of hand
and we know many techniques that shamans use
but the striking thing is that these shamans
when their children get sick
they go to other shamans
they themselves
I've seen shamans just in their houses
really desperately cycle through interventions
so I think there is a performative dimension
but there is also
that really bleeds into a sense of authenticity
if you know what I mean
Yeah. Now, you are an ethnographer, an anthropologist who immerses yourself into the place that you're studying, which I'm guessing in this case meant participating in certain ceremonies?
To some degree, yeah.
I mean, I would often sit and watch.
So in Mentawe, you're in a space, the cicada are entering trance.
Other people around you are entering trance.
And I have really felt an invitation, a pull, to just let myself fall into it.
The thing is, honestly, that I, among the Mentawe, never let myself enter trance.
Partly, to be totally honest, because I wonder if I'll just look like an idiot.
But also because...
You always felt like you had to kind of keep wearing your scientist hat?
Well, I wouldn't say so.
I would say it's, I think I was afraid of looking like an idiot,
but I was also afraid, to take another example,
I'm always apprehensive about taking a lot of photos
because I don't want it to become about me.
I'm incredibly grateful that they're letting me into these spaces.
I mean, who knows?
Maybe they would love it if I entered trans.
But I just think it would suddenly become such a thing.
Nevertheless, we've been exploring research opportunities, doing reconnaissance, visiting communities in eastern Colombia near the border with Venezuela.
As a part of that research, we've been studying IOPO, an anadonanthroa psychedelic snuff.
And we've been offered it, and I have tried it.
So, yeah, in other contexts, I have maybe more readily done so, but with the mentale, I've been more apprehensive.
I mean, you're up front in your book that, I mean, you've taken psychedelic substances.
Did they have much of an impact on you?
I know, you know, you don't want to have the focus on you, but I'm going to put the focus on you right now.
Were you moved?
Were you transformed at all in any of these experiences?
Some of them, certainly.
I mean, so in the book, I talk about two in particular.
One, when I took a Yopo snuff, and I would say I was not transformed by that because I was not cognitively prepared.
or psychologically prepared or something.
It was a mess.
I don't remember a lot of that experience
other than vomiting and having a lot of nasal discharge
and thinking that I was time traveling
and then waking up and seeing that I was a mess.
So that one, if anything, taught me about the substance
and the importance of, you know,
if you contrast my behavior with that of the shaman's apprentice,
they were very different.
So the importance of experience and understanding the substances.
But I talk about another experience that I had in the book,
which was profound, where I thought, you know,
I am in many ways quite an empiricist and, you know,
scientist to the extent that an anthropologist can be one.
But, you know, I felt like I was communing with a being
and I also understood myself and my thoughts and my behavior
in a totally profound way.
How long did that last?
The experience?
Mm-hmm, yeah.
It was two experiences over two nights,
each of which I think were like 10, I don't know, 8 hours possibly.
Did that give you any insight into all of this?
I mean, what you were studying, having the experience yourself?
Certainly, certainly.
Although it was interesting.
So it gave me insight into, one, how relatively important is belief versus experience?
I think like coming from a Western context where belief is treated as this very important thing.
Even when we were talking about the placebo effect, there's often this story,
oh, the extent to which you respond with therapy depends on how much you believe in it.
But that was a context where like even during the experience, if you asked me whether I believed, belief felt irrelevant. It was the experience that was so profound. More generally, I think my work has really led me to appreciate how much different societies have figured out how to manage, cultivate these experiences for particular ends.
I mean, even the Yopo experience, I was a mess.
You know, if you just find Yopo and you snuff it, you're going to be on the ground nasally discharging and vomiting.
But if you have a whole discourse about how to use these and you have experts who use them over and over, then you have the capacity to really develop a very sophisticated ethno-psychopharmacology.
So I think that's also something I've really appreciated.
Yeah.
I mean, there are some big metaphysical questions here.
I mean, the big one is, is the shaman actually going into some other dimension?
I mean, not just sort of a different part of consciousness, but actually connecting to some other realm.
I don't know. What do you think?
So do I think, for example, that a shaman is engaging with like a crocodile spirit?
Yeah. Uh-huh.
I don't think we can conclude that.
I would say I'm also like an uber agnostic.
I think we largely know nothing about reality, so, you know.
So maybe.
Yeah, I mean, we probably know a drop in an ocean-wide planet of what's going on in reality, so, you know.
Is that question important to you, to try to figure out what's really going on?
I mean, is that what you were trying to understand?
Honestly, I don't think it was a big part of what motivated me.
Fundamentally, I'm really interested in cultural parallels and cultural diversity.
And I think it was almost like an aesthetic fascination that pulled me in.
Ultimately, the question of whether or not they are doing what they claim,
I guess is something that I did not feel so compelled to figure out.
We're going to take a short pause here.
And when we come back, we'll hear Banvir's provocative take on the origins of religion.
And the question, was Jesus a shaman?
Thank you.
Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us.
We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead, and I'm really excited about them.
And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts,
those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed.
I hope you like it.
you're listening to wonder cabinet i'm steve paulson talking with the anthropologist manvir
singh about his cross-cultural study of shamanism let's go back to the conversation
does shamanism exist around the world i mean in i guess what we would call traditional cultures is
this universal it's near universal yeah yeah there are a couple exceptions we can identify
if you're looking at non-industrial societies, many of the examples of exceptions that you will
find seem to have been societies that lost shamanism. So the Northern Aceh in Paraguay
don't have shamanism. The Siriano don't have shamanism. The Tiwi do not have shamanism.
The Hadza, but many of these are hunter-gatherer populations that became so very small. We also
know the Northern Aceh lost the ability to make fire. They lost dancing. They lost lullabies.
they underwent catastrophic cultural collapse, as did the Siriona. So, more generally, yes,
I think shamanism is ubiquitous, although technically not universal.
And does it sort of look the same in these different cultures, or is it very culturally
specific? Basic elements of it are there. You have the altered states, you have an engagement
with unseen agents or realities, gods, spirits, fighting ghosts, fighting witches. You have
services like healing and divination. And then you have some other similarities. I mean, you know,
you have these dramatic initiations where the person fundamentally transforms. You often have
taboos. You often have music. But then you also have incredible diversity. You have diversity in
how these altered states are induced and understood. So sometimes it might be dancing
and drumming. Sometimes it might be hallucinogens. Sometimes it might be darkness. Sometimes it might
be understood that your soul is leaving your body. Another soul is coming into your body.
You are calling souls or spirits and talking to them. The mode of essential transformation can
be very different. You know, ritual surgery, death and rebirth, long bouts of asceticism.
So, yeah, I think there's some deep recurring heart, but then that echoes and manifests in
different ways in different contexts. So, if it is universal or nearly universal,
it raises some pretty profound questions about why. And I know you're interested in this sort
of larger question of what are the origins of religion? You know, why do all human cultures,
as far as we know, have religion. I mean, however you want to define that,
how do you think about that? And with the role that, I mean, is shamanism kind of the first
religion? So, yeah, I think shamanism likely characterized the earliest religious practices
of behaviorally or cognitively modern humans. I think as long as we've had recognizable religion,
we've probably had shamanism. The way that I myself understand religion is that we live in
an uncertain world, and we converge on ways to explain it and to intervene in it to manage that
uncertainty. And so, our explanations and understandings of uncertainty manifest as
religious belief, and then the ways we try to manage uncertainty, control uncertainty,
tame uncertainty, is religious ritual, with shamanism being a very, very compelling version
of that. Why is that so helpful in taming uncertainty? We can imagine we are in an
environment where people get sick, people randomly die, it's hard to predict the rain.
If I come to you and I say, hey, Steve, I know a family member of yours has been sick. I can talk
to the rain goddess or I can talk to the illness demon. I can fight them off. That would not be
very compelling to you. But if I seem like a fundamentally different human to you, if I have
lost my skeleton and have crystals inside my body and I engage in some kind of practice that makes
it feel like I'm fundamentally transforming in your eyes a different kind of being, then I think
that makes much more compelling both to you and to me that I am interacting with these agents that
oversee uncertainty. And so I think that's very centrally what's going on with shamanism, that
altered states and fundamental transformation make very compelling for everyone involved
that you are tussling with the forces that are believed to control the uncontrollable.
Did you ever witness anything, any of these ceremonies that you saw, just some things that you couldn't really explain?
I mean, just seem to defy your scientific understanding?
Certainly, yeah.
I mean, so in Mentale, there are descriptions of what spirits look like, and they're said to live in certain places.
And I've gone by my motorcycle and been like, what is that?
I mean, give me an example of this.
I mean, just something that's just like, wow, wait, really?
Well, so, I mean, the way they describe it is that in graveyards, you see beings that are white and glowing.
And I, on one occasion, drove by a graveyard and felt like I was staring at the kind of being that they're describing.
I've also seen my first summer, I went to Mantawe, and there was a kid who woke up paralyzed,
and there was a shamanic healing ceremony, and he came away not being paralyzed.
He was walking, and I think there are different explanatory frameworks that you can have for that.
maybe it was conversion, you know, maybe he's like implicitly performing illness. But I was
very struck after that and talked to friends about what it might have been. And I talked to
a psychiatrist friend who had a framework that favored, yeah, this is conversion. And, you know,
he had an expectation or whatever. Because you can always, I mean, you can come up with
explanations that sort of explain it away in a way. But there might be other explanations that
really do correspond more with sort of this idea that there is actually this hidden world,
this unseen reality that changes people. Certainly, certainly. I mean, this is maybe
going a bit too far, but I think a natural thing after you engage with something like psychedelics
is like the state of being that I have right now and my state of consciousness is an arbitrary one
that is geared for particular ends, that is good for what natural selection wants. You know, I get
food, I fight in status, but I can produce a very different state of consciousness that experiences
reality in a very different way. And what about the nature of reality am I missing in this everyday
one that I'm getting insight into while in one of these altered states? And that is something I
continue to wonder about, I guess, towards your question in the beginning. Yeah, it is the case
that after some of the experiences I write about in the book, I come away thinking, I wonder if
I glimpsed something that I may be quick to dismiss otherwise.
Did that glimpse give you a hunger to get more of a taste of it?
I guess to a degree, but then life can sweep you away.
I know you've got a little kid, a small child,
and yeah, it's a little hard to kind of be in contacting these other realms
when you've got a little person to take care of.
I mean, I get it. Life intrudes.
Yeah, but I will say my own relationship with spirituality and religion has really gone in many directions over the course of my life. I still wear a turban, although my own relationship to the metaphysics of the religious tradition I'm from, Sikhism, is complicated.
But at this point in my life, I think what I really appreciate is experience.
And, you know, I still sometimes go to the Gurdwara with my family, the Sikh temple,
and I listen to the Kirtan, and I read the lyrics, which are sublime,
and I at least revel in that experience for now.
So we've been talking about what I would call traditional cultures, for want of a better word,
and the shamanic practices there.
What about looking at the more mainstream organized religion?
the Bible, for instance. I mean, you know, if we read the Bible, do we see elements of shamans
in the Bible? For sure. The Hebrew prophets are quintessential shamans. If they weren't being
analyzed within a biblical literature, we would much more freely acknowledge that they're shamans.
They are entering altered states, sometimes even induced by music, and then they are divining.
They're speaking about the future, speaking about events that are in other places. They're engaging
with an unseen being, the Holy Spirit.
Who are some of those people you're thinking about?
Elisha, Elijah, possibly.
I'm not very good at pronouncing Old Hebrew,
but there's a word, nabi,
which is often translated as prophet in the Hebrew Bible.
And Marti Nisinen, he's a Finnish scholar
who has done really, really incredible work
just tracing prophetic behavior
throughout the classical Mediterranean.
And he has made a very compelling argument
that the Nabi, he doesn't call them shamans, he calls them possessed prophets or something like
that. But I think the Nabi look quintessentially shamanic. And what about Jesus? Was Jesus a
shaman? What about Jesus? So Jesus very clearly exhibits two of the three features of shamans.
He's engaging with unseen agents. So he's exercising demons. He's calling upon the power
of the Holy Spirit. And then he is also healing, obviously, very frequently. He's divining,
he's prophesying. So then the question is, does Jesus enter altered states? This is something
that also theologians argue over. There are very suggestive passages. I would have to look it up.
I think it's Mark 3, 20 to 22, which describes a scene where Jesus is healing and people are
flocking to him to be healed. He's, depending on the translation, described as being out of his
mind or astonished. People are saying that he's demon-possessed. So I think more generally,
we know that the Eastern Mediterranean during this time was very shamanic. We know that
the Hebrew tradition was quite shamanic. We know that the Greeks were pretty shamanic. We know that,
for example, the Neo-Assyrians had quite a bit of shamanic practices. And here we have an
individual who's healing. They're divining. They're engaging with other beings. And then
they are followed by the early Christian church. The day of Pentecost is people speaking in tongues.
The Apostle Paul is talking about the gifts being speaking in tongues and healing.
It's a very ecstatic place, a place that looks, or a context that looks very shamanic.
So I think we should more readily entertain the hypothesis that Jesus was a shaman.
And we also know that after this very ecstatic period, as the Christian church centralized,
there was a big turn against ecstatic behavior.
And so there may have been a desire to maybe ramp down that kind of behavior in the early
gospels.
we know that the early church really tried to argue that the Old Testament was much less ecstatic
than it might seem if you read it. I think that's a great place to leave it, because you're leaving
us on this very provocative note here, and kind of maybe rethinking the origins of Christianity.
Yeah, I hope so. I'm glad. Thank you. Thank you. This has been fun. That was so fun. Yeah.
That's Manvir Singh, anthropologist at UC Davis and a contributing writer to The New Yorker.
His book is called Shamanism, the Timeless Religion.
So Steve, you know what I liked about that?
I like thinking that if shamanism is a kind of universal psychology, like the root code for religion, then it must still be all around us.
So what changes if you think of, I don't know, not just Burning Man, but March Madness or Wall Street or Swifties or the mystique around AI as contemporary breakthroughs of this ancient shamanic impulse?
And it kind of adds some weirdness and wonder to ordinary daily life, don't you think?
Well, and I think, I mean, the story that Manvir tells and, you know, what you see in a lot of these other phenomena like Burning Man is it's also when people come together and they engage in some kind of ritualistic aspect and something new often comes out of those experiences.
That's the thing I love, the something else.
Yeah.
Well, thanks for bringing that conversation to Wonder Cabinet.
Oh, I love this kind of thing.
I'm Anne Strange-Hamps.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
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