Soviet Researchers about Shamanic Initiatory Sickness and “Shamanic Madness”

Soviet scientists held diverse opinions about the mental health of shamans, challenging the simplistic view that Soviet scholarship uniformly dismissed religion. The article reviews a wide range of Soviet sources on shamanism, from exiled revolutionaries to professional researchers of the 1980s, focusing on the debate over whether shamanic initiatory sickness and spirit communication result from psychological abnormalities or have other origins. The authors show that scientists' representations of shamans depended on the development of the Soviet state and science. Despite active antireligious propaganda, Soviet science aimed for objective knowledge of primitive beliefs, including shamanism, and lively debate existed on this topic.

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Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review various opinions of Soviet scientists about mental health of shamans. The task of this paper is to analyse a wide range of Soviet sources on shamanism, identify their attitude to “shamanic madness” and possible reasons for its formation, and compare positions of different authors on the subject. The following methods were used: comparative, causal analysis, historicism, and typological methods. In modern Russia, there is a preconceived opinion about the sharply negative attitude to religion in the Soviet era. In the USSR, there was indeed active antireligious propaganda, but it is an exaggeration to say that it represents the entire complex layer of relations between representatives of different faiths and Soviet institutions. Soviet science was based on the aspiration for objective knowledge of the world. This also applied to the primitive beliefs that existed at that time in the Northern and Eastern regions of the country, in particular shamanism. This article deals with the issue of shamanic initiatory sickness and shamanic activities based on communication with spirits. On this issue, there was a lively debate – whether these diseases are the result of psychological abnormalities or have a different origin. The article provides a wide range of sources about shamanism and the personality of the shaman, from the works of exiled revolutionaries to professional researchers done in the 80s. The main theories about the reasons for the shaman's ritual behaviour are briefly presented. The dependence of scientists' representation of the shamans during the development of Soviet state and science is shown.