Negotiating Transcendence

This volume on negotiating transcendence grapples with the issue of control of experience in the contested areas of ecstatic religion and shamanism. It also examines and challenges assumptions that these experiences are derived from superstitious or popular religious beliefs, that are inferior to experiences had in official religions. In fact, many modern western individuals often perceive so-called popular religious beliefs as superior to official religious ones, and eschew these beliefs and their practices in favour of New Age spirituality and neo-shamanism and their paths to transcendent knowledge (Heelas 1996; von Stuckrad 2002). This quest for transcendent knowledge has often been portrayed as a desire to return to a more primitive spiritual understanding of the world (Needham 1985; Kehoe 1990). While this may be true for some people, the new self-understanding(s) that the authors discuss in this issue is not a primitive or primeval knowledge that is found in one place and transmitted from one deity. It is rather about the pluralism of ecstatic experiences and the ways in which they provide new understanding(s). In this issue the authors examine ways in which ecstatics, both religious and secular, have expressed and negotiated their own experiences as spirit mediums, shamans, dancers, lovers, and healers. These experiences may all be called ecstatic in reference to the manner in which a person becomes other than who she or he is in everyday life in religious and secular contexts. Some patterns emerge when we compare accounts about ecstatic experience in different religious contexts. For instance, American Protestants of the early eighteenth^th century consistently described their religious experiences with narratives about how they had been filled with the Spirit (Taves 1999: 3). In the dances of !Kung Bushmen, dancers explained that they tried to boil what was called num or spiritual energy to cause the spirit named kia to be immanent (Katz 1982: 46). When the kia was immanent people often trembled. Taiwanese lingji practice meditation and dance in order to move the spirit within them (lingdong) and once they reach this state they also begin to tremble (Marshall 2002). The early American Protestant, the !Kung Bushman, and the Taiwanese lingji use specific language to express different experiences in which they become filled by Spirit, boil spiritual energy, and move the spirit. These individuals might all be categorized as ecstatics who share an experience of ecstasy and become transformed by spirits in their various forms. Even though the term “ecstatic” is useful to understand similarities among religious traditions it has been subject to criticism, which needs to be discussed. Roberte Hamayon summarizes the problems one encounters when invoking terms such as “ecstasy” and “shaman” to describe an individual who is not traditionally a Siberian shaman (1998). Today, the term “shaman” is used almost universally and without precision to refer to anyone who enters trance or experiences ecstasy or an altered state of consciousness, heals, or becomes possessed. When I asked my third-year undergraduate class in the course Ecstatic Religions in World Traditions to answer the question “What is a shaman?”, the answers revealed that today, in the West at least, a shaman can be defined as almost anyone who performs a spiritual role in any contemporary society. Students answered that a shaman was predominately male, a priest, a liaison with the spirit world, a bringer or ender of rain, a healer, someone who communicates with the spirits, someone who leads the community in the performance of rituals and ceremonies, a medium who has a greater degree of personal spirituality, someone who can enter trance, cure plagues, can be good or bad, a guide …