Traces of archaic shamanism in our languages and cultures

Since, historically and geographically, shamanism - understood as a device of social and cultural functioning of a community - is attested and recognized in some areas, we are mistakenly led to believe that it lived and developed exclusively in those places. From a cognitive and evolutionary point of view, on the contrary, as the most recent studies show, it is a phenomenon that it is right to interpret as pertinent to the whole history of Homo Sapiens, that is to say as present in all civilizations which developed starting from the upper Paleolithic. The problem is, if anything, to recognize the traces in a systematic way, starting from the analysis of phenomena often overlooked by anthropological research. Among these, the linguistic attestations present in our languages and in particular in our dialects are of extraordinary importance.

At the time when, as Australopithecines, we came down from the trees, starting to move as bipedal beings, we began to develop our language. Three million years ago, our language was necessarily a language of the forest, reminiscent of when we ourselves were forest. They were syllables-leaves, words-bark, phrases-trees. The common language was a forest. Our wild side (from silva, 'forest') was not yet the dark side of a wilderness outside inhabited places. The wild, from the root sel- 'light' (the same as Selene, that is the moon, 'the shining one') was instead what civilization brought, the 'light' of fire, the memory of the branches of when we were branches. It was what brought the food, the venison. And it was the place where the Ladies of the Venison lived, the ancestors of the mother goddesses, at the time when - before the Neolithic, that is, before 9000 years ago (when we began to understand it by observing the farmed animals) - the correlation between sexual act and procreation.

To the Ladies of the Venison, that is to those creatures who, in prehistoric belief, regulated and guaranteed the renewal of game stocks, at the same time protectors of animals and givers of prosperity, we addressed propitiatory prayers, sacrifices and propitiatory tears for millions of years, in order to get a good hunt and to be able to move safely in threatening territory. This still unexplored space was the place, which later became sacred, that we had to explore, that is, in Latin, ex-plorare 'cry, pray outside'. We were hunters, explorers, worshipers of the forest and its dreamlike emanations. The Ladies of the Venison, as intermediaries between then coexisting worlds, are to be understood as the first shamans of our (pre)history.

The linguistic and dialectological traces of an ancient conception according to which song, poetic word, dream, cave and healing were part of a complex system of references - today observable only in shamanic societies of ethnographic interest - are manifold. Think of those verbs that mean at the same time, in our dialects, 'heal', 'dream' and 'compose poems / sing': we can quote the Occitan endurmìr 'to sleep' and 'compose', ensongiàr 'to dream' and 'to heal', the Ladin sugner 'to dream' and 'to heal', the Breton hun 'sleep' and 'healing', the Welsh bredwydd 'to dream' from * bredw-, formerly 'to heal', the Swedish dialect söva 'to sleep' and 'to heal', the Dutch dromen 'to dream' and 'to heal', the Finnish unelma 'sleep / dream' and 'healing'.

Another relevant category is represented by words that mean both 'poet' and 'healer': the Emilian [from the Italian region of Emilia Romagna] bernardò 'poet' and 'traditional healer', the Mantovano [Italian city of Mantova] bernardùn 'storyteller' and 'magician', Gaelic (Isle of Skye) an choáithe ' poet'e and cheáithe 'healer', Welsh cerdedd 'to heal', collateral to the noun cerdd 'poetry', Ladin garìr un ćànt 'to compose a song ', sic. (Vittoria) heal 'heal' and 'sing'. The Emilian term vòtra means 'healer' and comes from the Indo-European root *uat- 'to be inspired, to be possessed', at the basis of Germanic counterparts, such as Gothic woths, ags. wōd, norr. oðr, all with the meaning of 'possessed, inspired' (hence - not surprisingly - the name of the god-shaman Odhinn, Wotan, i.e. Odin) and Irish fáith and Welsh gwawd, both 'poet, bard'.

There are also verbs that mean both 'heal' and 'hide / stay hidden', such as Ligurian selà, Emilian slèr, Venetian selàr, Salento cillare, Sicilian ciddari, all clearly connected to Latin celo, conceal 'to hide' and in the Latin cella 'cave, cell, grotto'; it is the Indo-European root *kel- 'hide', which, as well as in Latin, continues on the one hand in the rich Germanic family which leads to the English hell 'hell, abode of the dead', and on the other in Celtic: ancient Irish celim 'hide', cuile 'hollow' and cuilean 'healing'. On the same level we can mention those verbs that mean 'to heal' but whose first meaning is 'staying in a cave': for example Piedmontese groté, Emilian grutèr, Venetian grotàr, Abruzzese gruttare, Sicilian gruttari, voices connected to the Latin *grupta 'grotta', which easily allow to reconstruct a protoform of the type *grottare 'staying in a cave'.

It is evident that the multiple and overlapping meanings of these words refer to an origin of the same in which they were part of a single conception: when the revelation in a dream, perhaps sleeping inside a cave, was one with the healing and the singing, as is still observed today, in fact, in communities where shamanism has not been supplanted by other belief systems. In this sense, more than in connection with the birth of an animistic idea of the world, shamanism will be understood as contemporary to (and perhaps responsible for) the birth of the idea of a conscience. That is, as a form, itself, of self-awareness. And what in our cultures appears related to the ethnographically known forms of shamanism, is not a trace but an essence, it is not persistence but original presence, it is not influence but evolution. We travel, in dreams, each time in the way of the shamans.

The pre-stratified societies, and even more so the pre-Neolithic ones, were not societies without the State: this would presuppose that, evolving, they would have reached a point where a State would necessarily have begun to exist as a natural and necessary filling of that "without". In the same way that oral-communicated societies are not societies without writing, but societies that are anti-writing, pre-writing, alternatives to writing, and possibly not corrupted by writing, so pre-stratified societies were anti-State, pre-State, alternatives to the State, and ultimately not corrupted by the State. What is the shaman doing in an anti-State society? Isn't the priestly function complementary to the royal one? Does it not itself presuppose the existence of stratifications? Isn't it itself the expression, hierarchically satisfied, of that social crystallization? The shaman is already present in the Paleolithic precisely because he is not a priest, he is not a man of the sacred, he is not the professional of ecstatic communication between the natural and the supernatural.

It became so later, as an outcrop of a part of the vast body he had, as a survival of a simple finger, or even a phalanx, with respect to his entire body, and as a metamorphosis of himself into the world in which he has - apparently - lost its centrality. In the same way that totemism is not a form of religion, but a belief system that precedes any form of religion, so the shaman is, long before the birth of priestly functions, a professional of the word. In this sense, he is anti-priest, pre-priest, alternative to the priest, and ultimately not corrupted by the priest.

Non-priest and non-State, the shaman is not even healer or therapist. He also became this, as he became a priest.

Nevertheless, the fundamental question, for the shaman, is not to heal the disease, to recognize or interpret the unconscious. Far from this dictatorial conception of the individual, he poses the fundamental problem, assuming in himself the function that presides over it and claiming its capacity in an elective-mysterious way, to produce the unconscious, to create desires, to expand the imagination. The shaman does not cure diseases. He narrates them.

The shaman, then, is not the remnant of primitive belief systems. The figure of him in flesh and blood does not refer to a lost past, it is not its transformation. The shaman is a recognizable variant (and in some territory recognized as such by the community in which he operates) of what we were millions of years ago. Celtic bards, Occitan troubadours, traditional poets, European country healers, funeral mourners from Ireland to Magna Graecia, interpreters in written form of the great tradition of texts linked to the dream journey, up to Dante and beyond Dante, they are not "heirs" of the ancient shamans, but, like them, essence, original presence, evolution of what we were.

Despite the meritorious scientific and ethno scientific efforts, we still struggle to grasp the meaning of shamanism. Since the meaning of things can be seen, without glaring exceptions, as soon as they have disappeared, it is a question of a difficulty that precedes scientific and speculative discourse. This difficulty confirms that the shaman is part of ourselves and has not yet disappeared. Over the past decade, I have read over four hundred essays on shamanism. From which, even when I have vividly argued the opposite, I have only obtained evidence that it is not, trivially, a phenomenon limited to the territories in which it is still attested in an ethnographically relevant form.

Shamanism founded our civilization, gradually dissolving its most visible form and becoming a molecular phenomenon.

And how there are visual and sound molecules that are not confused with pictorial or musical themes and forms but which, precisely, constitute the "secret" of a painter or a musician, in the same way, when we reflect on the origins of Europe, understood in its broadest geocultural meaning, rather than with the themes and forms of Christianity, Islam, Carolingian civilization, the Hellenistic Alexandrian civilization, the various State and meta-State apparatuses which, as machines of enslavement, have segmented and segment the territories, we are forced to come to terms, since prehistoric times, with a different and more rooted hypothesis.

The hypothesis I am talking about can be summarized as follows: perhaps the poet, the poet-shaman, is not hosted by the continent, but hosts within himself every continent. From which a positive doubt can emerge: perhaps it is precisely in the shaman, and not in the various stages of cultural, technical and social evolution of Homo Sapiens (faber, religiosus, politicus, laborans, oeconomicus, ludens, aestheticus, technologicus) that we must recognize the secret of Eurasian civilization.

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Articolo originale di Francesco Benozzo:

https://comedonchisciotte.org/tracce-di-sciamanesimo-arcaico-nelle-nostre-lingue-e-culture/

Traduzione di Costantino Ceoldo