Comment on ‘Individuation and Shamanism’

Following Rosemary Gordon's invitation in her editorial in the January issue of The Journal of Analytical Psychology for readers to ‘feel free to enter the arena and do battle with any one or several of the authors published’, I am offering the following criticisms and amplifications of a paper published in that issue.

It would be unfortunate if the readers of this Journal were left with the image of shamanism misleadingly painted in such bright hues as that given in ‘Individuation and Shamanism’ by J. Downton. In that paper, the author states he is ‘drawing on shamanism as a metaphor for understanding individuation,’ and by selectively choosing certain archetypal motifs mentioned in Mircea Eliade's classic tome (Eliade 2) he constructs a seven-branched shamanic arbor vitae which is to be regarded as seven metaphoric stages of the shamanic initiation process, and hence individuation. The author portrays the initiation of the typical shaman in non-literate societies as an exercise in ascending the world tree ‘until the shaman reaches the top of the tree, at which time the opposites are united and a higher state of consciousness is achieved’ (Downton 1, p. 78). The author's caveat that ‘this simply provides a structure for creative thinking and should not be taken necessarily as a precise picture of reality’ (Ibid. p. 81) should be taken by the readers of this Journal with more than a grain of salt.

The problem is that the author's conception of shamanism is an all too common ethnocentric romantic or ideal metaphoric abstraction of what many Westerners believe the experiences of shamans ought to be. This is the romantic vision that is largely shared by the editor of the primary source cited by the author for his information about the shamanic initiation process (Halifax 4). But this distorted image does not capture the heart of the raw experiential world of shamans. It strays too far from the data provided in ethnographic accounts of actual shamans and their experience