shamanism and the ancient greek mysteries: the western imaginings

SHAMANISM AND THE ANCIENT GREEK MYSTERIES:

THE WESTERN IMAGININGS OF THE “PRIMITIVE OTHER”

A thesis submitted

To Kent State University in partial

Fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Arts

Troy Markus Linebaugh

December, 2017

Except for previously published materials

Thesis written by

Troy Markus Linebaugh

B.A., Saint Vincent College, 2011

M.A., Slippery Rock University, 2013

M.A., Kent State University, 2017

Approved by

Richard Feinberg, Ph.D., Advisor

Mary Ann Raghanti, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Anthropology

James L. Blank, Ph.D., Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………...iii

LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………………………v

PREFACE………………………………………………………………………………………vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………...viii

CHAPTER

I. Introduction: the Problem of Shamanism in Ethnology, Archaeology, and

Historiography………………………………………………………………………...1

a. Primitivism and Shamanism………………………………………………………3

b. The Problem with Ethnographic Analogue and the Archaeology of Religion……9

c. Entheogens and Altered States of Consciousness in the Narrative……………....14

d. From the Problems of Paleo-Shamanism to its Application in Historiography….19

e. Shamanism as Practically Barbarian Religion………………………………...…23

II. Gods, Beasts, and the Polis: Redux………………………………………………….28

a. The Barbarian Other……………………………………………………………..29

b. “Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk:” Nomads in Relationship to the Polis……...35

c. Barbarians as Naturally Slaves in the Polis……………………………………...41

d. Stereotypes and Other Hellenic Misinterpretations of Pontic-Caspian

Cultures…………………………………………………………………………..44

e. The Oikoumene: from the Polis to the Eschatiai………………………………...50

f. Concluding Remarks for Chapter 2…………………………………………...…64

III. Pontic Barbarian Religions and the Invention of the Mysteries……………………..66

a. Animism, Totemism, and Northern Eurasian Ontologies………………………..70

b. “Northern Shamanism” and Pontic Barbarian Religions………………………...78

c. The Mystery Cults: Survivals of the Greeks’ Shamanic Past or Invented

Tradition?...............................................................................................................94

d. Orphism…………………………………………………………………………..96

e. Cult of Dionysus…………………………………………………………………98

f. The Cult of Artemis, Mother Goddess………………………………………….101

g. The Eleusinian Mysteries……………………………………………………….105

h. Cults of Apollo, the Oracle at Delphi, and the Hyperboreans………………….109

i. Ancient Greek Philosophy as Mystery Religion………………………………..122

j. Concluding Remarks on Chapter 3……………………………………………..125

IV. The Indigenous Barbarian and His Religion………………………………………..127

a. The Ontological Space of the Other…………………………………………….129

b. The Invention of Shamanism…………………………………………………...134

c. The New Age and the Politics of Culture………………………………………142

d. The Indigenous Other…………………………………………………………..157

e. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...171

APPENDICES

A. Maps and Figures……………………………………………………………………….174

B. Glossary………………………………………………………………………………...177

C. List of Classical Literary References with Associated Abbreviations………………….181

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………183

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Northern Pontic………………………………………………………………………174

Figure 2. Herodotus’s geography (reconstruction)……………………………………………..174

Figure 3. Scythian world and associated funerary sites………………………………………...175

Figure 4. Ethnological map of modern Siberian cultures………………………………………175

Figure 5. Hellenic sacred sites and cult centers………………………………………………...176

Preface

When I first began my investigation of shamanism, I discovered it in the context of

ancient and medieval Eurasian nomadic cultures from the time of the Indo-European migrations

to the expansion of the Mongol Empire—a very large stretch of time. At the start, I admit I

accepted the concept at face value and did little to deconstruct it, as shamanism was more

peripheral to my historical research at the time. As I first understood it, shamanism was simply

an ancient and primitive religion, and it appeared to me that it was widespread, not only

throughout northern Eurasia, but globally. However, as I turned the attention of my research

from historical to ethnological, I found this supposedly global phenomenon problematic. I could

not identify any unifying set of practices or beliefs between the countless traditions found

throughout time and space which scholars and New Age mystics alike have called shamanism.

Even among the northern Eurasian groups the concept is applied with difficulty. Nevertheless, I

proceeded as if there was in fact a historic (or perhaps prehistoric) root religion which one might

call shamanic. My quest brought me to the Lakota Sioux of Pine Ridge, SD, being that the

Native Americans have been a popular, if not cliché, choice for enthusiasts and scholars alike of

so-called primordial spirituality. This prevalent sentiment in itself reveals much about the

problem of shamanism.

I find it embarrassing now to think of the naïve mindset I had been lulled into up to this

time. While at Pine Ridge, I had a number of interactions with a spiritualist woman who claimed

to be possessed by the spirit of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the mythic purveyor of the

vii

Sacred Pipe and the Seven Sacred Rites. She also described herself in Western terms as a witch.

While she and her husband took me in for a few days (many people gave me lodging while I

explored out there), she expressed that she did not like me nor did she appreciate my interest in

her traditions. She called me a New Ager and accused me of cultural imperialism. That

accusation represented a watershed moment in my research and a major paradigm shift in my

perspective on shamanism. After long reflecting on my experiences at Pine Ridge, especially that

one, I realized that, although I did not consider myself a New Ager, I had approached shamanism

from the same epistemological perspective as the New Age Movement. Moreover, I suspected

that many other anthropologists who research shamanism have fallen into this same

epistemological trap. Beyond the concept of shamanism’s heuristic function, something

embedded in our psyches, perhaps a product of our culture, constructs our idea of the primitive,

including primitive religion, and is bound with the concept of the indigenous other. Thus, this

thesis is a criticism of the anthropological concept of shamanism and the epistemology through

which scholars and mystics alike have arrived at the purported source of pre-Western wisdom

and “archaic ecstasy.”

In some ways Marshall Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason has informed my

criticism, especially in terms of the relationship of culture-structure and ecology. As

globalization has created the ecological “marble block” for the sculpting process in Western

consciousness, it has allowed the ancient construction of primitive otherness to persist in a new

age. As this thesis will lay out, this process began in the ancient world, best illustrated through

Hellenic culture, where the Ancient Greeks’ economic and mystical endeavors in the Pontic-

Caspian region simultaneously reinforced and were informed by their own culture-structure of

the polis and its associated ideologies.

viii

Acknowledgments

I would first and foremost like to dedicate this work to and offer the utmost gratitude to

my host on my 2014 South Dakota Trip, and now brother, Weldon Two-Bulls, of the Pine Ridge

Lakota Sioux. I also thank Frankie Running (Rosebud Lakota, Kent, OH) and Marrott Taylor

(Curve Lake Anishinabe, Peterborough, ON) for their input and discussions in 2014. Many

thanks also to my brother and fellow searcher-of-truth, Christopher Wilhide, through two theses

and through years of chaos. Much gratitude to my office mates and colleagues at Kent State,

Dexter Zirkle and Matthew Hudnall, for countless hours of deep discussions (relevant to our

respective theses or not). Many thanks to my committee members, Evgenia Fotiou and Alice

Kehoe, for fruitful discussions, insight, and direction. Moreover, I hold the deepest gratitude for

my advisor, Richard Feinberg, for tolerating my frequent disappearances into the ether and

reappearances in the academic polis as if I saw myself as a modern Aristeas, Abaris, or

Salmoxis, and for his immeasurable patience and wisdom exhibited in dealing with me

throughout my time at Kent. Finally, to all my relatives, Aho!

If you gaze long into an abyss,

the abyss also gazes into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsch

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Problem of Shamanism in Ethnology, Archaeology, and Historiography

In both academic and popular lexicon, shamanism is simultaneously one of the most

recognizable yet least understood terms. The educated classes of the Western world have long

known about the shamans of Central Eurasia, as the term itself comes from the Siberian Tungus

saman (Laufer 1917), and the term is often taken to be synonymous with “witchdoctor,”

“sorcerer,” “wizard,” “healer,” and other such Western lexical relics from the Age of Exploration

and the waves of colonialism which followed. Almost uniformly Western observers, educated or

not, understood the religious traditions of the native populations they encountered from Australia

to the Americas in terms of indigenous otherness. The application of the term “indigenous” is

problematic when used as an essential category of otherness in the Western perspective. Thus,

this type of word-usage has received little criticism for its lack of a clear definition outside of the

most basic (i.e., being native to a particular place) (Cunningham and Stanley 2003; French

2011). Although a full exploration of the concept of indigenous is beyond the scope of this

thesis, as a Western concept it is bound to the problem of shamanism. Like indigenous,

shamanism lacks a clear definition despite scholars’ attempts to conjure one (Eliade 1964; Jolly

2005; DuBois 2009; Sidky 2010). All attempts to define either “indigenous” or “shamanism”

have heretofore ignored the role of otherness in their conception. Shamanism and indigenous,

thus, inextricably inhabited the same space in the Western mind. It is the religion of the exotic,

indigenous other, the natives, the savages, the barbarians, the primitives, and so on and so forth.

Therefore, it is imagined as the religion of our own primitive past, or so it might appear in the

classical Western construction of otherness. In a way, this accounts in part for the pervasive

application of the more widely recognized term “shamanism,” despite its intellectual migration

out of its original Northern Eurasian context, in discussions of global indigenous religions today.

This thesis will illustrate how shamanism reflects more about the structure of the human

mind than it does about the ethnographic subjects of the ethnography of religion, especially in

imagining the past and in interpreting present cultures within the framework of said imagined

past. As the scholarly genealogy of the concept of shamanism has already been thoroughly

exhausted (see Atkinson 1992; Boekhoven 2011; Whisker 2013; and Fotiou 2016), this thesis

will instead approach the issue from a different anthropological angle which A. M. Khazanov

calls paleoanthropology, or the application of historical criticism to valuable ancient

ethnographic sources (Khazanov 1984 in Wright 1998:25). As the so-called civilized literary and

artistic centers of humankind have been observing and interpreting the so-called savage societies

outside their walls for millennia, careful scholarship will find that some of the same

anthropological questions that appeared in ancient discussions about the primitive other persist

today, albeit in different contexts. Shamanism is nothing more than a product of that long

discussion.

The rest of this introductory chapter will discuss some of the contemporary problems

with the concept of shamanism in ethnology, archaeology, and historiography. This should

prepare the reader for the discussion of the relationship of shamanism today and some of the

dominant religious and mythological traditions of Ancient Greece, both of which emerge from

the “civilized” mind imagining the “primitive other.”

Primitivism and Shamanism

In the wake of globalization and postmodernism, anthropology has become divided on

the definition and the accurate usage of the words “shaman,” “shamanism,” and “shamanic.” On

one side of this division, followers of Mircea Eliade’s school of thought since the mid-twentieth

century have understood shamanism as a kind of primordial religion, a tradition of mythology,

ritual, and ontology purportedly ancestral to all religions in existence today. In this school of

thought, scholars of religion seek cross-cultural parallels in terms of mythic archetypes, spiritual

connections to the natural world and netherworld, and, most popularly, altered states of

consciousness, especially through ritual intoxication or ecstasy (Eliade 1964; Liberty 1970;

Harner 1980; Noll 1985; Wasson et al. 1986; Porterfield 1987; McClenon 1997; DuBois 2009).

In spite of such mythologizing of human history, shamanism is not the remnant tradition of a

bygone age before Western imperialism but rather the product of the invention of tradition and

the politics of social space as a result of inter-societal relationships of power. As this thesis will

demonstrate, it is an invented tradition, to borrow from the terminology of historian E. J.

Hobsbawm, because its inventors (i.e., scholars such as Eliade) have concocted “shamanism” out

of the traditions of a plethora of mostly unrelated cultures upon the premises that those traditions

are 1) indigenous, or 2) primordial or very ancient. Often the two are conflated to refer to an

ancient understanding of human nature more commonly known as the noble savage. Shamanism

imagines, from the perspective of modern, global civilization, the indigenous minorities of the

world as an homogenous, Romanticized, exotic other who possesses innate wisdom about the

natural-spiritual world, which civilization abandoned when it left the wilderness for the polis.

Nevertheless, the study of shamanism has long played a fundamental role in an

anthropological discussion on human nature which originated in the Enlightenment theories of

Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, and others (Lowenthal 1985: 232-3; Trigger 2006: 110-116). This

rather dated debate persisted to the present through numerous paradigm shifts. Yet it often

travelled beneath the current of discussion as an almost unspoken, sublime element which posits

the human condition, past and present, in an ethical dimension. We can summarily describe this

debate as divided over whether the primitive state of man, however imagined, was good or bad.

Rousseau asserted that it was good. Hobbes argued the opposite. Historiographical parallels can

be found throughout the major currents of anthropological discourse. Boas, although critical of

Rousseau’s naïve notion of primitive virtue and himself not a romantic, clearly saw in the

world’s indigenous cultures the origin of all human culture in the sense of cultural roots. In 1889

he claimed the “history of the sciences, the history of inventions, and above all the history of

religions point to the study of their germinal forms among primitive peoples” (1989:67-8,

emphasis mine). Primitive religion and primitive society, as Westerners have constructed them,

represent the romantic germ of human culture in such a paradigm. For those observers during the

Age of Imperialism, and for many observers today, “primitive” equates to “prelapsarian.” In

some ways, Boasian ethnology sought to unearth that ideal in its methodology, and so

anthropology’s course was set for the shores of the peripheral, foggy, perhaps even Hyperborean

territories of the indigenous other for the next century of ethnographic research.

The admirable nobility of primitive societies was also an integral part of early Marxist

social theory and gave rise to the concept of primitive communalism. Marx was fascinated with

pre-capitalist, pre-feudal economies, and so the “primitive simplicity” of such societies, although

he did not idealize them as pure communism (Marx 1969:271). Marx and Engels early on

forwarded their criticisms of the economies of “tribal ownership” in German Ideology for its

shortcomings of patriarchy and slavery in the division of labor. However, the work of Lewis

Henry Morgan, namely Ancient Society (1877) and Houses and House-Life of the American

Aborigines (1881), the latter in which Morgan makes extensive use of the phrase “communism in

living” to describe aboriginal society, such as the social order of the Iroquois nations, had a

lasting impact on the theories of Marx and Engels. Ethnological observation seemingly offered

Marx and Engels the proof they needed to support their model of human history. However,

Marxist anthropology, well into the twentieth century, stumbled over the seemingly paradoxical

observations ethnographers made on primitive religion in egalitarian societies (Barsh 1988). The

Mbuti, for example, whose economy and religion both revolved around reliance upon the entity

of the Forest, presented a stumbling block for Marxists exploring the “primitive communalism”

of these natives which had to be reconciled to the integration of their ideology into their mode of

subsistence (Barsh 1988:194-95). On one hand, Marxists from Marx and Engels onwards sought

out primitive egalitarian societies to support their economic model, but the aspect of religion, the

reflection of social relations, contradicted their idealization of the other.

Anthropology, especially towards the latter part of the twentieth century, follows

Rousseau’s ideal of the native, even if that ideal is embedded subconsciously as sublime

empathy for the other. The conservative reaction to this school of thought, namely among

sociobiologists such as Napoleon Chagnon, held Hobbes’s premise that primitive society is

nasty, brutish, and short (see Chagnon’s comments in 2013:7-10). Both perspectives on the

human condition operate in a larger paradigm of cultural evolution, as both camps imagine (or

inadvertently imply) that indigenous peoples represent the most ancient past of all human

ancestors. The implications of that premise traverse the Rousseau/Hobbes dichotomy, and

archaeological, historical, and ethnographic information has filtered through the paradigm of this

archaic debate since the period of the Enlightenment.

The reality of our human past might never come fully to the light, yet humans continually

look to the past to make sense of the present and for self-actualization. In academia, this is most

manifest in archaeology, linguistics, history, and anthropology as a whole. The social and

cultural conditions of the present undeniably affect the narrative(s) of human history. From the

perspective of Hobbes, whose England had emerged from the Cromwell years into the era of

royal restoration, chaos, turmoil, and tribulation typified the lawless state of man, and law

naturally comes with social order. Thus the state of primitive man prior to social order is one of

chaos, in the mind of Hobbes. Rousseau, alternately, from the perspective of living under the

thumb of an oppressive French monarchy, viewed the primitive state before and outside of the

social order of civilization as the truly good state of humanity. The historical conditions of each

of these individuals’ worlds naturally shaped their diametrically opposed views on mankind.

Moreover, these views accompanied the spread of European colonialism and imperialism

worldwide well into the twentieth century.

I do not plan to defend one stance or the other. Actually, I argue that noble and brutish

savages alike are more the result of values which the observer subconsciously (or perhaps

consciously on occasion) embeds in his or her reflections on ethnographic subjects. More recent

anthropology has had some successes in rising above this dilemma, but the problem remains in

the anthropology of religion, especially the diverse traditions associated with so-called

indigenous cultures. That is not to say every scholar of indigenous religions is necessarily in

agreement with Eliade. Rather, it is something deeply embedded in the Western perspective and

perhaps even deeper in the human psyche, which has systematically created the space of

otherness in which the slots of “indigenous” and “shamanism” have been imagined.

Consequently, the social theorizations of Hobbes and Rousseau helped propel the debate on the

nature of the primitive into the birth of professional anthropology, as we discussed above.

As the bulk of this discourse will delineate, this debate goes back much further than the

Enlightenment, to Ancient Greece, with parallels and antecedents throughout the civilizations of

the Ancient Near and Far East. The pessimism of Hobbes can be found in much of Plato’s work,

whereas Hesiod artfully describes a much more idyllic quality in the natural man, much like

Rousseau. A careful reader of Aristotle might notice he synthesizes both opposed qualities into

his theory of life beyond the political sphere of the city-state. In any of the above cases, the

savage other exists in an imagined region of space and/or time which is beyond the city-state, or

polis (pl., poleis). Free of the social boundaries of Greek laws and customs, or nomos, the

primitive other was imagined in terms of godliness or beastliness. Likewise, the noble savage of

Enlightenment thought is an archetype of otherness which is removed from the social boundaries

by both imagined space and time. From Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh to Rudyard Kipling’s

Mowgli, primitive otherness as noble savage appears in a naturally pure state of naïveté,

untainted by the rise of the sedentary powers of human civilization. Primitive man thus

represents the ethical paradigms of the present but also creates a space for characterizing past

and present peoples in terms of imagined otherness. In other words, the noble savage represents

humanity’s origins imagined as good and, moreover, that primitive cultures today signify living

examples of those origins. It is Eliade’s “Yearning for Paradise” that he argues is at the root of

the study of the primitive. Rousseau would applaud him.

Ultimately, such theories founded in a Romantic search for origins fall short of offering

anything of real academic value. Shamanism plays an integral part in the current discussion in

anthropology about early human culture and the evolution of religions. The study of shamanism

is, however, bogged down with the Romantic notions discussed above. Shamanism in this sense

becomes overgeneralized and superficial. Moreover, the constructed form of shamanism offered

through the works of figures like Eliade, Harner, Wasson, and others became popularized with

the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s and attracted Westerners interested in

psychedelic drug-use and alternative systems of thought. This unintended effect of the

ethnography of altered states of consciousness perhaps has left some stigma on its study but has

also given it some popularity. On the other side of the intellectual chasm, more recent scholars

such as Alice Kehoe reject the application of the term, “shamanism,” outside of the study of the

region of its original context, that is, Central Eurasia (and more specifically, Siberia) (Atkinson

1992; Amitai-Preiss 1999; Kehoe 2000; Schnurbein 2003; Sidky 2010; Whisker 2013).

Somewhat recently, Pieter Jolly (2005) has attempted a reconstruction of the term,

shamanism, which acknowledges its original indigenous usage but also tries to identify

underlying principles which could be useful in examination of cultures which have been

described in academia as “shamanic.” He proposes that shamanism refers to religious traditions

which “possess religious functionaries who draw on the powers in the natural world, including

the powers of animals, and who mediate, usually in an altered state of consciousness, between

the world of the living and that of the spirits including the spirits of the dead” (pp.127-128).

Jolly’s peers are unsatisfied with the cross-cultural usefulness of this definition. Klein, Guzman,

and Stanfield-Mazzi comment on Jolly’s position as having improved the scholarly classification

of shamanism but that it evades the problems concerning its application in cultures beyond the

Northern Eurasian context. Even so, shamanism persists in academic discourse. Outside of

Northern Eurasia, ethnographic material on so-called shamanic traditions is most prominent in

the contemporary writings on indigenous traditions of the Americas (Benedict 1923; Siebert

1937; Johnson 1943; Harner 1962; Spencer et al. 1965; La Barre 1970b; Ellis 1993), whereas

Africa (Katz 1982; Lewis-Williams 2001), Southeast Asia (DuBois 2009), Australia (Radcliffe-

Brown 1926; Elkin 1945; Lévi-Strauss 1963), and Melanesia-Polynesia (Layard 1930; Herdt

1977; Keesing 1982; Wallis 2002) receive far less attention. More often, ethnographic

information on various native religious traditions can be gleaned from works specific to certain

groups or communities but more generalized in subject matter. And often in these cases

shamanic terminology seldom appears where other concepts, such as sorcery and ancestor

worship, abound.

The Problem with Ethnographic Analogue and the Archaeology of Religion

Given that certain ethnologists seek a unifying root of present native religions (or all

religion), it makes sense they would look to the distant past as the primordial source of human

spirituality. Lewis Binford (1962) calls the explanation of the ritual or mythological significance

of an artifact in archaeological methodology ideo-technic; that is, what sort of ideology the

artifact might have conveyed in its original context. There is a problem, however, since we

cannot know for certain what the ideo-technic context of an artifact was if the archaeological

culture is disconnected from cultures of the present; that is, if no historically verifiable

connection exists between the assemblage and modern descendants or claimants. Furthermore,

the historical contingencies of human migration and culture change raise the question of who the

descendants of past cultures are, if any even exist. We can also add to this messy issue the fact

that contemporary groups might give new meaning to prehistoric sites and artifacts to which they

claim some connection, whether Stonehenge or Kennewick Man. This becomes a heated topic in

the politics of culture and especially in the construction of indigenous identity. For example,

although no known descendants of Woodland Ohioan cultures exist today, Ohio mortuary sites

such as Libben fall under the jurisdiction of the Native American Graves Protection and

Repatriation Act of 1998 simply because, from a modern perspective, these cultures are

indigenous. Once bracketed as indigenous, ideo-technic artifacts tend to fall into the category of

shamanism in the archaeology of religion. Numerous archaeologists, with some exceptions to be

dealt with below, simply assume prehistoric religion equates to indigenous religion and thus

shamanism. Modern constructs of “indigenous” and “shamanism” thus erroneously become

lenses for the scholar looking into the distant human past.

Given that most of these types of explanation tend to be conjectural, scholars are tempted

to describe the ideo-technic value of artifacts and sites in historical or ethnological terms. They

typically do so through the use of a method known as ethnographic analogy, that is, the

application of traditions of the present to explain the traditions of the extinct past, whether or not

any actual relationship exists between the two (Trigger 2006:416-17). Archaeologists and

historians have thus attempted to identify the occurrence of shamanic traditions in past cultures

through the explanation of artifacts and sacred sites in terms of ideologies which parallel modern

indigenous traditions globally. Despite the difficulties of limited primary sources, archaeologists

essentially have, in terms of the politics of culture, the power to reconstruct traditions of

shamanism in extinct cultural remains with little academic hindrance to the idea that shamanism

is very ancient. This is not to say that the archaeological assemblages described as shamanic

were not religiously or ritually important to the people who originally made and used the

artifacts. Rather, we must ask, how are prehistoric religions shamanic?

Rather than any empirically sound delineation of the prehistory of religions, what we find

under the guise of cross-cultural analysis is an insistence on indigenous religion as being very

old and typically associated with Altered States of Consciousness (ASC). It is a rickety and

unsound bridge that has been built between modern indigenous religions, prehistoric ideo-technic

artifacts, and an imagined and Romantic Paleolithic “shamanism.” This is especially true for the

archaeology of religion in North America. For example, Brown (1997) holds no reservations

about describing the entirety of Eastern Woodland religions, their ritual paraphernalia and

associated iconography, as shamanism. We do not know exactly what the relationships were

between the religions of the various Eastern Woodland groups historically, let alone

prehistorically so Brown’s attempt to lump them under one category is spurious. That is not to

say there are no relationships between traditions. Stothers and Abel (1993:68-70, 79), without

falling into the trap of using shamanic terminology, provide some compelling explanations for

the ideo-technic uses of some Late Archaic cultic grave goods, ursine and canine skull-masks

from the Williams Mortuary Complex on the Lower Maumee River. Likewise, Seeman

(2007:174-82) interprets the “successful predator motif” of similar animal and human jaw-

trophies and animal effigy pipes in ideo-technic, cultic terms without crossing over into the

fanciful world of shamanism. The strongest connections between past and present indigenous

North American religions have been found in the late-prehistoric and historical archaeology of

Anishinabe (i.e., Ojibwa or Chippewa) Midewiwin ceremonial materials.

The strength in the study of Midewiwin tradition is the attestable continuity between past

and present. However, even here scholars often make heavy use of shamanic terminology in the

description of Anishinabe spirituality. For instance, Whiteford (1991:75) assumes “as with many

other Native American peoples, the Anishinabe worldview has always been deeply religious and

mystical,” and frequently calls practitioners “shamans” with no method which explains why

Midewiwin is shamanism. Midewiwin as shamanism has also been loosely associated with other

North American prehistoric cultures: Fort Ancient (Cook 2012), Peterborough Petroglyphs

(Colson 2007), and Canadian Shield rock art in general (Whelan 1983). One exception, a study

of Misaukee Earthworks in Northern Lower Michigan (Howey and O’Shea 2006) draws an

historic-ethnographic association with Midewiwin mythology and the proposed context of the

site without using the shamanic terminology. Beyond the Anishinabe, Zedeño (2008:376) takes a

similar “shamanic” approach to the ceremonial medicine bundles of historical Northern Plains

groups such as the Blackfoot in the explanation of prehistoric ideo-technic bundle-assemblages

as indigenous “concepts and principles that guide relationships between human and non-human

agents.”

A number of scholars have focused on the ideo-technic value of rock art and associated

mytho-religious contexts, specifically petroglyphs, in North America (Whelan 1983; Hedden

2002; Colson 2007; Lenik 2010) and worldwide (Price 2001; Wallis 2002; Lymer 2004; Þorr and

Bell 2012). Religious or not, rock-art refers to paintings, such as in the Lascaux Caves, France;

inscriptions or petroglyphs, such as at Peterborough, Ontario; megaliths like Stonehenge,

England; or combined rock-art, such as Kamyana Mohyla, Ukraine. Rock-art occurs globally and

throughout time, albeit in endlessly different contexts with meanings which are temporally and

culturally specific. Rock-art also offers the advantage of existing in the present instead of

vanishing with their makers, but also the added complexity of changing meaning with each

group to use a site over time. Many groups exist today who utilize rock-art as sacred sites,

whether or not they were the original people to do so (Lymer 2004). For example, and to return

to the topic of Midewiwin, Anishinabe spiritualists today utilize sacred petroglyph sites across

the Great Lakes region of North America in vision-seeking, rites of passage, and the transmission

of tradition from generation to generation, which I observed on my own visit to Peterborough.

As such, Whelan (1983) and Colson (2007) feel compelled to describe the religious use

of rock-art among the Anishinabe as an ancient tradition of North American shamanism. Both

scholars utilize a “homological” method of “comparing archaeological data with related historic

and ethnographic cultures,” which builds a strong case for a very old lineage of Anishinabe rock-

art tradition but which makes no methodical connection to a supposedly primordial religion or

Paleo-shamanism (Colson 2007:156-7). Like Colson, Whelan (1983:83) claims to make a

systematic attempt to interpret rock-art, but his Anishinabe shamans become mere “handlers of

supernatural power,” supposedly observable in the archaeological record. Likewise, Hedden

(2002) identifies prehistoric and early historic petroglyph figures in Machias Bay, Maine as

shamans but leaves in unclear what a shaman exactly is. Lenik (2010) tries to keep his rock-art

analysis within the mythological context of northeastern Indians, but he too liberally interprets

figures and motifs within the bracket of shamanism.

Robert J. Wallis (2002) makes a bold attempt to synthesize ethnographic analogy and the

archaeology of shamanism in his analysis of cave art on the Melanesian island of Malakula. On

this island, Wallis contends, there is a strong correlation between the indigenous tradition of

bwili shamanism and the ritual use of rock-art in the island’s cave systems. Seemingly a

labyrinth adorned with abstract paintings and petroglyphs, the caves represent, according to

Wallis, the ASC associated with shamanic traditions of rites of passage and vision-seeking, in

other words, the imagery of the shamanic “trance” (p.749). Wallis, no disciple of Eliade, admits

that the Western use of the term “shaman” is problematic, but he accepts that it has gained

enough intellectual currency to warrant its continued use (pp.740-41). Although he is wary of the

overgeneralization when applied cross-culturally, Wallis favors a “neuropsychological”

paradigm by which shamanism refers to socially sanctioned, ritually induced altered states of

consciousness, which occur cross-culturally in a variety of specific and unrelated contexts.

Cross-culturally, caves as mytho-ritual centers also seem to symbolize connections between the

chthonic underworld and mundane above-world, a topic we will delve into in chapter 3. For now,

let us draw our attention to ASC and the neuropsychological explanation of shamanism.

Entheogens and Altered States of Consciousness in the Narrative

Now we are arriving closer to the driving force behind the categorization of indigenous

traditions as shamanism. Since the popularization of mind-altering substances in the West during

the 1960s and the emergence of the New Age Movement, shamanism has come to embody an

epistemological alternative to traditional, modernist Western thought. As such, the ASC,

especially as achieved through the imbibing of entheogens, or culturally and ritually specific

mind-altering substances or hallucinogens, became a popular topic in the literature on indigenous

religions. Some, such as Harner, even prefer to use the phrase “shamanic states of

consciousness” to differentiate them from the ASC of non-religious experiences. For simplicity’s

sake we will use “ASC” to describe the altered state in general, but in the context of ritual

intoxication which others have described as shamanic. For many followers of Eliade’s view that

shamanism is the “archaic technique of ecstasy,” the ASC is the common denominator of

shamanic traditions, something which Sidky (2010) finds problematic for its sloppy

generalizations. Michael Harner brought Amazonian ayahuasca to the attention of Western

readers, V. G. Wasson legitimatized entheogenic fungi as a primordial tradition in human

history, and a plethora of local, native intoxicants worldwide have been pouring into Western

consciousness for decades, usually quite devoid of any authentic ceremonial context (See also

Stewart 1980 on Peyote and Mescaline; and Pochettino et al. 1999 on Andean cebil snuff).

Although traditions of ASC do not have to include mind-altering substances as ritually

prescribed, and despite the fact that many traditions achieve ASC through fasting, prayer,

suffering, and discipline, the ones with the mind-altering substance are far more popular among

Western enthusiasts and acolytes. In any case, the vision is important in many indigenous

religions and in many religious traditions generally (Noll 1985).

That being said, archaeologists of shamanism, such as Wallis (2002), following the

neuropsychological approach, look for material evidence of ASC in both ritual paraphernalia and

iconography symbolic of (or perhaps inducing) the supposed shamanic trance. Additional

ethnobotanical and ethnomycological evidence, either from ethnographic analogy or laboratory

analysis of archaeological materials, further contributes to the construction of prehistoric

shamanic ASC traditions in such a paradigm (LaBarre 1970; Pochettino et al 1999; Merlin 2003;

Russo et al. 2008). Wallis (2002:742, 753) argues that kava, a mild intoxicant part of some

traditions in Oceania in both ritual and social contexts, was an integral part of bwili shamanism

on Malakula in conjunction with the imagery of “trance metaphors and spirit helpers” of the cave

rock-art. In the North American context, Emerson (2003), a follower of Eliade, holds that a

number of Pre-Columbian pipes associated with the Cahokia culture reflect a “shamanic core” of

ASC, ritual accoutrements, spirit helpers, soul flight, and animal-gender transformations. Much

of Emerson’s discussion is conjectural and stems from an Eliadic imagination with little to no

empirical backing. Similarly, Pavesic (2000:325-7) asserts that an assemblage of Early Archaic

pipes from Old Ferry Dunes site, Western Idaho, suggests a “ritual or magico-religious usage” in

a shamanic context of healing, ASC, and life/death soul-travel.

Likewise, VanPool (2009) champions the shamanic interpretation of North American

archaeology in her study of the Pottery Mound and Casas Grandes sites of the American

Southwest. Following the theory of Liberty (1970), which posits that the dichotomy between

priest and shaman is superficial and on a continuum rather than structurally and mutually

exclusive categories, VanPool attempts to systematically define shamanism materially in terms

of cross-cultural regularities in “shamanic tools” and “experiences.” Accordingly, and much like

Wallis, VanPool claims the ASC is observable in the material record through the confluence of

iconographic trance-imagery and ritualistic, trance-inducing paraphernalia which ranges from

musical instruments to tobacco pipes (2009:183).

With all this focus on supposedly observable ASC in the archaeological record, we still

have yet to arrive at a clear and sound definition of shamanism. I have no doubt that some if not

each of these instances indicate some kind of ASC, but whether or not the inclusion of those

instances in the category of shamanism would be accurate is another question entirely. Tobacco,

especially the wilder strains of nicotiana rustica, is indeed an intoxicant (Janiger and Dobkin de

Rios 1976), and it is one with a variety of traditions in which it is ceremonially important

throughout the Americas and worldwide in the wake of globalization, for example, in

conjunction with Datura in Afghan Malang tradition (Sidky 1990:294). Drums, singing,

chanting, and other forms of music are used in religions around the world, not just the

“shamanic” ones. Rock-art may indeed signify vision-seeking in many traditions around the

world, but it also has many meanings alternative to achieving ASC. It is a tradition, not quite the

same as written history, nor oral history, but something revelatory, experientially and

contextually specific.

Nevertheless, many scholars of indigenous religions focus much of their attention on the

ASC. For some, the ASC is the essence of shamanism. Richard Noll, for instance, considers

shamanism a “cultural cultivation of mental imagery” which attempts to recreate “spontaneous

imaginative experiences” (1985:444). Problematically, he bases his understanding of shamanism

on the framework of Eliade as an original religion at the center of which is the vision: “The

magico-medico-religious complexes in traditional, non-literate societies collectively known as

shamanism provide the best-documented example of vision cultivation” (p.444). The ASC or

trance is certainly attestable historically and ethnographically throughout the religious traditions

of the Americas and worldwide, as is the use of ritual intoxicants in some contexts. Peyote,

mescal, and to some extent various species of mushrooms are among the more potent North

American entheogens with traditions which are quite old. Ayahuasca is possibly the most widely

recognized South American entheogen and is also quite popular for Western tourists and New

Agers in search of authentic ethno-religious experiences (Fotiou 2016). Other South American

entheogens like the coca plant have longstanding ceremonial traditions as well. Tobacco, which

was widespread throughout pre-contact North and South America, has a broad spectrum of

breeds which vary in strength, the strongest of which “literally knocked the Indians out” in

ceremonial contexts and can produce more vibrant effects than a standard nicotine hit (Janiger

and Dobkin de Rios 1976:296). Even alcohol, in early contact times, found a religious niche

which has been described as shamanic among Eastern North American groups despite modern

misconceptions about Indians and drinking (Trenk 2001), let alone its Eurasian contexts.

These are only a few gleanings of the countless examples of indigenous American uses of

ritual intoxicants, many of which are attestable historically, ethnographically, and

archaeologically. As stated above, ritual intoxicants only make up a small portion of ASC

traditions among American indigenous cultures, past and present. Mind-altering experiences are

interesting, and the added-flair of ASC embedded in any tradition bracketed as indigenous

provides a sense of exotic authentication for many non-academic Western readers. For lack of a

better phrase, drugs sell. Otherwise, Michael Harner would write about how the Lakota vision

quest is a three-four day ordeal involving sweat lodge and abstinence from food, water, and

human contact. Pain and isolation give the Lakota adolescent male his vision. Anything else is a

shortcut or is purely recreational. Instead, Harner describes how ayahuasca and similar

entheogens take you on wild trips, which naturally attracts attention from those interested in such

things whether spiritually or recreationally. Given, Harner is a highly respected scholar and an

advocate for Amazonian traditions of healing for Westerners. Nevertheless, his paradigm is

suspect.

This is not to say that legitimate ethnological research has not been done on ASC and

indigenous religions. Rather, the general interest in shamanism and the ASC stems from a

societal urge to seek epistemologically alternative paths of wisdom which society assumes is not

only prehistoric but primordial in human history. By “societal” I do not mean that every member

of society follows or even necessarily feels this urge, but rather it is in the air, in the ether, in the

sublime. It is also an ideology which is actually deeply rooted in the consciousness of

civilization, which we touched upon above and which this entire thesis will lay out. As an

ideology, it is, like many other origin myths found in the world, given to the populace of its

culture below from the ascents of the structure above. Furthermore, like those myths, much is

conjecture. But for what aim, and with what evidence? The archaeology of religion searches for

it because, perhaps without even really knowing it, we equate prehistoric religion with imagined,

preconceived notions of primitivism. As primitive religion, we then assume such prehistoric

traditions are related to existing modern ones which, as indigenous, are also primitive or the

closest thing to primitive that we have. Basically, we are led to believe that shamanism is

primitive and prehistoric. In a speculative bout, James McClenon goes so far as to suggest that

shamanism is not only primordial but actually catalyzed human evolution, physically and

culturally. For instance, on the origin of human fire-use, McClenon remarks, “H. erectus may

have spent millennia gazing into fires while chanting, singing, and engaging in mimetic rituals,

activities inducing therapeutic ASC” (1997:349). Imaginative and entertaining, McClenon’s

model, of which this is only one episode, is pure conjecture.

From the Problems of Paleo-Shamanism to its Application in Historiography

Alice Kehoe (1996) takes issue with this application of “shamanism” to the

archaeological record, because it proceeds upon Eliade’s idea of a primordial shamanism. To

Kehoe, the assumption that a primordial religious tradition once existed, from which all

“shamanisms” descend, denies modern indigenous religions their own agency and context. This

has seemingly created a rift between archaeological and ethnographic discourse. Some

Paleolithic peoples may have practiced something which resembles some aspects of modern

indigenous religions, but we cannot assume that indigenous religions are any older than the rest

of the religious traditions of the world or that they have not changed, died out, or emerged in

their own historical contexts.

The problem of shamanism has similarly cropped up in the historiography of Islamic

civilization, most prominently in the relationship between mystic Islam, namely Sufism, and the

conversion of the barbarian nomads of the north and east, namely Turks and Mongols

(Trimingham 1971:54, see also pp.130-31 on Sufi syncretism with Indonesian and African

religions; Amitai-Preiss 1999; Geoffroy 2010:21, 105). Again, the issue is one of applying the

term beyond its means. Noll (1985:451) notes a Sufi practice of contacting spirit-guides during

mystic vision-seeking experiences. Geoffroy (2010) maintains that shamanism and Sufism share

some inherent quality, probably unrelated to the tendency of some Sufis to smoke hashish. Like

Eliade, Geoffroy yearns for an identifiable tradition at the root of all religions, and unsurprisingly

he focuses on the altered state of consciousness. Conversely, Amitai-Preiss (1999) thoroughly

investigated the matter and concluded that there was no conceivable relationship between

Medieval Central Asian shamanism and the conversion of groups like the Mongols to Islam.

Sidky’s ethnography of Afghan Malang, essentially Muslim ascetics and healers in rural

modern Afghanistan, identifies these traditions as part of a modern amalgamation of Islam and

pre-Islamic Central Asian religion, or shamanism (1990). Modern occurrences of this

phenomenon in Central Asia also have been associated with the syncretism of indigenous

petroglyph sacred sites and Islamic ziyarat sites, or supposed grave sites of Islamic saints (Sidky

1990; Lymer 2004). For instance, Lymer notes that two Kazakhstan petroglyph sites in

particular, Tamgaly and Terekty Aulie, associated with Bronze Age archaeological cultures, have

been given Islamic meaning in modern contexts of Kazakh ancestor veneration but which have

pre-Islamic contexts associated with millennia of Eurasian Steppe pastoralist religious traditions.

Himself an Afghan, Sidky argues that shamanism is integral to Afghan Islam for its

traditions of healing and spirit-communication as well as ritual ecstasy. The pre-Islamic Central

Asian shamans, in Sidky’s model, essentially became the mystics and holy men of Islamic

Afghanistan associated with Sufism. The key difference Sidky notes, however, between Sufis

and shamans is that the shaman aims to “gain control of particular spirits rather than to obtain

mystical union with the divine,” as the Sufi orders do (1990:278-9). Malang do not follow any

specific guidelines aside from what their teachers pass on to them in their apprenticeship-

initiation and the Qur’an. Within the context of Islam, these Afghan Malang utilize the ASC

through both socially prescribed prayer-fasting and the use of tobacco and Datura as entheogens;

they engage with malicious jinnd entities in visions and in healing ceremonies; and overall they

cultivate a mastery over the spirit world. According to Sidky (2010:231), “mastery over spirit

helpers” is the single characteristic that separates shamanism from non-shamanic spiritualists

whom scholars have lumped together under the same term. It seems like a fairly basic

distinction, but also one that excludes the vast majority of indigenous traditions which

Westerners often include as shamanic.

In a way, Sidky brings shamanism back to its own roots as a Central-Northern Eurasian

phenomenon. However, although he is openly critical of Eliade’s paradigm of primordial

shamanism, Sidky does not engage long with the Eliade’s implication that indigenous peoples

worldwide are somehow attached to an imaginary Paleolithic religious tradition. Shamanism in

its context of the Eurasian steppe, taiga, and possibly arctic regions is embedded in a deep

history and prehistory of the socio-economic interplay of nomadic and sedentary civilizations.

Similar circumstances may have occurred in other parts of the world at various times, but we

might not be able to apply a term from one cultural-historical context globally based only on

Eliade’s understanding of shamanism. Sidky is correct in providing a specific criterion for

describing religious traditions which emanate from Central Eurasia.

The shamanism problem worked its way into classical history in addition to archaeology.

At least as early as Karl Meuli’s 1935 essay, “Scythica,” shamanism became an accepted term

with which to describe the ancient religions of the barbarians of the northern Pontic-Caspian

Steppe. A racial element guided the argument at the time, equating Scythians with the Hun-

Asiatic “Mongoloid” physical and cultural type as per the theories at the time which certain

German nationalists glorified and used to served their own political ends. Given that many of

these so-called barbarians were part of the larger cultural complex of Central Eurasia, it is less of

a stretch to describe their traditions in terms of shamanism. Even V. Gordon Childe (1926) notes

the relationship between the Scythian religious traditions in archaeology and those of the later

historical Mongols. Perhaps more accurately than the use of shamanism in American

archaeology, a number of archaeological and historical studies of Central Eurasia from Bulgaria

to the Altai region highlight an extensive cultural horizon of traditions which exhibit qualities

similar and related to Siberian shamanism, and they have been described in such terms (Mančar

1952; Loehr 1955; Fol & Marazov 1977; Heissig 1980; Mundkur et al. 1984; Mallory & Mair

2000; Russo et al. 2008). However, we should be just as careful about categorizing the

archaeological ideo-technic assemblages of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe within the shamanic slot.

Consequently, and falling in line with Eliade’s paradigm, a large number of Greek

classicists since the mid-twentieth century adopted shamanism as a means of explaining the

development of Archaic and Classical Greek religious traditions (Carpenter 1946; Dodds 1951;

West 1982, 1998; Ruck 1986; Littleton 1986; Lateiner 1990; Ustinova 2009) with little

opposition (Bolton 1962; Bremmer 1983). This historiographical trend is rife with the same

Romanticist problems which plague Eliade’s camp, and indeed Eliade himself contributes

directly to this trend (see Eliade 1972). In the simplest terms, the consensus today is that Ancient

Greek religion originated in the hypothetical shamanic traditions of Bronze Age Proto-Indo-

European culture on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, and thus one can identify shamanic “survivals”

in Hellenic mythology and ritual with parallels in the contemporaneous culture groups to the

north of the Greek heartland. Unfortunately, like Eliade, this system of thought relies upon a neo-

Romanticist “noble savage” premise and ignores the more complex cultural processes which

occurred on Greece’s northern frontier from the Archaic period onward, as well as the elements

of Mediterranean and Mesopotamian religions. The issue of what has been called “Greek

Shamanism” will constitute the bulk of this thesis with the goal of arriving at a more accurate

definition of shamanism in a modern, global sense.

Shamanism as Practically Barbarian Religion

Arriving at a sound definition of shamanism was well beyond the scope of my first M.A.

thesis (Linebaugh 2013), as my focus was on the construction of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy

in Late Archaic-Classical Greek culture. Nevertheless, I encountered a serious issue of cultural

and religious interaction on the ancient Pontic frontier in which scholars read modern ideas about

shamanism into the mix. What I found was a complicated system of otherization in which Greek

colonial undertakings in the Pontic region generated an ideology of the otherness of the

indigenous peoples of the Pontic region. Differences in lifeways and traditions between the polis-

centered Greeks and the nomadic and semi-nomadic Pontic groups inspired the characterization

of northerners in various fantastical ways ranging from bestial to virtuous. These

characterizations came to form the Greek idea of the barbarian, which I will summarize in the

following chapter. This thesis will focus on the influence of Pontic religious traditions in the

invention, or perhaps re-invention, of Hellenic religious traditions, specifically the mystery cults.

It is this historical-cultural process that will demonstrate how the construction of shamanism

occurs today, for the forces at work in the Hellenic world were those of ideology, power, and

exploitation just as they are today albeit on a global scale.

Yet the idea of shamanism persists, and its existence has transcended its former position

as a mere category of scholarly inquiry to become a legitimate cultural force among educated

Westerners and non-Westerners alike. As shamanism has been applied to culture groups

globally, past and present, based upon a nebulous collection of parallels in terms of practice and

belief, scholars have hitherto ignored the larger processes of hegemony and agency in tradition.

Thus, I pose two crucial questions: 1) who are the groups whose traditions are described as

shamanic; and 2) who applies the academic construct of shamanism to said subjects? The

answers to these questions tell all there really is to know about shamanism. In this global age,

shamanism functions as a constructed model of tradition, which a privileged, educated segment

of society inserts into discussions of the local traditions of culture groups who are on the

periphery of the global polis. Such culture groups have been described in the past as “savage,”

and more commonly today “indigenous,” and they are often understood as other from the

perspective of the West. In a sense, the age-old noble savage premise has been guiding the study

of shamanism, especially in the Eliade camp. The result of this type of science of religion is the

construction of an idealized primordial root-religion of Hyperborean purity, supposedly

preceding the observable social and environmental disasters of Western “progress.”

Is it any wonder then that spiritual movements like the New Age and Neo-Paganism,

which Romanticize the remote human past, have embraced the shamanism Eliade, Harner,

Wasson and others made popular? In an era of seemingly global calamity, shamanism is sold as

the purest religion and most in touch with Mother Earth, it is a response to Eliade’s “Yearning

for Paradise,” a return to Eden. Nevertheless, consider the source. Is the motive of the science of

religion and the construction of shamanism the creation of a new academic “mystery” tradition

believed to be the original religion of the human race? If so, then it seems that a Tylorian model

of cultural evolution has reemerged combined with a Romantic cyclical view of returning to the

primitive. At the same time, marginalized indigenous groups are once more reduced to the

fossilized status of noble savages whose cultures and traditions are mere exploitable resources

for those of the privileged consumer classes, and a new global polis/barbarian ideology is

reinforced.

The problem, therefore, is still one of definition. Unlike religions like Christianity and

Islam, whose multitudinous variant traditions still self-identify as being part of the larger

tradition, shamanism more accurately refers to religious traditions of independent lineages but

which outsiders might perceive to be similar. As shamanism originally referred to specific

Siberian traditions, how has it become a global religious identity among unrelated groups?

Scholars have failed to agree on a basic definition of shamanism; yet, some underlying principle

continues to lead other scholars to describe indigenous traditions as shamanic. Even those critical

of the cross-cultural use of the term, “shamanism,” acknowledge, that there are similarities

between these traditions, but they assert that culturally specific terms should be used to describe

the variations of each tradition. Their focus is on the differences between traditions, and some,

especially Alice Kehoe, refuse to entertain the idea of a “primordial shamanism.” This poses a

problem to archaeology and history of religion, the premise of which essentializes shamanism as

a hypothetical root tradition: 1) we cannot know with any certainty what the religious traditions

were, including mythologies and rituals, for extinct cultures for whom we lack historical

contextualization; 2) the application of modern shamanism in interpreting extinct cultures has the

possible error of forcing modern and possibly irrelevant traditions on the past, which of course

proceeds upon the evolutionary fallacy that modern “shamanic” cultures are living relics of the

past. This becomes increasingly problematic for the study of cultures which, prior to the last five

centuries, left few or no records and whose traditions likely changed with the ebb and flow of

history and cultural diffusion. Shamanism, thus, cannot properly refer to primitive religion.

Rather, the question should turn to one of socio-economic relationships within the contemporary

context of globalism.

What is shamanism then? It was and still is the religion of the “barbarians” in the sense

that it is a construct which represents the traditions of the other in a global society. It has become

symbolic of primitive man in global consciousness, but as an invented, or reinvented, tradition.

In the colonial past of the West, it has been described at times as rude, savage, bestial, and

superstitious; more commonly today it is understood as a source of wisdom untainted by the

errors of history. Either way, shamanism is ultimately “other” from the hegemonic perspective of

academia and the emergent religions reliant upon the ethnographic information which comes

from academia. It is not really the anthropologist’s fault, however, as we have little power over

the literature once it hits the minds of enthusiastic, yet idealistic readers. While literature on

shamanism, academic or otherwise, persists in pursuing the wisdom of the constructed noble

savage, some of it ignores the reality of marginalization and the multiplicity of traditions among

ethnographic subjects, many of which do not always match up with the constructed image of

nobility or primordial wisdom.

I hold that a similar process occurred in the culture of Ancient Greece. The following

chapters will demonstrate: 1) the complex historical-cultural context of the Hellenic-Pontic

frontier, the Greek worldview of that frontier space, and the ideology of Greek/barbarian which

emerged from that context; 2) Hellenic perspectives on indigenous Pontic religions and the

emergence of Hellenic mystery religions as invented traditions; 3) How processes similar to or

nearly the same as those which occurred in the microcosm of the ancient world occur today in

the construction of shamanism as an academic and popular global tradition.

Chapter 2

Gods, Beasts, and the Polis: Redux

The previous chapter introduced the historiographical and anthropological problem of

shamanism in which the larger issue of the construction of otherness is integral. These problems

have affected the archaeology of religion, the ethnography of so-called indigenous cultures, and

the classical history of the Ancient Greek world and surrounding cultures. This chapter serves to

summarize and refine my 2013 work on one of the most persistent Classical ideas about human

nature, one which manifested in Ancient Greek culture and likewise was adopted by the Romans.

Ancient Greeks understood the world in terms of Greek or “Hellenes” (Έλληνες) and barbarian

(βάρβαρος). Moreover, as the barbarian problem persisted in the Enlightenment and beyond, it is

just as relevant to current discussions of otherness in anthropology.

The barbarian emerged in the Hellenic consciousness as a symbolic characterization of

primitive man, both lawless and virtuous, and also as a template for describing, in terms of

otherness, real groups the Greeks encountered in their cultural sphere of contacts. Greeks viewed

indigenous groups on their frontiers as reminders of their own mythic past, and consequently the

narrative of Hellenic ancestry incorporated barbarian culture into the construction of their own

traditions, including the mystery religions. All the more, the barbarian emerged as the antithetical

other to Greek-self and the primordial shadow in the Hellenic understanding of cultural

evolution. The approach to this chapter stems from classicist and philological literature. Yet, the

meat of the question is fundamentally anthropological in the sense that it provides us an excellent

historical example of the construction of otherness. Thus, my method is ethnological rather than

philological, and could provide insight into both classical and anthropological discussions.

I utilize a diverse body of sources on the barbarians which include Ancient Greek art,

such as vase-paintings and statues, and literature, such as poetry, drama, mythology, philosophy,

and history. Perhaps more than any other source, the Histories of Herodotus, provides the largest

wealth of ancient ethnographic material on barbarian cultures. In the use of Herodotus we must

keep in mind the historical and cultural context of his work, but no scholar should ignore him

altogether. Some scholars have even referred to him as a kind of ancient anthropologist, as social

theory was among the scientific discussions of thinkers in Ancient Greece (Thomas 2000;

Sturrman 2008; Skinner 2012). His narratives, which weave cultural information into his larger

story of the Persian Wars, sometimes in brief statements, sometimes in lengthy, detailed surveys,

describe the cultural diversity of the ancient frontier of the Greek world rather than the static

barbarian who often appears in the dramas, vase-paintings, and political rhetoric of Herodotus’s

contemporaries. Thus I will often refer to passages from his work throughout this discussion.

The Barbarian Other

“Barbarian” denotes otherness, similar to other such descriptors in the English language,

like “savage,” which fell out of use during the twentieth century, and its successors “aboriginal”

and “indigenous.” The word implies that a group is outside the cultural boundaries of another

group, simply us/them. This is a cross-cultural universal from which culture itself emerges. One

might even say it is human nature to divide one’s own group from other groups, as this is the root

of patterns of kinship. This is not to say that some groups do not adopt the terms of other as self,

as in the case of self-identifying Native Hawaiians, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians,

and other groups. Thus, as the issue of creating otherness is tied up in the politics of culture, it is

also yet a universally human behavior. Richard Feinberg notes “When people from differing

communities come into contact, they inevitably develop images of one another, and they convey

those images to other members of their own communities” (1994:25). It is the specific context of

each us/them dichotomy, however, which denotes the nature of the relationship between the two.

The “them” category is always other from the first person point of view, although this does not

necessarily mean that one group has the advantage of power over another. Claude Lévi-Strauss

(1966) argues that among totemic clan groups in Australia, for example the Arabanna and

Aranda, otherness is based more on kin-group affiliation, systems of marital exchange, and the

ideology of ancestor spirits rather than the exercise of power over other groups. Lévi-Strauss

finds, therefore, that totemism, like the caste system of Hindi culture, is fundamentally

constructed as a way to understand self/other, Us-identity versus them-identity. Although the

details of each social structure are different (indeed, Lévi-Strauss carefully notes the difference

between totemism as “primitive” and the caste system as the “reverse of primitive,” p.129),

totemic clan and Hindu caste each operate, for Lévi-Strauss, in structurally similar fashion to

divide the world into convenient categories within the mind of the individual. The contextual

language changes from culture to culture; the structure, however, remains the same throughout

humanity.

Lévi-Strauss struck something big. Us/them is a basic structure of the human mind, and

everything else (i.e., culture) is constructed around it according to the context in which the self

finds itself. Martin Heidegger, philosopher of the existentialist-phenomenology school, made a

similar claim in 1927 regarding the actualization of the self as something other-than-other,

something “being-here” or dasein. Rather than make any sort of claim about social structure at

large, however, Heidegger’s focus was the Self-as-being, and everything else was other. Despite

this difference, Lévi-Strauss took a similar route towards his deconstruction of totemism down to

its roots as social relationships in culturally specific, “primitive” or sauvage languages. Thus the

Us/them structure typifies the workings of the human mind, but it is thereafter actualized in the

context of the relationship which could take any number of superficial forms cross-culturally.

Everything from rules of marriage (e.g., who can marry whom) to the exchange of goods and

intergroup politics revolves around how groups differentiate one another. The dichotomy affects

and is affected by the intergroup relationship. In some cases, especially in the context of complex

socio-economic networks and systems of power, Us/them can assume an entirely lop-sided form

in which the space of “them” is constructed in a way which reflects more about the ideology of

the “Us” group than the nature of the “them” group(s). In the case of the barbarian, the Greeks

and the Romans who followed them constructed this category of otherness as being outside the

culturally constructed definitions of civilization, that is, the polis, or Greek city-state, or the

Roman Empire, for the latter. The polis and the Hellenic cultural identity which polis-life

embodied formed the ideological basis of the dichotomy of Us/them in the Ancient Greek mind.

The structure of this ideology through which the Greeks understood themselves posited otherness

as that which was not Greek. Although superficially this appears as a simple binary opposition of

Us/them, Greek/barbarian, the structure is far more intricate and encompasses the complex

historical process of colonialism in the Archaic Pontic context.

The word “barbarian” has its linguistic origin in Greek civilization during the Archaic

Era (ca. eighth-early-fifth centuries BC). The earliest known written form of the word appears in

Homer in reference to the Carians, inhabitants of western Anatolia who did not speak Greek but

were in prolonged contact with the Ionian Greek settlers in Asia. In the Iliad, Homer calls these

Carians βαρβαρόφωνοι, that is, barbarophonoi or “bar-bar-speakers” (Homer Iliad 2.867). This

early form of barbaroi indicates otherness in a very basic sense, that these non-Greeks seemingly

spoke nonsense, at least in the eyes of Homer and his audience, and the Carian barbarophonoi

spoke nonsense comically in the epic. It is also quite possible, however, that the Hellenic use of

the prefix “βαρβαρ-” in reference to foreigners predates Homer, whose literature comes from the

eighth century BC, and that Homer had been but the first (or one of the first) to record its use. In

any case, βαρβαρόφωνοι represents the earliest known Greek linguistic occurrence of our

“barbarians.” By the time Herodotus was writing his Histories, the word βάρβαρoς, or barbaros,

had been commonplace in the Greek language for at least three centuries. Moreover, it came to

represent an imagined space of otherness associated with non-Greeks abroad and particularly to

the north, though not necessarily limited to the north.

Much like the Greek Ionian colonial activity in Anatolia in the eleventh century BC (See

Demand 2006:177 on the influence of Eastern cultures on the so-called “Ionian Enlightenment”),

the Greek colonial endeavors throughout the Mediterranean and Black Seas from the seventh

century BC into the Roman Imperial period brought the Greeks into contact with various groups

whom they found profoundly other (see Appendix A, Figure 1). More than the Mediterranean

Greek colonies such as those in Italy and Sicily, the colonies throughout the Black Sea region,

known then as the Pontic, exposed the Greeks to northern steppe cultures whose nomadic modes

of subsistence contrasted markedly with the agrarian-based polis-economies of the Greeks. It

was these Pontic cultures who inspired the archetypes of barbarism in Greek media, a point

which Shaw (1982-83) makes. Siep Stuurman (2008) surmises that Greek-Pontic colonialism

even led to the rise of “anthropology” among Greek thinkers such as Herodotus due to the

simple, pragmatic fact that the Greeks observed cultural patterns entirely alien to their own and,

hence, tried to make some sense of those foreign cultures. Likewise, Joseph Skinner (2012)

marks Greek colonialism as the catalyst for ancient ethnographic media which included not only

the classic ethnographies of Herodotus, himself an Ionian Greek, but also the wealth of

alternative expressions of foreign culture from Greek perspectives such as literary and visual art.

In any case, the subsequent relationship that developed between the Hellenic colonial

system and the native Pontic cultures generated an ideology of otherness which was far more

complicated than a simple structuralist binary explanation. Modern scholars have traditionally

interpreted the Greek/barbarian paradigm in Lévi-Straussian terms in which the Ancient Greeks

supposedly understood their self-identity through the definition of what they were not (Hunt

1998; Browning 2002). For instance, Nancy Demand posits that the Greeks organized their

known world into “opposed categories” (e.g., male/female, citizen/non-citizen, human/animal,

free/slave, Greek/barbarian) which constituted Hellenic self-identity through ontological

contradistinctions with barbarian other-identities (2006:238). Similarly, Christopher Tulpin

acknowledges that “one way to define what Greeks were like is through a contrast with barbarian

characteristics” (in Tsetskhladze 1999:49). In the structuralist sense, the Greek/barbarian pair

denotes both a positive self-identifier of Greek-ness and a negative other-identifier of barbarian-

ness.

This brings our inquiry to the question of what exactly separates the Greek from the

barbarian. Although the binary structuralist model appears convenient enough for any historical

emic ontological distinctions, it lacks the adequate depth for such an ideological plunge, and the

historical-cultural context of the emergence of the barbarian as the characterization of otherness

in a colonial relationship offers a much deeper pool. From the Greek perspective, the barbarian

represented that which was entirely external to or beyond the polis. The social structure of the

polis, moreover, embodied the Greek/barbarian dichotomy through the creation of discreet

categorical social space for the interaction of polis citizens and foreign outsiders. The fourth-

century BC philosopher Aristotle boldly claimed that man is a creature of the polis and that

anything outside the polis was either a god or a beast (Politics 1.1253a). It was in the imagined

space beyond the polis, even to the edges of the known world, in which the Greeks placed their

likewise imagined barbarians.

In the Hellenic worldview, the polis was the peak of civilization. It was the concrete

embodiment of the abstract concept of nomos, which could be described as the laws and customs

of the polis, and which could typify the Greek conception of “culture.” Those outside the polis,

conversely, were anomoi, without laws and customs or at least the “proper” context for using

laws and customs. Although this is a strange concept for modern readers to grasp, nomos was, in

Aristotelian terms, human self-sufficiency. People outside the polis, in this system of thought,

lacked the means to live naturally and sufficiently as humans and, hence, found sufficiency in

living as either beasts or gods. This polis/beast/god trichotomy essentially sums up how the

Greeks envisioned the known world. Otherness was outside of the polis in the lives of human

societies which either lacked the inherent virtue necessary to live within Hellenic nomoi, or else

possessed such surpassing virtue that the gods favored them. Beasts could only be contained

within the polis in the form of slaves, and gods through ritual mystery. These social slots are

otherwise beyond Hellenic comprehension except when accessed in their socially-prescribed

polis-settings. François Hartog thus describes the frontier between Greeks of the polis realm and

the barbarians outside and beyond as “other” space, socially inaccessible or incomprehensible to

the Greeks (1988: 61-2).

“Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk:” Nomads in Relationship to the Polis

Opposite of the Hyperborean-Golden Age-noble savage, Ancient Greeks typically

portrayed native Pontic barbarians as bestial and extreme in contrast with the supposed value of

moderation in polis-culture. Further below we will discuss a few instances of this perspective,

such as the animal-like Neuroi or the drunkenness of Celts and many others. Frequently in

ancient media, barbarians appear stupid, high-spirited, slavish, violent, and given to wanton

drunkenness and sexual licentiousness. At other times the archetypal nomad-barbarian occurs as

a mythic, non-human foe who exhibits simultaneously the virtues and vices of primitive

ignorance, as in the case of the cyclops Polyphemus in the Odyssey (Shaw 1982-83). Although

the cyclops, as a monster rather than a human, does not necessarily belong to a group of

barbarians, as a mythic archetype he represents the bestial dimension of life outside of the polis

in the Hellenic worldview. He drinks too much, he is cruel rather than hospitable, and his lifeway

and habitation are crude compared to the relative comfort of the audience. At the same time, he

drinks too much because he lacks the refined knowledge of grape cultivation, fermentation, and

sociable drinking in symposia. His virtues instead are in the simplicity of animal husbandry,

specifically shepherding from which he receives his sustenance of meat and milk.

As both non-human and as symbolic of pastoral nomadism, Polyphemus illustrates the

extreme barbaric other of the Hellenic worldview, a space usually reserved at the furthest extent

of the inhabited world, the eschatiai, alongside half-human, half-animal entities, monsters, and

deities. However, at the same time Polyphemus represents the relative simplicity of the primitive

past, a life of simple pastoral subsistence which typified the economies of the steppe but which

the polis relegated to their peripheries. Thus we find a paradox in the Greek/barbarian ideology

in which Scythians and other nomadic barbarians appear simultaneously as both peaceful milk-

drinkers and warlike cannibals.

How does the category of barbarism operate upon such apparently contradictory

premises? The answer to this riddle lies in the kinds of colonial exploitation which took place on

the Pontic frontier—economic and cultural. Out of the colonial context of Hellenic Black Sea

enterprises and explorations, the figure of the barbarian emerged, at once the invented

amalgamation and exaggeration of Greek views of native Pontic cultures, but also as

representative of the source of Greek material gain in the region. The Hellenic colonial system in

the Pontic resembles similar historical systems of cultural interaction on the Eurasian Steppe

between nomadic and sedentary populations (Bartold 1958; Saunders 1971; Lattimore 1979;

Khazanov 1984; Di Cosmo 1994; Wright 1998; Liu 2001; Kradin 2002, 2006; Skaff 2004;

Frachetti 2012). The studies listed indicate that pastoral nomadism on the Eurasian Steppe

developed in symbiosis with the agrarian, sedentary cultures to the south of the steppe. In such

theories, nomadic economies become inextricably bound to the larger economic systems of the

sedentary cultures with which they interact. Consequently, nomadic economies develop a

demand for goods which they themselves cannot produce and come to rely upon trade from

urban centers, either directly or through a series of hands. Though traditionally portrayed as

“predatory” in the acquisition of exotic products of civilization, in reality, Eurasian nomads

occupied a marginal space under the economic thumb of the “high” civilizations that traded with

them. When the Persian King Darius tried to draw the Scythians into his war, the nomads

frustrated the Persians with their perpetual evasions and maneuvering which seemed no different

from their ordinary seasonal migrations. The Scythian ruler, Idanthyrsos, taunted Darius

according to Herodotus:

Never yet did I fly because I was afraid, either before this time from any other man, or

now from you; nor have I done anything different now from that which I used to do in

time of peace: and as to the cause why I do not fight with you at once, this also I will

declare. We have neither cities nor land sown with crops, about which we should fear lest

they be captured or laid waste, and so join battle more speedily with you; but if it be

necessary by all means to come to this speedily, know that we have sepulchers in which

our fathers are buried; therefore come now, find out these and attempt to destroy them,

and you shall know then whether we fight with you for the sepulchers or whether we

shall not fight (Hdt. 4.127).

Here we see that the only territory the Scythians permanently claimed was of ritual importance to

them as their traditional burial grounds.

Historical occurrences of conflict between Eurasian Steppe nomads and urban

civilizations (e.g., Sarmatian/Roman, Xiongnu/Han-Chinese, Turk/T’ang-Chinese, Turk/Arab,

Mongol/Jin-Chinese, Mongol/Arab, etc.) reflected more of the volatile nature of the symbiosis

than any kind of inherently predatory quality within pastoral nomadic societies. In an

examination of the T’ang-Turk frontier of Medieval China, Jonathan Karam Skaff describes how

fluid such seemingly sedentary/nomad frontiers tend to be historically:

The China-Inner Asia borderlands from the early 600s to the early 630s exhibited a great

deal of interchange and experimentation. The frontier truly appears to have been a

permeable zone of ecological transition that permitted people to move in both directions

along the borderlands in terms of their physical locations and their political allegiances

(Skaff 2004:133).

The sedentary/nomad symbiosis revolved around a power relationship of high-handed socio-

economic hegemony on the part of the urban civilizations and dependency and warlike

opportunism on the part of the nomads. The frontier between the two ecological extremes

facilitated dynamic cultural exchange and political posturing for the twain.

Like the Greek/barbarian paradigm itself, the relationship between nomadic and urban

economies does not fall neatly into a dialectical binary of master/slave, yet this dialectic often

typifies the sedentary view of that relationship. Rather, the relationship is more organic: power

tends towards urban-economic hegemony but at times is seized upon by opportunistic nomads,

whether “kings,” khans, or chieftains who might benefit richly from cooperating in trade with

polis-dwellers, or the formation of tribal alliances who might exploit contingent weaknesses in

their urban neighbors and turn the tables of hegemony in the formation of large kingdoms and

empires, however transient. In other words, khans do not emerge in vacuums but in the context

of preexisting economic dependencies with urban societies. Likewise, urban societies which act

as the hegemonic colonizer in the relationship with nomadic groups typically have more success

in trade with nomads than with conquest or wholesale enslavement. Failure to meet the economic

demands of the natives, in this context, often leads to the “predatory” behaviors of banditry on

smaller scales and nomadic conquests on larger scales. Thus the symbiosis of nomadic and urban

societies is historically delicate and even volatile.

How does the Greek-Pontic frontier fit into this paradigm? The period of Greek-Pontic

colonialism which began roughly in the seventh century BC, with a few earlier colonies on the

southern coast of the Black Sea in the eighth century, established a system through which the

Greeks imported raw goods, like wood and animal hides, and indigenous slaves to the

Mediterranean and exported agricultural and manufactured urban commodities to the Pontic

nomads (See Appendix A, Figure 1). Explorers, merchants, mercenaries, and otherwise

wandering Hellenes had likely already known about and traveled throughout the Pontic region

for centuries before and inspired stories such as Jason and the Argonauts. The colonization

which followed established the Greeks’ role as mediator of northern goods and ideas to the

Mediterranean. This process of trade occurred through the emergence of Greek colonies along

the Pontic coast, Olbia being the most prominent urban center of Hellenic colonialism in the

region (Treister 2004; Braund & Kryzhitskiy 2007).

The relationship that developed between the Greeks at Olbia (i.e. Olbiopolitans) and the

nearby Scythians, for example, indicates a symbiosis that falls into the scheme taken up by

various scholars, such as Khazanov. For instance, Gavrilyuk (2007:140) specifically applies

Khazanov’s theories to the Scythians, as does Leypunskaya (2007:122). Leypunskaya describes

this relationship as having started with Greek trading explorations inland with small quantities of

exchange occurring until the end of the sixth century BC, when trade between these Greeks and

Scythians rose dramatically. This trade increased until about 470 BC when the Olbian chora

shrunk considerably due to various pressures. These Scythians responded by reforming their

system of acquiring the goods they themselves could not produce—they expanded their

geographic region of material acquisition. In other words, they tapped into other Greek markets

besides Olbia and perhaps provoked greater competition with neighboring tribes.

The parallel with other historical instances of civilization/nomad interactions across

Eurasia is not surprising. Di Cosmo noted how the Xiongnu created a “steppe empire” as “a

more effective means to extract from China the resources they could not produce” (1994:1093).

Di Cosmo puts forth that aggressive nomadic empires, such as the Xiongnu, emerge as a reaction

to the collapse of trade between sedentary and nomadic groups, especially when the nomadic

groups become dependent on the sedentary societies for certain goods. In the case of Scythia

and Olbia, the collapse of trade between the two groups led to the rise of a greater Scythian

kingdom, creating “protectorates.” In Gavrilyuk’s theory (2007:142-3), the Scythians of the

sixth to fifth centuries BC created economic and political hegemony over the wooded-steppe and

steppe zones through military conquests in order to dominate trade with the Greeks. This leads

us to question whether or not we can define “Scythia” as an example of the “steppe empire”

pattern of Di Cosmo. Herodotus’s account of the Scythians’ unstable relationship with the other

Pontic tribes in the war against Darius might hint at just such a complex system of alliances and

inter-tribal competition (Hdt. 4.102, 118-120). Hence it is not out of the question to consider the

relationship between Greeks and Scythians in terms of a nomadic empire or kingdom akin to

similar historical phenomena on the Eurasian Steppe before and after the Scythian zenith.

Braund’s position on the “existence of a Scythian kingdom” near Olbia supports this

historical pattern (2005:42-3). Braund finds that the development of a Scythian kingdom in the

north Pontic region “meant that Greek colonists could more easily reach agreements and develop

relationships to mutual advantage.” Furthermore, Braund holds that the growth of this

relationship between Greeks and Scythians very likely caused the development of the Scythian

kingdom. He attributes this symbiosis to the exchange of agricultural goods for the raw materials

and slaves of Olbia’s pastoral neighbors. As the Scythians could not produce agricultural goods

like grain, olive oil, and alcohol (and many other types of goods) themselves, they could acquire

them through the Greek economies, such as Olbia, and other nearby sedentary groups. Given that

Greco-Scythian trade also thrived beyond the hub of Olbia, similar processes probably occurred

throughout the north Pontic. The result would have been the rise of powerful tribes to kingdom

status, perhaps even in competition with one another. Herodotus (4.118-25) illustrates the

delicate inter-tribal relationships that occurred between Scythians and their neighbors during the

Persian Wars (See Appendix A, Figure 2). The collapse of Olbian trade exacerbated inter-tribal

tensions and competition, and it altered the nomad/civilization symbiosis between Greeks and

barbarians.

Such alterations, Braund continues, occurred on the Pontic Steppe throughout the Greek

and Roman eras, especially in Olbia:

For the whole position of Olbia, both the civic core and Greater Olbia, depended on a

symbiosis with neighboring peoples and cities. At the same time, however, it would be

naïve to imagine that relationships with all neighbors ran smoothly, not least because

Olbia could expect to be drawn into conflicts between different groupings in the region

(2007:60).

Braund lists periods of expansion and abandonment in rural Olbia in times of crisis as proof for

the breakdown of relations between Scythians and Olbiopolitans based upon the archaeology of

the outlying Olbian farmlands. He claims that after the expansion in the sixth century BC, a large

number of rural sites were abandoned; the sites were rebuilt between 430-400, but they were

again abandoned between 300-250. Though the archaeological sites showed no signs of physical

destruction, Braund supposes that the farmers simply fled before marauders arrived. If Braund’s

hypothesis is correct, this indicates that the breakdown of the symbiosis was observable enough

to the farmers that they knew to flee ahead of time and subsequently organized an exodus.

Barbarians as Naturally Slaves in the Polis

As a result of polis/nomad relations, the Greek-Pontic colonial system allowed for

socially stratified nomadic societies to emerge, with evidence found in the abundance of “royal”

burials which show unbalanced wealth distribution among groups such as the Scythians. Thus

Pontic barbarian rulers who benefit from their economic relationship with the colonists often

exchanged less fortunate, subjugated barbarians with the colonists in exchange for Mediterranean

goods. For instance, Herodotus notes that Thracians often sold some of their children into slavery

(5.6). However, on the Greek side of the relationship, the indigenous Pontic folk who found

themselves in the Mediterranean world as slaves in the household, or as institutionalized polis-

slaves like the Scythian police in Athens, also came to represent the constructed category of

other in very concrete terms. This is not to say that all slaves were barbarians. In fact, an

inscription dating from around 415 BC found in Athens details the types of slaves confiscated in

a specific case as well as the price each slave sold for in the auction (Inscriptiones Gracae I3

421, col. I). The list contained five Thracians, three of whom were women, two Syrians, three

Carians, two of whom were women, two Illyrians, one Scythian, one Greek from Colchis, one

Melittenian, and one Lydian woman. Although such extant data are rare, it appears that most

slaves were of barbarian origin, but Greek slaves were not unheard of. Rather, it is the ideology

of slavery which coalesces with the ideology of barbarism in the Hellenic worldview.

The ideological system which operated in Ancient Greece posited freedom as the nature

of Greekness and slavery the nature of barbarism. In the fifth century, Herodotus (6.9-11; 7.135)

associates despotism, or political tyranny, with the Persians. In this system of thought,

barbarians were naturally inclined to either be tyrants or ruled as slaves by tyrants, while Greeks

should naturally exist in a state of freedom. The Classical philosophers Aristotle (Politics 1255a

2-3) and Plato before him furthered theories about the connection between barbarism and

slavery. Plato, for instance, argues that Greeks should enslave barbarians rather than Greeks to

maintain a tenacious division between Greek and barbarian (Rep. 469b-c). As the Greeks

understood it, a Greek in the state of slavery is likewise in a state of barbarism unable to be, by

nature, free. In other words, a Greek slave was no better than a free barbarian. Slaves within the

Greek poleis provided concrete examples of the nature of barbarism which citizens could

understand in terms of Hellenic ideologies on slavery and barbarism. This concept dovetails with

the ideology of the polis as Greek nature. Beyond the nomos of the polis of the Greek worldview,

barbarians lived outside of the boundaries of human freedom, slaves to bestial appetites and to

tyrannical warlords. The stereotypes associated with this “beast” category of barbarism typified

how the Greeks viewed the native Pontic peoples on their frontier and from whom they received

most of their slaves. Beyond the frontier and into misty lands unknown, the barbarians become

more or less fantastical (e.g., the Hyperboreans) and categorized differently from the tangible

cultures who supplied slaves to the Mediterranean.

Despite the inherent contradictions within both the ideologies of barbarism and slavery,

they operated together as a convenient, multifaceted means of justification for the construction of

polis society. For example, around the fifth century we find in a number of cultural references,

primarily in the comedies of Aristophanes (Ecclesiazusae 143; Knights 665; Thesmophoriazusae

920-45; Acharnians 43-54), to an institution of Scythian slaves in institutional public service to

the polis. Various scholars have debated the chronology of the institution and demise of this so-

called Scythian police force in Athens, who had been conscripted by a wealthy Greek politician

named Speusis (Minns 1911; Hall 1989; Braund 2006). However, Balbina Bäbler is the first

scholar to directly connect the issues of the Scythian police in Athens with stereotypes of

Scythians in ancient Athenian ethnographic sources (Bäbler 2005:114-22). In fact, we might

even call into question whether these barbarians were in fact slaves at all rather than free, and

that the ideological paradigm of the polis simply may have constricted the Greek view of

foreigners employed by the state into the language of slavery. From a modern perspective, we

might not consider these Scythians slaves but rather mercenaries employed in the service of

policing the polis. However, the issue that concerns us is the nature of these Scythians in the

minds of the Greeks. Because they were barbarians in service to the polis, they existed in the

Greek worldview as slaves. Within this ideological framework, barbarians cannot exist freely

within the Greek polis except in a state of slavery. Aristophanes’s plays highlight the popular

stereotypes of the Scythian police as cruel, mindless servants of the justice system. Furthermore,

Aristophanes’s employment of Scythians as a comic plot device demonstrates a divergence in

notions of barbarism, especially between those who imported the Scythians and those who felt

their whips of justice in the agora. Thus the institution of slavery in the Hellenic world was

essentially the embodiment of the Greek/barbarian ideology. In pragmatic terms, slavery brought

actual foreigners into the everyday lives of polis-dwelling Greeks, and the social relationship

between free Greeks and barbarian slaves operated upon the ideology of categorical otherness.

The various forms of Greek media (i.e., drama, artwork, literature) both perpetuated barbarian

otherness and put the formal ideology to the test in the material world of the liminal space

between free and slave.

Stereotypes and Other Hellenic Misinterpretations of Pontic-Caspian Cultures

Consequently, the stereotypes of the bestial barbarian developed in conjunction with the

use of Pontic slaves in the Greek polis, and a template through which Greeks interpreted and

characterized Pontic and other barbarian cultures emerged. As we have discussed, the popular

Greek view of Scythians and Thracians, barbarians whom they were in direct contact with most

frequently, characterized Pontic cultures as high-spirited, ignorant drunkards. Plato (Rep. 4.435e)

refers to the inherent quality of the souls of barbarians in Athens, such as Thracians and

Scythians, as high-spirited (i.e., thymoeides). In characterizing northerners as such, Plato implies

a certain sense of irrationality and erratic nature in the souls of barbarians. In Plato’s mind, they

were excitable, easily fooled, and easily angered, given more to emotions and appetites than to

rationality. Plato of course was not alone in his sentiments. The idea of the ignorant or foolish

barbarian pervaded all dimensions of the ideology of barbarism from Hyperborean blissful

ignorance to Thracian stupidity. High-minded clichés emerged in which barbarians appeared

“primitive and rather simple-minded” (Hdt. 4.95). Herodotus even scoffs at the Pontic cultures’

tendencies towards lifeways of rapine instead of agriculture or civilized crafts (i.e., techne) (Hdt.

2.167).

Moreover, the Greeks viewed the barbarians as given to depravities such as sexual

promiscuity, extreme acts of cruelty, and, most commonly, drunkenness. Herodotus’s Books 4

and 5 are teeming with minor accounts of promiscuous Pontic barbarians, which of course could

indicate as much of the ethnocentric attitudes of the Greeks as well as foreign kinship and

marriage patterns among Pontic cultures which may have been confusing to most Greeks. The

Agathyrsians, for example, (4.104) “have promiscuous intercourse with their women, in order

that they may be brethren to one another and being nearly all related may not feel envy or malice

one against another.” Similarly, Herodotus provides the following ethnographic description of

the nomadic Massagetai of the Caspian region:

Each marries a wife, but they have their wives in common; for that practice which the

Hellenes say the Scythians have, is not in fact done by the Scythians but by the

Massagetai, that is to say, whenever a man of the Massagetai may desire a woman he

hangs up his quiver in front of her waggon and has sex with her freely (Hdt. 1.216).

This excerpt on the Massagetai could possibly represent a Greek misunderstanding of polyandry

in association with patterns of natolocal residence and unilineal descent, such as among the

Indian warrior-caste of the Nayar. Among the Nayar, women take multiple “temporary

husbands,” as men were frequently away on military duty. As a result,

These men had visiting rights with their ‘wives,’ and if one of the men on visiting found

another’s spear or shield outside the house, then he would go away and try again the next

night (Fox 1967:100-1).

Perhaps this comparison is overly imaginative, but the Nayar warriors might also share

something with the ancient steppe cultures given the Indo-Aryan origins in the same region as

the Massagetai. But let us not become too distracted with such conjecture.

The main point here is that Herodotus’s perspective on the Massagetai barbarians stems

from his own Hellenic biases, from a culture in which emphasis is placed on the male role in

social relationships rather than the female. Thus any cultural system in which women inhabit a

different role is exotic and destined to become misinterpreted by the Greeks. Hence men and

women have equal rights in Issedonian society (Hdt. 4.26), the Massagetai are ruled by a

powerful female warlord (Hdt. 1.205), and Sarmatian women hunt and make war alongside their

husbands (Hdt. 4.116). The Thracians too, in the Herodotean account, allow their daughters to

have wanton intercourse with anyone and also practice polygamy (Hdt. 5.5).

Tied in with this general characterization of barbarians as sexually liberated, Greek

attitudes towards women influenced this type of motif, often exemplified by the mythic Amazon

figure (Tarbell 1920; Graf 1984; DuBois 1991; Blok 1995; Blundell 1995; Smith 2003; Skinner

2012). Essentially, the Greeks viewed women, as they did slaves, as having natures similar to

barbarians. Like barbarians, women were naturally slaves in the polis (i.e., to their husbands).

Outside the polis, Greeks imagined women as powerful and promiscuous, something which

Greek men should fear. These notions became constructed into the archetypal Amazons, a

mythic race like the Hyperboreans. Unlike the Hyperboreans, the Amazons exuded tyrannical,

beastlike, and warlike freedom diametrically opposed to polis nomos, and consequently, the

Amazon figure acted as a template for any vaguely ethnographic characterization of northern

cultures like the Massagetai and the Sauromatae (i.e., Sarmatians) in which women had elevated

status. Moreover, the Amazon template served in the dramatic portrayals of legendary barbarian

women such as Atossa and Medea, and Amazonomachy (i.e., combat with Amazons) became a

popular motif in art and literature. Moreover, as we will discuss further next chapter, mystery

cults which involved Mother Goddess worship also reflected the Hellenic perspective of

primitive womanhood with analogues in barbarian religions.

Like the fearfully cruel and warlike Amazons of Greek mythology, historical and semi-

legendary accounts of Pontic cultures highlight instances of tyrannical cruelty meant to

demonstrate the beastlike nature of many of the barbarians. Accounts abound of the terrible

punishments and human sacrifices in barbarian cultures. Again, Herodotus provides a wealth of

such accounts. On one occasion, Herodotus details how a Thracian king “did a deed of

surpassing horror” when he plucked out the eyes of his sons for marching with Xerxes (Hdt.

8.116). The Tauroi, another group on the Black Sea coast, reputedly sacrificed shipwrecked

victims to the sea, but the story may have been more of a sailors’ warning than a careful

ethnographic observation (Hdt. 4.103). Nevertheless, Herodotus claims this group also earned its

keep through pillaging and plundering.

Another more common motif of barbaric cruelty in Herodotus and other sources is the

motif of barbaric cannibalism. The Scythians, who also practiced occasional human sacrifice,

were said to mix blood with their wine for spiritual strength before war and in oath-taking.

Psarras notes similar customs among the ancient Xiongnu on the eastern Eurasian Steppe

(Psarras 2003:129-32). James Redfield (2002:37-8) argues that this Scythian custom in

Herodotus, if true, could be considered a form of “modified cannibalism.” Another ethnographic

passage in Herodotus illustrates some of the ethnocentric extremes of the barbarian motif:

The Androphagoi have the most savage manners of all human beings, and they neither

acknowledge any rule of right nor observe any customary law. They are nomads and

wear clothing like that of the Scythians, but have a language of their own; and alone of all

these nations they are man-eaters (Hdt. 4.106).

The Androphagoi (Hdt. 4.106), whose name literally means “man-eaters,” fictional or not, were

reputed to cannibalize outsiders, similar to modern stories about various Papua New Guinean

exocannibalistic groups such as the Kamano. Observations of endocannibalism among groups

like the Fore may also have contributed to the modern idea of cannibalistic natives (Lindenbaum

2013:22). Modern or ancient, how much is the speculative rumor of travelers and how much is

ethnographically sound will continue to be a point of contention among anthropologists.

Additionally, Herodotus (1.116; 4.26) describes customs of ritualistic endocannibalism among

the Massagetai and Issedonians. However, scholars have disputed whether or not Herodotus may

have confused their customs with ritual defleshing of deceased relatives given his

contextualization of the practice as a funerary rite (Bolton 1962; Mallory and Mair 2000).

One major difference in custom between Greek and barbarian which resulted in a

widespread stereotype of Pontic peoples came from cultural attitudes towards drinking habits,

mentioned briefly above. The Greeks, or at least the privileged and educated members of Greek

society, preferred to drink diluted wine in moderation, and they laughed at stereotypes of

drunken northerners, whom they typically regarded as gluttonous. For instance, Artistophanes’s

Acharnians mocks the great praise barbarians give over-eating and over-drinking: “For great

feeders and heavy drinkers are alone esteemed as men by the barbarians” (Aristoph. Ach. 65-99).

A fragmentary poem by Anacreon likewise contrasts Greek drinking with Scythian drinking

(quoted in Skinner 2012:69):

Come now, this time let’s drink

Not in this Scythian style

With din and uproar, but sip

To the sound of decent songs.

Herodotus describes a Scythian drinking custom where only honored warriors who have slain an

enemy can drink, and those who slew great numbers of enemies drink with two cups at the same

time (Hdt. 4.66). Herodotus also includes, perhaps as a lesson, the story of Cleomenes of Sparta

who went mad from drinking unmixed wine from his association with Scythians (6.84).

On the topics of both barbarian drunkenness and promiscuity, the poet Archilochus

compares a woman’s act of fellatio to the Thracian custom of sucking excessive quantities of

beer through straws (Arch. Fr. 42). Plato characterized barbarians, from Scythians, Persians, and

Carthaginians to Celts, Iberians, and Thracians as excessive drinkers in Laws (637d-e):

So let us deal more fully with the subject of drunkenness in general for it is a practice of

no slight importance, and it requires no mean legislator to understand it. I am now

referring not to the drinking or non-drinking of wine generally, but to drunkenness pure

and simple, and the question is—ought we to deal with it as the Scythians and Persians

do and the Carthaginians also, and Celts, Iberians and Thracians, who are all warlike

races, or as you Spartans do; for you, as you say, abstain from it altogether, whereas the

Scythians and Thracians, both men and women, take their wine neat and let it pour down

over their clothes, and regard this practice of theirs as a noble and splendid practice; and

the Persians indulge greatly in these and other luxurious habits which you reject, albeit in

a more orderly fashion than the others.

The Persians too, according to Herodotus (1.133), “much enjoy wine-drinking,” and they had

various customs and taboos regarding drinking including deliberating on serious matters first

drunk and once more sober. An identical passage of drunk/sober deliberations is found in

Tacitus’s observations among the Germanic tribes:

Drinking-bouts lasting all day and all night are not considered disgraceful. The quarrels

that inevitably arise over the cups are seldom settled by merely hard words, but more

often by killing and wounding. Nevertheless, they often make a feast an occasion for

discussing such affairs as the ending of feuds, the arrangement of marriage alliances, the

adoption of chiefs, and even questions of peace or war. At no other time, they think, is

the heart so open to sincere feelings or so quick to warm to noble sentiments. The

Germans are not cunning or sophisticated enough to refrain from blurting out their inmost

thoughts in the freedom of festive surroundings, so that every man’s soul is laid

completely bare. On the following day the subject is reconsidered, and thus due account

is taken of both occasions (Tac. Ger. 22).

The stereotype in Greek lore of the “wino” barbarian should be connected with the concept of

thymoeides, or “high-spiritedness,” as we discussed above. The Greek writers and artists

recognized indigenous customs of alcohol use and abuse which contrasted with Greek

moderation and sought to exploit those customs as evidence of “weaker” souls, natures given

more to appetites and emotions devoid of nomos. Such is the way the Ancient Greeks perceived

those barbarians at hand, whereas those more far-off drifted into the fantastic and often found

themselves the subjects of ethical discourse.

The Oikoumene: from the Polis to the Eschatiai

Leaving the ethnocentrism, or more specifically polis-centrism, of the Greeks aside, the

polis as a socio-economic entity wielded great cultural hegemony in the ancient world, especially

in Greek colonial endeavors in the Pontic region. In other words, the Greek/barbarian paradigm

concurrently emerged in the context of colonialism and perpetuated a sense of Greek superiority

over native populations whom the Greeks exploited both economically and culturally. As

humans were superior to beasts, so were Greeks to barbarians, excluding the godly Hyperborean-

types, in their minds. Thus, systems of slavery grew around the flow of native northerners along

with plenty of other raw northern goods, of which trafficked humans were but one raw good, into

the Mediterranean world. Slavery in the Mediterranean and Near East long drew upon

marginalized populations, especially nomadic groups, from peripheral frontier zones of the

northern steppe, the southern deserts, and the high mountains from at least the time of most

ancient Sumeria until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century. As a specific

brand of Mediterranean slavery, the Hellenic institution of slavery developed around the idea that

barbarians could only integrate into the polis-system through the institution of slavery.

At the same time, the barbarian embodied Greek ideas about cultural evolution and the

Greeks’ own mythic past. In the barbarian lands, the beastlike and godlike barbarians symbolized

past stages of the Hellenes’ mythic narrative of ethnogenesis. The poet Hesiod summarizes the

mythological premises in Works and Days (lines 109-201). In sum, the human race passes

through a series of ages from primitive paradise in the Golden Age through the hardships and

toils of the Silver, Bronze, and Heroic Ages. Each period in the cycle tends towards an

eschatological cultural apex until the emergence of the Greek polis in the Iron Age, an age

plagued with its own strife yet itself striving for a cyclical return to Golden Age virtue. As the

Greeks understood their own past in these terms, so they also interpreted foreign cultures as

being in various stages of this historical progression much like the more modern evolutionary

theories of Morgan, Tylor, Frazer and others.

James S. Romm (1992) demonstrates that Hellenic ontology interlaced the mythological

with the geographical, political, and economic forces of the polis. As a result, the Greeks

envisioned a world divided into concentric circular zones which emanated outwards from Hellas

towards the river Okeanos (i.e., Ocean), which encircled the earth. Recalling Aristotle’s

discussion of gods, beasts, and the polis, the Ancient Greeks imagined that the regions beyond

their world grew more primitive the further away from the center one travelled. In this way,

Ancient Greeks imagined that people not immediately part of their cultural system were more

primitive, or were going through stages of cultural development which the Greeks believed they

themselves had already undergone. Thus, geography recapitulated an ancient version of cultural

evolution in the Greek mind. Herodotus reports that the Scythians claim they are the “youngest

of all nations” (Hdt. 4.5). By “youngest” Herodotus means they are in an early, primitive stage of

cultural evolution, although perhaps Herodotus rejects the poetic noble savage paradigm in favor

of empirical observation, historical criticism, and natural philosophy. Naturally, the values and

ideas of Hellenic culture shaped this envisioning of the inhabited, known world, and ancient

“primitivism” came into being (Lovejoy and Boas 1965).

The center, or “navel,” of the known world, a location steeped in cultic mystery tradition,

was Delphi (Plutarch De defectu orac. 1.1; Strabo 9.3.6). Outward from Delphi one found the

Greek world of agrarian city-states such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth and others, all of whom

visited the Oracle at Delphi as a shared Hellenic tradition. As one travelled further north, one

encountered Thessalians and Macedonians, equestrian Greek culture groups who at times

resembled more the barbarians to their north than the Greeks to their south but could have also

represented Greek perceptions of the Heroic Mycenaean Age. Beyond the Hellas and into the

northern lands of the barbarians, one encounters barbaric groups who were commonplace in

Greek lore and in everyday life for many polis-dwellers. These native Pontic groups included

Scythians, Thracians, Dacians, Cimmerians, Phrygians, and many other groups of Anatolia and

the Black Sea region. Moreover, their warlike customs and histories, especially their roles in the

Persian Wars, might indicate a placement in the mythic Bronze Age or perhaps a continuation of

the Heroic Age in the Hesiodic ontology—the mythic scheme, naturally, is one which does not

neatly match the reality.

The Greeks traded with these peoples, and many commonly appeared in the polis as

slaves. Thus these barbarians were an ordinary enough sight for the Greeks and, consequently, a

recognizable template with which poets, historians, dramatists, painters, sculptors, and other

artists characterized barbarism. In fact, the Scythian figure with trousers, a tall felt hat, bow and

quiver served as a template for Greek depictions of numerous other barbarians, including the

Persians. Greek heroes from earlier ages, whether Odysseus or Herakles, also appear as

somewhat “barbaric,” especially in their use of the bow, a skill Classical Greeks seldom used but

which they believed was primitive. In a way, the template applied to these Greek heroes reflects

the same Hellenic view of history and cultural evolution. If the Scythian template of barbarism

represented a past stage of Greek culture, it would make sense for the Greeks to portray the

heroes of their past in the terms of “present” primitive cultures.

While the material template (e.g., clothing, archery, etc.) may have been somewhat

accurate for many Pontic-Caspian steppe cultures and of Iranian Medes and Persians, the

Scythian template came to represent all of the groups lumped together as Persians during the

Persian Wars without any cultural differentiation (the sole exception being Herodotus’s

exhaustive efforts in describing in meticulous detail the culturally-specific uniforms of every

group of the Persian forces in his “Catalogue of Armies,” book 7 of Histories), and many groups

called “Scythians” could potentially have been non-Scythian groups amalgamated into the

identity from the Greek perspective. In other words, the motive in Greek media was to exhibit

the otherness of foreign cultures through a culturally recognizable template-characterization of

barbarism. Scholars have often revisited this problem of accurately identifying ambiguous

barbarian figures on pottery paintings given the Greeks’ arbitrary application of templates of

barbarism (Schauenburg 1975; Raeck 1981; Roller 1983; Pinney 1984; A. Smith 1999; Harrison

2002; T.J. Smith 2003; Ivanchik, Braund 2005; Skinner 2012; See Linebaugh 2013:70-82 for a

more detailed discussion of the specific pieces of art than my very brief synopsis presented here).

Nevertheless, the template emerged out of Greek interactions with societies on their northern

Pontic frontier and the resulting attempts to make sense of their observations of the other,

popularly and intellectually.

Beyond that frontier zone, historical and ethnographic reality becomes mixed with

fantasy. In the Hellenic worldview, the closer one travels to the eschatiai, the ends of the earth,

the more fantastic and mythical the inhabitants of those lands become, and, moreover, the closer

the wayfarer comes to the beginning of human history. Here elements of beast-barbarians and

god-barbarians become more evident, and they inhabit, in the Greek mind, the mythic cultural

stages of the Golden and Silver Ages, the time of virtuous paradise and the time after the “fall”

from the gods’ grace. Barbarians on the fringes of the world also tend to appear with exaggerated

qualities. James Redfield explains that in Greek lore the Scythians are often surrounded by more

extreme versions of themselves (2002:37). Herodotus describes a number of groups beyond the

Scythians who drift more-or-less in the liminal space between fact and fiction. The Neuroi, for

example, were reputed to be shapeshifters or werewolves, and they fled from their land in the

north due to an invasion of serpents. Although Herodotus doubts the story’s factuality, once

more he maintains an ethnographer’s faithfulness to giving voice to the barbarian other in his

inclusion of their story (Hdt. 4.105). Beyond their lycanthropic behavior, which led to

Herodotus’s skepticism, the Historian describes these people as similar in custom to their

Scythian neighbors. Matthew Dickie considers the Neuroi an example of native illusionists or

charlatans (2003:73-4); however, one could interpret the account of the Neuroi in Herodotus as

evidence of Greek misunderstanding of native steppe totemic myths about primordial wolf and

snake conflicts. In any case, the trans-human/animal liminality of the Neuroi is representative of

the bestial or brutal characterization of barbarism noted by Aristotle. This motif of Pontic Steppe

barbarism appears in other forms in Ancient Greek media, such as the Centaur, more widely

recognized today than the Neuroi, whose natural position between man and horse mythicized the

nomad’s affinity for horsemanship (Tarbell 1920).

Other groups which Herodotus mentions (4.22-4), on the fringe beyond the Scythians

include the Thyssagetai and Iyrcai, the descriptions of whom might possibly designate them as

hunter-gatherer groups, and the sacred Argippaians, whose customs and physical characteristics

set them apart from the Scythians, although Herodotus says they share the same manner of dress.

The Thyssegetae and Iyrcai, according to Herodotus, “live by hunting,” and he provides a

detailed summary of their specific hunting tactics using mastery over their heavily wooded taiga

landscape, mastery over their horses and dogs, and mastery over the skill of archery:

The hunter climbs up a tree and lies in wait there for his game (now trees are abundant in

all this country), and each has a horse at hand, which has been taught to lie down upon its

belly in order that it may make itself low, and also a dog: and when he sees the wild

animal from the tree, he first shoots the arrow and then mounts upon his horse and

pursues it, and the dog seizes hold of it (Hdt. 4.22).

Herodotus’s ethnography of the Argippaians describes them as bald, both men and women, with

flat noses and large chins. They lived in tents constructed around trees, foraged for wild cherries

called as-chy, which they mixed with milk and from which they made cakes. This obscure

“ethnographic” passage of Herodotus also describes the Argippaians as settlers of disputes

among their neighbors rather than as warriors like many of the nearby groups. As such, it appears

that legitimate ethnographic data has possibly mixed with notions of noble savage, eschatiai-

barbarism, not to say the Argippaians may not have had some kind of role as peace-keeping

council rulers in a mix of tribal conflicts and relationships similar to the function of the Iroquois

Confederacy in North America.

The customs Herodotus describes could identify the Argippaians with any number of

historical Eurasian Steppe nomads. However, the light in which he describes them makes the

Argippaians something between a brutish Scythian and a primitive Hyperborean. Herodotus is

sure of the validity of his sources though (4.24-5): “Now as far as these bald-headed men there is

abundantly clear information about the land and about the nations on this side of them;” and he

continues to describe how Scythians and Greeks often travel to the territory of these nomads

from the ports of the Pontic coast for trade with the natives. However, Herodotus claims nobody

knows very much about the lands to the north of the Argippaians due to impassable mountains,

possibly the Urals or the Altai (Bolton 1962; Wasson et al. 1986; Mallory and Mair 2000). He

does report that the locals claim that goat-footed men and men who sleep for six months of the

year dwell in the high country. Here Herodotus draws his line between believable and

unbelievable, ethnography and folktale (although he does this throughout the entire work).

Likewise, Herodotus describes the lands further to the east of the Scythians as inhabited

with groups similar to the Scythians but perhaps even more savage (e.g., Sauromatae,

Issedonians, Massagetae) (See Appendix A, Figure 2). Beyond these groups we traverse the

boundary into the fantastic once more. We find in the eastern eschatiai the Arimaspians, one-

eyed, horse-riding primitives entwined in an eternal cycle of combat with gold-guarding griffins.

These Arimaspians of the east, like the Hyperboreans of the north, represent the primordial ages

of man in Hesiodic ontology and an archetype of barbarism at the ends of the earth (Romm

1992:70). One could also argue that the Arimaspian represents the most extreme version of the

Scythian. Following Mallory and Mair (2000:42-3), the name “Arimaspian” might derive from

the Indo-Iranian arim (“friends of”) aspou (“horses”), a fitting description for equestrian nomads,

rather than Herodotus’s translation of arima (“one”) spou (“eye”) (Hdt. 4.27). Herodotus claims

this report of the Arimaspians as one-eyed horsemen comes from both the Scythians and the

Issedonians. Although the translation of their name is contestable, the one-eyed Arimaspian

became an extreme motif of barbarism in Greek art. We will discuss this further in the next

chapter, but the Arimaspian/Griffin motif also has its own cultural roots in the native

mythologies of the Eurasian Steppe. Greek traders and travelers certainly would have noticed

such a widespread image.

In the complex frontier zone between the polis and the mythic eschatiai the Greeks

observed, interacted with, and to an extent exploited tangible, historical native populations whom

they understood and characterized through the lens of barbarism. Romm (1992) has noted similar

concentric cultural-geographic arrangements in terms of southern barbarism with the Egyptians,

Ethiopians, Libyans, Arabians, and the mythic Pygmies. Given that the Greeks commonly

accepted the idea that the Hyperboreans lived beyond the source of the northern winds of Boreas

(hence their name), Herodotus entertains the notion of a southern equivalent to the Hyperboreans

called Hypernotians (Hdt. 4.36). Although an investigation of southern barbarism is beyond the

scope of this thesis, Romm does a fair job explaining the relevance of “blameless Ethiopians,”

warlike Arabians in combat with flying serpents, and Pygmies in perpetual warfare with wild

cranes as categories of barbarism in their own right. Although southern barbarism certainly

appears in Greek media with virtues and vices which mirror northern barbarism, the most

common template of the barbarian draws its inspiration from Greece’s northern frontier.

As mentioned above briefly, at the furthest extent of the northern eschatiai dwelt the

Hyperboreans who represented the primordial Golden Age of human history in the Greek

worldview, a type of Romanticism or primitivism which would survive in Western thought into

the present (Lovejoy and Boas 1969; Romm 1992). By all accounts the Hyperboreans embodied

happiness, justice, and primitive virtue. Indeed the Ancient Greeks deemed the Hyperboreans to

be the most virtuous and sacred of all humankind, closest to the gods but also to the primeval

chaos of Ocean. It is little surprise that these mythical people found an esteemed place in Greek

mythology and cultic religious traditions as the spirit-guides of the cult of Apollo and other

traditions. Even Plato took some interest in the manifestation of their Golden Age ancestors as

the spirits of the wise (Cratylus 397e-398c). The following chapter will look more deeply into

this issue, but for now let us provide some background for these Hyperboreans, a mytho-

ethnography perhaps.

An exploration of the Hyperboreans could in fact produce enough discussion for an entire

monograph, and it has inspired a few scholars to accept such a task (Macurdy 1916, 1920;

Casson 1920). These mythic northerners usually remain a topic conjoined with the discussion of

either other, more historically attestable groups or within the larger context of the myths in which

they appear. For example, J. D. P. Bolton (1962), in a vast exegesis of the sources on the Greek

traveler Aristeas, surmised that the Arimaspians might refer to the proto-Turkic nomads of the

Altai and that the vegetarian, maritime Hyperboreans refer to the Chinese. J. P. Mallory and

Victor H. Mair (2000) in their search for the cultural identities of the mummified pastoralists of

the Tarim Basin, south of the Altai, arrive at a similar conclusion. If we consider the possibility

that the Argippaians, Issedonians, Massagetae, and other groups lived north and east of the

Caspian Sea, it is quite likely that Greek explorers and traders would have heard about the

customs of cultures beyond these groups. In hearing about these customs, and perhaps even

occasionally observing them or speaking with travelers from the more distant lands, the Greeks

would have formed their own ideas about the distant cultures based upon their already

developing mythic framework concerning the furthest extents of the oikoumene.

Timothy P. Bridgman (2005) offers the latest fully dedicated analysis of Hyperborean

source material, and he concludes that the Hyperborean archetype emerged out of Greek

interactions with Celtic European groups. While the Greeks certainly had interactions with the

tribes of Keltoi, Bridgman’s attempt to narrow the Hyperboreans down to one identifiable,

historical group is far-reaching to say the least. Nonetheless, one could certainly include the

Celts among the milieu of barbarians of the north in the Hellenic worldview, and Greek writers,

including Plato, at times did so, differentiating between specific cultural group-affiliations but

essentializing the whole lot within the barbarian template. For instance, on the drinking habits of

various barbarians discussed above, Plato lists the Celts among several others as all habitual

alcohol-abusers in Laws (637d-e). Similar discussions appear in Roman literature on the Celtic

and Germanic tribes to the north of the Roman Empire, most notably in Tacitus’s Germania (22-

23). Furthermore, the ethnographic descriptions of the Celts in Greek sources, like Plato, indicate

the Greeks viewed them much like they viewed Thracians, Dacians, and other northwestern

barbarians, usually with disdain but at times with admiration. During the third century BC, as if a

final barbarous thrust through Bridgman’s Celtic Hyperborean figure, the Celtic group known as

the Gauls sacked sacred Delphi, one of two major religious centers which mythically connected

the Hellenes with the peaceful, vegetarian Hyperboreans of the distant north.

Nevertheless, we cannot suggest that one culture was solely responsible for inspiring the

Greeks to concoct the mythic Hyperboreans as the inhabitants of the furthest rims of the world.

Rather, the Hyperboreans were the composite of Greek observations of the actual inhabitants of

Pontic-Caspian Steppe and hearsay concerning cultures much further north, west, and east. Many

of the sources are legend, folklore, myth, and outright lies or propaganda. As Romm (1993:47)

illustrates, the Greek sources on Hyperboreans and other barbarians, real or imagined, often

mixed Hellenic ethnocentrism with “reverse ethnocentrism,” paradeigmata, the object of which

is not to present accurate ethnography, good or bad, but to flip the ethnocentrism on the Greeks

themselves. Paradeigmata refers to the use of descriptions of the other, namely barbarian

cultures, as criticism of the ancient ethnographer’s own culture. The Roman historian Tacitus, for

example, utilized ethnographic passages on the German barbarian tribes to criticize Roman

culture in contrasting German disregard for gold and silver:

The natives take less pleasure than most people do in possessing and handling these

metals; indeed, one can see in their houses silver vessels, which have been presented to

chieftains or ambassadors travelling abroad, put to the same everyday use as earthenware

(Tac. Ger. 5).

Tacitus likewise uses the dishonor of adultery among the German tribes as a criticism of Roman

immorality (Tac. Ger. 19), and he praises the overall virtue of the Chauci tribe as “the noblest

people of Germany” (Tac. Ger. 35). Hartog (1988) describes the same ethic in Herodotus, that

some of the passages, historical or not, were meant to highlight the paradoxes and hypocrisies of

Greek culture from within. The barbarian, at times, functioned as a mirror with which artists and

writers could hold up to their own Hellenic society as well-disguised criticism. The

Hyperboreans, not immune to the paradoxical motives of Greek writers and artists, became a

complex and enigmatic template for an already paradoxical category of otherness. As chapter 4

will explain, the modern New Age Movement utilizes narratives about and idealized images of

indigenous folk as a sort of paradeigmata with which one can criticize Western culture.

The primary mythological sources on the Hyperboreans paint an idyllic image of an Earth

(Gaia)-born tribe at the ever-expanding edges of the world. Hesiod (late eighth-early seventh

centuries BC) describes them as “well-horsed,” fed by streams of water, and possibly associated

with amber (Catalogues of Women Fragment 40a). The horses alone indicate an association with

steppe cultures, but amber, a precious raw good that the Greeks, Romans, and other

Mediterranean cultures imported from the north via the Black Sea, illustrates perfectly well the

cultural inspiration for Hesiod’s poetic expression (see Tac. Ger. 45, for an example of the

Roman perspective on the northern amber trade). Roughly contemporaneous with Hesiod,

Homer utilizes the Hyperborean figure in a dramatic expression of distant barbarism along with

Egypt and Cyprus in which the Hyperboreans represent the very edge of the world inhabited by

humans (Homeric Hymn 7 to Dionysos 27 ff). The fifth century poet, Pindar, describes in more

detail the primitive nobility and virtue of those who dwell “behind cold Boreas.” His Olympian

Ode (3.12 ff) lays out Herakles’s quest to find the golden-antlered hind where he discovers the

Hyperborean paradise, and Pindar’s Pythian Ode, moreover, details the cultural traits of these

“hallowed” and mysterious people: sacrifice to and serve Apollo; Apollo delights in them;

promiscuity; given to poetry, dancing, and music; free from illness, old age, toil, and battle.

Pindar’s description of the Hyperboreans is fairly similar Hesiod’s description of the people of

the Golden Age, the most substantial exception being their service to the young god Apollo

rather than Kronos:

Once Perseus, the leader of his people, entered their [the Hyperboreans’] homes and

feasted among them, when he found them sacrificing glorious hecatombs of donkeys to

the god. In the festivities of those people and in their praises Apollo rejoices most, and he

laughs when he sees the erect arrogance of the beasts. The Muse is not absent from their

customs; all around swirl the dances of girls, the lyres loud chords and the cries of flutes.

They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully. No sickness or

ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles they live without

fear of strict Nemesis (Pindar Pythian Ode 10.30-44).

And compare to the poet Hesiod, on the people of the Golden Age:

The gods…fashioned a golden race of mortal men…and like the gods they lived with

happy hearts untouched by work or sorrow. Vile old age never appeared, but always

lively-limbed, far from all ills, they feasted happily. Death came to them as sleep, and all

good things were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land gave up her fruits unasked. Happy

to be at peace, they lived with every want supplied, rich in flocks, dear to the blessed

gods. And then this race was hidden in the ground. But still they live as spirits of the

earth, holy and good, guardians who keep off harm, givers of wealth: this kingly right is

theirs (Hesiod Works and Days 110-124).

Beyond the difference in devotion to one deity or another, the differences between the

Pindarian and Hesiodic narratives include: 1) a specific ritual prescription of the Hyperboreans,

whereas none are provided for the Golden Age folk; 2) an emphasis on the Muses, spiritual

inspiration of poetry and music, among the Hyperboreans, whereas the people of the Golden Age

are simply described as having “feasted happily,” which does not entail they did not engage in

music and poetry; 3) the Golden Age people received their food from the abundance of the earth;

and 4) the spirits of the Golden Age become associated with the chthonic underworld as

guardians after their demise, whereas Pindar notes nothing of that sort of the Hyperboreans.

Nonetheless, the Hyperboreans are also associated with the chthonic earth in the Pythian

traditions, as spiritual entities whom the oracles frequently contacted, and in Hesiod’s

Catalogues of Women. Parallels between the two passages denote that both the Golden Age and

Hyperborean mythic cultures were 1) pastoralists; and 2) neither suffered sickness, old-age, or

war.

These mythic appearances of the Hyperborean-Golden Age noble savage were part of the

Greek imagination of space which was both geographically and chronologically remote, but it

was also sacred or powerful space. On one hand, the barbarian figure in Greek media (e.g.,

pottery-paintings, poetry, drama) inspired the exploration of the northern and eastern frontiers

through symbolic links to heroic and mythic journeys of the Greeks’ past, a stance which

François Hartog (2001) champions. In this ideological vein, barbarism is equated to the Greek

Golden Age and is placed at the edges of the earth, the eschatiai, most notably characterized by

the Hyperboreans. This ideology which I would call “Hyperboreanism” created a template of

barbarism through which native northerners, thought to be close to the gods and in harmony with

Gaia (i.e., Mother Earth or Nature) served as a source of northern wisdom for learned Greeks.

Thus Hyperboreans were associated symbolically with a number of Greek mystery traditions;

cults dedicated to Apollo. Pindar’s Pythian Ode, above, for example, illustrates the mystical

importance of the Hyperboreans in Ancient Greek religious life.

The crafting of the noble savage archetype was the work of the artists and mystics of

ancient society, whereas the social theorists of the time preferred to put this template to the test

of empirical ethnographic observation. Like Plato’s Republic and Atlantis in his Laws, and like

the musings of much later European thinkers on the cusp of the Age of Exploration like Sir

Thomas More’s Utopia, the Hyperboreans existed practically as invented paradeigmata, as

imaginary subjects for ethical, social, and political discussions conveniently brushed off to the

blank edges of the map where few ethnographers could challenge the source and the majority of

the audience would remain blissfully ignorant as to whether the subject culture was real or not

(Romm 1992). Herodotus is critical of such imagined space, or at least he gives that impression.

Herodotus outright rejected the noble savage and rather allowed barbarian cultures to

demonstrate their diversity, their strengths and weaknesses, their multiform virtues and vices. He

was still an ancient “cultural evolutionist” to a degree, but he wanted proof that the

Hyperboreans existed before he would ever describe a foreign culture in Golden Age terms.

Another passage out of Tacitus, a description of the most northern people in Roman knowledge

known as the Fenni, demonstrates a similar “critical” examination of distant northern barbarians

which put the noble savage paradigm to the test. Although technically not Hyperborean, this

nomadic tribe, likely the Finns, Saami, or some other related or ancestral Finno-Ugric group,

Tacitus describes in tongue-in-cheek fashion which uses a template of primitive simplicity, based

on what appears to be a hunter-gatherer society, in order to poke fun at the complexities of

Roman life:

The Fenni are astonishingly savage and disgustingly poor. They have no proper weapons,

no horses, no homes. They eat wild herbs, dress in skins, and sleep on the ground. Their

only hope of getting better fare lies in their arrows, which, for lack of iron, they tip with

bone. The women support themselves by hunting, exactly like the men; they accompany

them everywhere and insist on taking their share of the game. The only way they have of

protecting their infants against wild beasts or bad weather is to hide them under a

makeshift covering of interlaced branches…yet they count their lot happier than that of

others who groan over field labor, sweat over house-building, or hazard their own and

other men’s fortunes in the hope of profit and the fear of loss. Unafraid of anything that

man or god can do to them, they have reached a state that few human beings can attain:

for these men are so well content that they do not even need to pray for anything.

Tacitus then concludes this passage with a mention of the fanciful beyond the Fenni, meaning

that they mark the border between human and non-human worlds, that Tacitus’s survey has

reached its terminus and struck the eschatiai:

What comes after them is the stuff of fables: Hellusii and Oxiones with the faces and

features of men, the bodies and limbs of animals. On such unverifiable stories I shall

express no opinion (Tac. Ger. 46).

Concluding Remarks for Chapter 2

The resulting multivariant models of barbarism that emerged in Hellenic media generated

a general sense of the otherness of northern, Pontic cultures, but also an otherness which was

more fluid. Hellenes might simultaneously have viewed the indigenous nomads of their frontiers

as primordial in both the senses of animalistic vice and primitive righteousness. Moreover, the

Hellenic imagining of their geographic and cultural frontier was organized in these templates of

primitivism, a trend which Lovejoy and Boas (1965), James Romm (1992), and Harry Levin

(1969) note persisted in Medieval and Modern European exploration. Barbarian as a template for

the characterization of otherness utilized both real ethnographic material and a highly

ethnocentric polis-ideology in the construction of a frontier of both social space and economic

and cultural exploitation between Greek and barbarian, civilization and nomad. The effects of

colonization in the Pontic region catalyzed the growth of equestrian nomad “kingdoms” and a

thriving slave trade. Moreover, Ancient Greek colonialism established a circuit through which

privileged, educated Greeks could access native steppe religions and integrate elements of those

traditions into the emergent Hellenic socio-religious structures known as mystery religions. This

final classical issue will be the subject of the next chapter, after which this discussion will turn to

more contemporary matters relevant to otherness and invented tradition manifest in shamanism.

Chapter 3

Pontic Barbarian Religions and the Invention of the Mysteries

The previous chapter discussed 1) how the concept of eschatiai informed the Hellenic

worldview and activities in the Pontic from exploration to colonization, 2) how Greek activities

in the Pontic generated the gradual construction of the Greek/barbarian antithesis, and 3) how the

Hellenic ideology of the barbarian furthermore created two antithetical archetypes—the slavish,

animalistic barbarian based on ethnocentric stereotypes of the historical peoples of the Pontic

(e.g., Thracians, Scythians, etc.), and the noble savages of a more fantastic type who always

dwelt on the furthest peripheries of the Greek oikoumene, or known world (e.g., Hyperboreans,

Arimaspians, etc.).

This chapter will examine how the Greek/barbarian ideology, as a product of Greek-

Pontic colonialism, generated 1) a demand for “Hyperborean” wisdom in the Greek world

through the rise of Hellenic mystery religions; and 2) cultural appropriation of the exploitable

indigenous peoples of the Pontic in the construction of mystery traditions in the Greek heartland.

Essentially, the Greek mystery religions emerged in a state of Greek-Pontic colonialism and

cultural imperialism. Furthermore, this chapter should contribute to the debate on shamanism

within academia. As a number of scholars (Dodds 1951; La Barre 1970a-b; Eliade 1972; West

1982; Noll 1985; Littleton 1986; Ruck 1986; Lateiner 1990; and Ustinova 2009) interpret

various aspects of ancient Greek religious and mythological traditions through the lens of

shamanism, this discussion should revise the idea of “Greek shamanism,” a concoction of E. R.

Dodds’s 1951 work, The Greeks and the Irrational. Moreover, it will reveal that just as the

mysteries were invented traditions of culturally hegemonic stature, to reconstruct them as a type

of shamanism roughly 2500 years later is also a product of cultural imperialism.

The inquiry returns once more to the question of what shamanism is. Although the idea of

“Greek shamanism” is exceedingly problematic, the description of Pontic religions from the

same period as “Northern shamanism” is more permissible. Like the archaeological problems

discussed in our first chapter, we should be careful not to inject modern ideas about globally

indigenous religions into the interpretation of the material record of the ancient steppe.

Nonetheless, steppe culture was historically fluid, in that technologies, languages, ideas, and

populations were exceptionally mobile and transient. Migrations east and west, back and forth

from one end of the steppe to the other were routine until the Modern Period. With the

domestication of the horse during the Bronze Age, nomadic culture effectively generated a

process of cultural exchange and change which cycled for millennia, and consequently tribal

alliances and empires grew and shrank in succession (Anthony 2007; Bartold 1958; Saunders

1971; Skaff 2004). Historically and archaeologically, Pontic traditions were part of the larger

cultural complex of Northern Central Eurasia, albeit the western end of that geographical

continuum of steppe and taiga-forests which runs from Eastern Europe to Mongolia. As a result

of the natural highway this region provided, relationships between the many peoples of the

Eurasian Steppe, prehistoric and historic, and its border lands were far-reaching (see Bruyako

and Ostroverkhov 2004:194-195). Thus it should not come as a surprise that many cultural

similarities can be found between, say, Pontic Scythians and Altaic groups from the same period.

It is no great leap to claim that this cultural continuum also incorporated the flow of

religious ideas and customs. Although describing the ancient religions of the steppe as

“shamanism” risks misleading the reader, we should note that the Pontic religions shared a

relationship, via the steppe, with the Altaic-Siberian cultures from which historical shamanism

originated (See Appendix A, Figure 3). We cannot know how Scythian, Thracian, Massagetae, or

Issedonian spiritualists interacted with the spirit world except from a few gleanings from

sedentary observers and conjectural interpretations of associated material culture. Thus, the

cultures of the steppe in the first millennium BC may or may not fit Sidky’s category of

shamanism as mastery over spirit-entities. We simply cannot know, aside from the fact that these

cultures were an integral part of the burgeoning world in which shamanism in the modern

Northern Eurasian sense developed. Franz Hančar (1952:192) reports that between 700 and 100

BC the relationship between “Pontic Scytho-Sarmatian art and Siberia” is evident in terms of

motifs of shaman-animal affinity, animal-combat, and animal-predation. Although we will delve

into the specifics of the mythological and ritual significance of Pontic artifacts below, it will

suffice to mention that cross-cultural parallels run deep enough to describe them in the context of

Central Eurasian shamanism, even if for nothing more than heuristic reasons. Fol and Marazov

(1977) identify among the ancient Thracians mythological symbolism akin to Scythian and

Siberian traditions, especially in terms of shaman-animal affinity. The Thracians, who were

likely the most sedentary of the Pontic barbarians, utilized imagery that suggests they shared

some of their traditions with their contemporaries to the east (Loehr 1955; Rice 1961; Farkas

1981). Mundkur (1984:454) goes so far as to suggest, concerning Northern Eurasian nomadic art,

that:

their common ‘animal style’ traits stem from a uniformity in the Eurasian nomad’s

traditional way of life and relationship to the fauna of the steppe, boreal forest, and tundra

and are expressed through ornamental, utilitarian objects such as belt buckles, weapons,

mirror-frames, etc. The antecedents of this style apparently belonged to extremely early

groups of hunter-gatherers whose art merely reflected magicoreligious beliefs about

innumerable animal species of the vast Eurasian expanses.

China’s historical relationships with the nomadic cultures of its northern frontier,

especially with the Xiongnu, parallel those of the ancient West. The accounts of the nebulous Hu

peoples, the Chinese equivalent of the “barbarians,” in literature such as the Hanshu and Shiji are

eerily reminiscent of Herodotus’s reports of the Pontic-Caspian barbarian cultures from roughly

the same time period. It only makes sense if readers eschew the Orientalist notion that the East

and West were separate civilizational centers which existed in vacuums. Instead, consider that

Europe and Eastern Asia were in fact connected for millennia through not only the trade routes

of the south but also the traditional migratory routes of the steppe. The nomads of the steppe

simultaneously interacted with the cultural cores at either end of the continuum and themselves

were connected with one another. Sophia-Karin Psarras (2003), using historical and

archaeological analysis, notes not only similarities between “Scytho-Siberian” and Xiongnu

culture but also considers them to be part of that cultural continuum of the Eurasian Steppe.

Xiongnu religion, according to the historical accounts and archaeological sites included horse

sacrifice, human sacrifice to a war god, worship of the sun, moon, sky, earth, and ancestors, and

like the Scythians the Xiongnu drank blood, here that of horses, mixed with wine and swigged

from enemy skulls to solidify solemn oaths (Psarras 2003:129-32). In terms of Xiongnu art, the

same Scythian motifs of animal-predation and animal-combat occur in grave goods associated

with Xiongnu sites in Mongolia and Northern China with influences in Han Chinese art.

Given the antiquity of the Pontic cultures in question, our primary ethnographic sources

are extremely limited, and Herodotus, furthermore, provides the bulk of observations and

hearsay on Pontic groups from the Hellenic period. Nonetheless, the modern reader can glean

from the writings of the “Father of History” a number of passages that are confirmed by the

archaeological record of the steppe. Modern scholars have made attempts to compare Herodotus,

as well as the material record, with historical and modern ethnographic data (Childe 1970:38-9;

Meuli 1935; Hančar 1952; Heissig 1980), and numerous striking similarities surfaced between

the cultural patterns of the various Paleo-Asiatic, Ural-Altaic, Tungoso-Manchurian, and Turco-

Mongolian groups which are analogous to the descriptions of the Northern Eurasian barbarians

in Herodotus.

Animism, Totemism, and Northern Eurasian Ontologies

In order to fortify our perspective of the ancient Pontic cultures and their historical

analogues, we must first clarify the ontological principles which underlie historical Northern

Eurasian religious traditions. Morten Pedersen’s (2001) exposition of North Asian indigenous

ontologies provides exhaustive and insightful understandings of the multifarious religious and

philosophic modalities of the “shamanic” traditions of the vast region which stretches from the

steppes of the Mongolian Plateau in the south northward through the taiga and tundra of Siberia

(See Appendix A, Figure 4). Among a long list of indigenous groups, Pedersen notes a major

division, in terms of both social structure and ontology, between the cultures of Northern North

Asia (NNA) and Southern North Asia (SNA). He also notes that this division is not purely

dichotomous given that aspects of both ontological dispositions occur throughout the entire

region. Rather, the division indicates the dominant type of worldview exhibited by cultures in

each region without being mutually exclusive.

It likely sounds more dichotomous than Pedersen intended. Elements which typify NNA

traditions occur to a degree in the SNA traditions and vice versa. Although Pedersen understands

all of North Asian indigenous religion as generally shamanic in the truest, Siberian sense, he also

acknowledges fundamental variations between cultural groups on a north-south cline. Whereas

the theoretical principles of animism bracket the more northern traditions, the southern traditions

exhibit more totemistic modalities. These theoretical divisions, furthermore, coincide with

variation in social complexity and community-group worldviews, but are by no means limited to

one or another culture group:

Despite the tendency of different scholars to highlight different aspects of the North

Asian societies, and taking into account their different theoretical standpoints, the

established wisdom concerning the differences between NNA and SNA boils down to a

basic distinction between horizontal and vertical relations…Put simply, whereas the

societies of NNA organize the world horizontally (through notions of charismatic

leadership, egalitarian ethos, bilateral descent, direct exchange, and orally based

shamanist religion, etc.), societies of SNA organize it vertically (through notions of

inherited leadership, a hierarchical ethos, patrilineal descent, indirect exchange, a script-

based Buddhist religion, etc.) (Pedersen 2001:419-420).

As such, Pedersen breaks down various North Asian ontologies into animist and totemist

worldviews. Animism and totemism are not necessarily religious traditions in their own right,

nor are they mutually exclusive categories. Rather, following Pedersen, they describe the

dominant worldview of the cultures in question, which incorporates the spiritual or religious

realm. They are “governing principles” through which the social context of self/other is acted out

(e.g., animist principles in hunting customs, totemist in rites of passages) (Pedersen 2001:419).

As distinct categories of religion, animism and totemism are no more based in reality than

shamanism, and they are often lumped together as variations of indigenous shamanic traditions

(see DuBois 2009). The early schools of cultural evolution, largely shaped by the theories of E.

B. Tylor, supposed that animism represented one of the oldest, if not the earliest, forms of

religion. For Tylor, the empirical categories he notes (i.e., animism, fetishism, polytheism,

monotheism, and science) which he perceived in his present era, represent stages of cultural

evolution. Animism, in Tylor’s sequence, represents the earliest stages of primitive religion, and

science is his pinnacle of human cultural achievement. Tylor built his categories of religion,

although not necessarily Romanticist, upon the same Enlightenment understanding of the savage

other, perhaps with a slight Hobbesian bent, that the savage mind’s unscientific approach to

understanding seemingly mystical phenomena is at the root of all religion.

In any case, animism became synonymous with primitive religion in the evolutionary

model in that all religions or spiritualities are survivals of primitive animism’s “error.” In the

twentieth century animism naturally fell into the larger category of shamanism as the “living”

example of the most primordial and egalitarian form of indigenous, shamanic religion. The truth

is animism is as much a constructed product of Western thought as is shamanism. Yet, animism

as a category persisted unchallenged in scholarship through most of the twentieth century. It is

no secret that many peoples, indigenous or not, believe in spirits. The belief in spirits, however,

is integrated into larger ideological and social contexts that cross the categorical boundaries

which Tylor established. Should we throw out animism then? Recent scholarship would say no,

that we should instead take it seriously once more, not as a religion per se, but as a dimension of

cultural understandings of self/other, as an ontological principle for interpreting what exists in

the world surrounding a member of a specific culture group and how that person should interact

with said world (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Bird-David 1999; Pedersen 2001; Willerslev 2007,

2013). It is an identifiable element in the perspectives of various cultures rather than the single

defining fundament of any religious tradition. It is neither primitive nor part of an Enlightenment

theosophic paradigm.

Animism, which Pedersen describes as “Analogous identification” between persons both

human and nonhuman (2001:413) and “heterogeneous perceptions of a potential interior spiritual

quality in things” (p.414), typically occurs “where societal relations as a whole are horizontal in

character” (p.416). In a libertine type of shamanism, as among the Yukaghir for example, where

any being has the potential to mediate between the spiritual and material realms, animist sociality

between persons occurs in an egalitarian fashion. Humans communicate with the spirits of

ancestors, plants, and animals and vice versa in a “boundless whole” of society, according to

Pedersen’s Swiss-Cheese-Universe Theory (2001:416). In such a universe, the “whole” of the

universe is all of the same unified substance, the “cheese,” and the “holes” in the “cheese” are

different social positions to be occupied by animate beings ranging from geographic features and

weather phenomenon to plants, animals, and humans. Moreover, the socialization or shifting

between the existing categories is horizontal, meaning it is egalitarian and perhaps anarchic.

Spirits and humans interact on a frequent and chaotic basis in this ontological model, but

simultaneously they are all part of the whole. In contrast with the evolutionary model of religions

(e.g., animism—totemism—polytheism—monotheism), Pedersen’s model of animism tends

towards a socially variant model. We can infer that animistic traditions should be viewed in the

context of their relationship with the hegemonic world system. Should animism occupy the same

socio-economic position as shamanism, then shamanism as a term could apply to animist

traditions in a Northern Eurasian context. Moreover, it has the potential to provide some insight,

however slight, into the ancient cultures of the same Northern Eurasian region.

Like animism in the evolutionary perspective, totemism has at times been treated as an

independent phenomenon, an identifiable religious tradition or stage of religious evolution, often

synonymous with Tylor’s fetishism. Others looked to a more practical reason for the appearance

of totemic traditions. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, albeit in different ways, argued that

totemism occurred as social means of regulating natural resources through the classification of

social groups within naturally occurring categories. According to Malinowski, totemism is a

utilitarian manifestation of primitive man’s interest in his environment, of figuring out through

the social institutions of totemic myths and taboos what is and is not good to eat for one’s self.

Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, describes totemism as the social ordering of natural

resources for the good of the larger group structure, the establishment of social and ecological

equilibrium. Totemism, in Radcliffe-Brown’s system, is a practical solution to the problem of the

“relation of man and nature in ritual and myth” (1929:399). Totemism, in such a theory, provides

the indigenous mental framework of who has access to what resources, how, and perhaps why.

Namu Jila, in a more recent examination of the myths of various ancient Central Asian

steppe nomads as they have been preserved in the written records of their sedentary neighbors,

notes a common motif of a wolf/crow totemic pair as supernatural guardians of human hero-

characters and as totemic ancestors. In a fashion reminiscent of the structural-functionalist

perspective, Jila remarks that:

In the severe fight for survival within nature, the wolf and the crow are two inseparable

“comrades” who skillfully cooperate with consideration for one another. The crow

always crows “caw, caw, caw” when it flies, thus providing the wolf, who runs on the

ground, with the information necessary for knowing the whereabouts of potential prey. In

return, the wolf, after having eaten its fill, leaves the rest to the crow (2006:168).

As the groups from whom these myths come identify with the wolf and crow as totemic

ancestors, a belief system which continues today among the Mongols, the mythic symbiosis of

wolf and crow represent a type of clan-based ecology. The establishment of social identification

with specific totemic categories and related taboos and restrictions on what is good or not good

to eat basically functions as the mutual conservation of natural resources between totemic

groups. The mythic pair of crow/wolf in Altaic totemism thus “has its grounding in a

phenomenon observable in nature,” and that, as a “process of social life,” Jila’s interpretation of

the myth is that it is a cultural adaptation to an ecological problem (2006:168). As such, one

might view this type of totemism as the maintenance of Radcliffe-Brown’s idea of “social order”

to the natural domain of ecological adaptation for Altaic societies.

It sounds like a fair hypothesis, but as Lévi-Strauss (1963, 1966) notes, any functionalist

(or structural-functionalist) model misses the underlying social-rational structure that totemism

represents in intergroup relationships. Essentially, totemic divisions regulate the entire system of

intergroup relationships beyond the acquisition of food. Rather, totemism describes a basic

function of the human social mind which classifies and regulates the relationship between

us/them in the perfectly rational language of the subject cultures. In Pedersen’s model, where

animism yields a horizontal ontology, totemism yields one that is vertically aligned. Pedersen

describes totemism as being “homologous differentiation” between humans and nonhumans

(p.413), based on Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of totemism as a system of classification.

Furthermore, Pedersen finds that totemic ontology creates a “heterogeneous conglomerate of

mutually independent domains inhabited by humans as well as nonhumans” (p.418). Rather than

the spontaneous shamanism characteristic of Siberian animist ontologies, totemic shamans are

apparently the only human members of society with the ability to cross over the liminal

categories of the “bounded grid” of the existing world.

Consequently, the ontological principle of totemism is one of a vertical axis from upper

world to lower world. Clan 1 might be analogized to Species A in one domain, and Clan 2 might

be analogized to Species B at another. Socialization between domains is thus facilitated by the

shaman-figure. As Psarras notes on Scytho-Siberian art, and as a motif “common to iconography

across the Eurasian steppe,” the passageway “traveled by the shaman in rites of healing,

sacrifice, and the escorting of the soul to the world beyond” appears iconographically and

mythologically as the World Tree or Mountain, the vertical axis between the various levels of

upper and lower worlds (2003:117). Heissig notes that the Mongols believe that deceased

shamans become spiritual entities embodied as sacred mountains or other such axis mundi in

connection with both upper and lower worlds, or perhaps associated with one or the other

(1980:14). The point is that in the totemic ontology, the social space of mediation between

perceived categories is reserved for the shaman.

The World Tree also appears in early Chinese (Shang, Zhou, and Han dynasties)

mythology in the form of a mulberry tree, the roost of the sun-birds and the ancestral black birds.

Sarah Allan considers these mythologies in conjunction with associated contemporaneous

archaeological ritual assemblages from between the eleventh and fifth centuries BC evidence of

totemism in early Chinese religion (Allan 1981). Allan, following Lévi-Strauss, describes

Chinese totemism as a “system of classification rather than social institution,” in which royal

dynasts developed complex systems of exchanging power from generation to generation, and in

which Chinese bone-divination magic operates as the institutionalized “manipulation of

categories within the system to achieve practical results” (1981:304-5). Although Chinese

“shamanism” is potentially as problematic as “Greek shamanism,” despite Allan’s surety about

the existence of Chinese poet-shamans (p.300), her remarks on totemism provide some scholarly

insight into the Northern Asian totemisms of China’s Hu (i.e., “barbarian”) neighbors.

Again, totemism as an ontological principle does not preclude animist principles. It is the

social context in which either animist or totemist tendencies occur which is important. Pedersen

adamantly holds that Southern North Asian groups like the Halx Mongols are predominantly

totemistic in their understanding of self/other, but without explicitly rejecting any animistic

modalities. Likewise, Northern North Asian groups such as the Yukaghir tend towards an

animistic understanding of self/other categories, but this is not to say totemic elements are non-

present in their mythologies and rites of passage. Pedersen’s model might appear more

dichotomous than it actually is, but the point is that these constructed principles are most useful

in figuring out how various groups understand the relationship between ontological categories in

their specific contexts rather than as identifying generalized indigenous religious traditions at

large. In the words of Lévi-Strauss, the categories are good to think with. Although Jila (2006)

does not directly say it, I argue that the Turco-Mongol mythic wolf/crow symbiosis also signifies

clan-relationships and perhaps obligations to one another, which makes sense given the historical

alliances and empires which significant groups forged on the steppe frontier between societies

and which needed intergroup cooperation to thrive.

This brief discussion of animism and totemism is pertinent to the discussion of

shamanism in that: 1) evolutionary theories which classify animism and totemism as

manifestations of primitive religion (i.e., evident of early stages of cultural evolution or the

social ordering process) uphold outdated historical-materialist conjecture; and 2) that a

hypothetical dichotomy still persists in the discussion of shamanism in which primitive religion

appears on the one hand as man’s exertion of his will on his environment through social

structures, and on the other hand the environment’s exertion of its will upon social structures.

Sahlins’ “critique of the idea that human cultures are formulated out of practical activity and,

behind that, utilitarian interest” provides some explanation of how shamanism appeared as a

phenomenon, not as actual primitive religion but as symbolic of primitive religion in a global

structure (1976:vii). The raw “marble” block for the sculptor is quarried from the barbarian lands

which symbolize the past. Animist and totemist modalities are identifiable cross-culturally as

structural rationalizations and symbolism within certain cultures and often associated with

religious and mythological systems. But the symbol of the primitive shaman means more to the

observer than to the observed, and it does more to reify our own structure than provide evidence

for an evolutionary narrative.

“Northern Shamanism” and Pontic Barbarian Religions

As this thesis is not specifically about totemism or animism but about the construction of

otherness in the product of shamanism, these heuristic categories serve primarily to contextualize

our discussion of historical cultures which were a part of this Northern Eurasian complex. With

the principles of animism/totemism and horizontal/vertical ontologies which underlie Northern

Eurasian worldviews in mind, let us now examine the historical and archaeological records of the

ancient cultures of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe with special attention to how scholars have

reconstructed and interpreted their religious traditions based upon their readings of the

archaeology of the steppe and ancient sources on barbarian traditions. From there we should be

better equipped to tackle the issues of “Greek shamanism” and “northern shamanism.” Hančar

(1952) finds that between the period of 700 and 100 BC, mythic animal motifs featured most

commonly in grave goods throughout the Eurasian Steppe from the Pazyryk sites of the Altai

region (where modern-day Russia, Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan meet) westward throughout

the Pontic-Caspian Steppe region. Bruyako and Ostroverkhov (2004) note this continuum of

Eurasian styles in the pre-Scythian Pontic Steppe graves, and Malashev and Yablonsky pay close

attention to the occurrence of the “animal style” on Sarmatian male-warrior grave artifacts of the

southern Ural Mountains (2004:267). Among the fauna included in the “animal style,” the stag

occurs most commonly throughout Eurasia. Rice (1961:158) claims that the mythic stag is the

“most characteristic single motif in Scythian art.” Moreover, Rice associates the stag motif with

Siberian traditions in which the stag represents the soul-vehicle that carries the deceased to the

netherworld. Loehr (1955) essentially comes to the same conclusion in which the Scythian stag

played a vital role in Scythian perspectives on the afterlife. We might be able to hypothesize

about the vertical ontology of Scythian groups in light of these artifacts. Soul-travel to the

underworld utilizes socially-prescribed soul-vehicles which manifest through the art of grave

goods.

In Thracian art from the same period the stag appears frequently on grave goods,

particularly ornate golden cups in the tombs of Thracian and Dacian individuals of higher social

status (Fol & Marazov 1977:73). Farkas (1981:44) identifies the recurrent theme of the eight-

legged stag on Thracian cups as indicative of both a style and mythology related to the Scythian

style, but also part of a distinctly Thracian tradition. The eight-legged characteristic may convey

a running motion, but it also could indicate supernatural power associated with the chthonic

underworld in Thracian ontology. One might even consider the Thracian stag analogous to

Sleipnir the eight-legged horse who carried Hermod into the depths of Hel to rescue the slain god

Baldur in Norse mythology. In any case, the occurrence of the stag as a central part of Pontic

funerary animal-ceremonialism suggests the stag held a sacred position in Thracian and Scythian

traditions associated with the realm of the dead. Furthermore, in light of Pedersen’s theories on

totemism and vertical socialization, the mythic stag likely occupied, within the worldview of the

ancient Pontic cultures, a discreet totemic category as soul-vehicle with which only a shaman-

figure could communicate. Additionally, we cannot deny that these artifacts, typically gold,

silver, or electrum, are uniformly part of a privileged segment of Pontic societies analogous to

Pedersen’s SNA hierarchical, vertically organized societies.

Zoomorphic art which depicts animal-animal and human-animal affinities and

metamorphoses also occurs widely throughout Pontic art and has a deep cultural history

throughout Northern Eurasia among material assemblages and extant traditions associated with

shamanic activity. For example, Mundkur (1984) observes a “bicephalous,” or double-headed,

animal style among ceremonial artifacts throughout Northern Eurasia from the Late Stone Age

into the Scythian Iron Age. For Mundkur, the bicephalous animal style represents the

“primordial religious attitudes” of shamanism: “Shadowy though they may seem, the roots of

bicephalous art lie in the appeal of a few species selected as ‘assistants’ to the shaman and as

partners in the man-to-animal or animal-to-animal transformations that characterize the tribal

world of dualistic spirits” (p.474). Mundkur’s discourse ultimately takes the pan-shamanist

stance of Eliade in his interpretation of the evidence as primordial shamanism. Nevertheless, his

analysis highlights the widespread motif of animal transformations in the mythologies of

Northern Eurasian nomadic groups, and this motif is further demonstrable in the Pontic material

record as well. For instance, Hussman (1976:116) notes that among the Pazyryk tombs the

occurrence of antlered masks crafted for horses (ca. fifth century BC). Hussman interprets these

masks as a “horned lion-griffin” motif, but offers no further comment on its mythological

significance. Rice (1961:118) forwards one possible practical explanation of Scythian antlered

horse masks as an attempt to disguise the horses as reindeer for hunting. However, the masks are

probably too ornate for such a practical purpose, and their occurrence as grave goods (complete

with inhumed horses) might hint at an alternate interpretation. Given the interpretation of the

mythic stag as part of Pontic and Siberian ideas about death and the netherworld, the horse

masks might indicate ceremonial totemic transformations of horse-stag. Moreover, the

transformed horse-stag may have functioned as the soul-vehicle in that the horse, buried with its

owner, carries the soul of the human to the underworld.

Horse sacrifice as a funerary custom occurred throughout the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, and

Herodotus reports such a custom in two separate instances. On the Caspian Massagetai,

Herodotus describes how this nomadic group sacrificed horses to their sun-god (Hdt. 1.216).

Similarly, he includes horse sacrifice as an integral part of the funerals of Scythian kings (4.71-

2). Childe (1970:38-9) claims the Scythian kurgan excavations verify the Herodotean accounts,

and he furthermore associates the Scythian custom with historical Mongolian traditions of horse

sacrifice. Heissig (1980:6) additionally describes the Mongol funerary custom of the suspension

of sacrificed horses from poles as a shamanic practice. Psarras (2003) notes in the historical

Chinese accounts of the Xiongnu and associated archaeological sites, horse sacrifice was also

customary among these nomads.

Another popular motif in Northern Eurasian artifacts is animal combat, which often

included mythical beasts such as the griffin. Farkas (1981:44) describes the scenes on the

Thracian Agighiol Cups (ca. fourth century BC), which depict not only the eight-legged stag but

also griffins attacking wild boars. The griffin motif, according to Hančar (1952), was also

widespread throughout steppe sites associated with the Scythians. Mallory and Mair (2000:42-3)

connect Herodotus’s account of the legendary one-eyed Arimaspians who eternally fought the

Griffins over their hordes of gold (Hdt. 4.27), with the Pazyryk Scythians of the Altai. Among

the Pazyryk finds, Mallory and Mair cite a textile fragment which depicts two griffins locked in

combat with one another. Hančar (1952) considers the animal combat motif the dominant style in

Pazyryk art (e.g., “panther on reindeer,” “griffon[sic] and tiger,” “eagle-griffon[sic] on argali,”

“tiger on a mountain sheep”). E. H. Minns (1913:2, 92) similarly reports images of griffins

attacking fallow-deer on a silver amphora from the Čertomlyk Kurgan and on a gold bracelet

from Kul-Oba. Psarras (2003) makes similar observations of Xiongnu grave goods, albeit in a

strictly socio-political context of power and group-dominance. Additionally, Farkas (1981:37)

notes the frequent occurrence of more realistic birds of prey in Scythian art (ca. seventh century

BC) and Thracian art (ca. sixth-fifth centuries BC) with local, native variations in style.

However, Hančar (1952:192) also finds that Pontic Scythian art diverged from that of

their Pazyryk relatives with the emergence of human characterizations as the dominant style by

the late fourth and early third centuries. Reportedly, the Pontic “human form can have the shape

of the great female goddess, the male monster-killing hero, or of the Scythian prince elevated by

the deity through the potion which brings about the mystical union” (1952:192). As we will

discuss later in this chapter, this shift in style likely resulted from a gradual influence of Hellenic

mystery traditions in the Pontic. We also see the idea of the mystical potion, the kykeon in Greek,

which was a part of the mystery rites of numerous Hellenic cults, here a part of northern

barbarian tradition. It may very well simply be the scholar’s interpretation, but it could also

indicate a degree of cultural exchange. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century, reports the

Scythian pantheon and his interpretation of Hellenic analogues as Tabiti (Hestia), Papaios

(Zeus), Api (Gaia), Oitosyros (Apollo), Argimpasa (Aphrodite Urana), and Thagimasidas

(Poseidon), with the addition of hero cults devoted to Herakles and Ares (Hdt. 4.59). Psarras

connects Herodotus’s description of the Scythians’ custom of venerating a sword to the god of

war with similar Xiongnu veneration of sacrificial knives (2003:129-32), and similar legends

surrounded Attila the Hun. Hančar notes that the “youngest” Scythian kurgans on the Dnieper

and Kuban rivers show the ancestor worship of a totemic Targitaos, whom Herodotus identifies

mythographically as Herakles, as the progenitor of the Scythian people (Hdt. 4.5-10).

Hančar supposes that a cultural shift in ideology among the Pontic Scythians in contrast

to their Siberian relatives coincided with increased social complexity on the steppe. Whereas,

according to Hančar, the Pontic Scythians apparently grew into a system of “monarchy,” the

Pazyryk graves demonstrate a societal structure in which an elevated shaman-figure holds

leadership with a warrior class of “knights” beneath the shaman. Furthermore, Hančar recalls

certain myths of the “Buryats [Buriats]…Jenissei Ketes [Yenesei Kets] and of the Jakutes

[Yakuts] who believe the deified shaman to be the ancestor, cultural hero, commander-in-chief,

and mighty protector of the tribe” (pp.193-4). The Mongols venerate Genghis Khan in a similar

fashion to this day.

Among the Thracians, Herodotus identifies the worship of Ares, Dionysus, and Artemis

(Hdt. 5.7). As with the Scythians, Herodotus interprets indigenous deities in Hellenic terms.

However, when we inspect the Thracian archaeological record we find a great number of

artifacts which commonly depict a horse-riding hero-deity and a mother or lady goddess. Fol and

Marazov (1977:17) report, for example, the Hero, potentially Herodotus’s Thracian Ares,

appears on roughly three thousand Thracian artifacts with astounding consistency. Consequently,

Fol and Marazov deduce that the Hero represented a universal deity shared between the

multitude of Thracian and Dacian tribes with only slight variations, typically localized names.

Moreover, the Hero is often depicted in combat with a dragon, which Fol and Marazov connect

to Indo-Iranian myths of Hero-deities such as Mitra and Indra. We will return to Artemis in her

Hellenic context below, but the mother or lady goddess motif in Thracian art likely inspired

Herodotus’s interpretation of the Thracian Artemis, whose domains are associated with animals,

motherhood, and the hunt. The goddess with her animals is a common motif in the Eurasian

archaeological record among the nomadic groups (Psarras 2003). As for Dionysus, one might

wonder if the tradition diffused into Thrace from Greece as an introduced cult. Then again, the

Thracians, as well as the Scythians, were known in Ancient Greece for their love of alcohol. The

Scythians however despised the Dionysian cult, so the Thracian Dionysus is still open to

interpretation.

The Hero-God, on the other hand, may also reflect the belief in a Sky-God common

throughout Eurasian Steppe cultures, especially stratified tribal societies. Heissig (1980:10)

claims that the Sky-God, or “all ruling Eternal Sky,” is one of the most widespread shamanic

deities in Eurasia, evident in traditions such as the Turco-Mongol ancestor-god Tengri. The

Scythian Papaios likely fits the bill for their Sky-God, as might the Thracian Hero. For instance,

Fol and Marazov (1977:19, 36) interpret the Herodotean account of Salmoxis, god of the

Thracian Getae tribe, as a form of Sky-God worship. Specifically, the authors note the reverence

the Getae have for thunderstorms as manifestations of their deity. We will return to Salmoxis

below, as Lateiner (1990:243) considers Herodotus’s report on this Thracian tradition “a travesty

of Asiatic shamanism.”

To return to the issue of social complexity and shamanism which Hančar raises, the

Pontic cultures by at least the fifth century BC diverged from the animistic traditions of Siberia

with an elevated degree of social stratification. Hančar describes this trend in terms of a scheme

of cultural evolution, a model typical of anthropological theory in the mid-twentieth century in

the works of figures like Julian H. Steward and Marshall D. Sahlins. Most of the Pontic grave

goods, as mentioned above, are artisan-crafted items of gold, silver, and electrum. This indicates

the high status of the inhumed and perhaps expanded political and economic cohesion between

related nomadic tribes, a historical trend which the Sarmatians, Huns, Turks, and Mongols

echoed after the Scythians (see Saunders 1971). However, I posit that it also indicates that Greek

colonial activity in the Pontic impacted the cultural direction of the indigenous Pontic peoples,

not to mention the factor of Persian imperialism in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Keep in mind

that the frontiers between sedentary and nomadic groups are volatile and places of cultural

exchange and shifting political alliances. Finely crafted goods made their way into the steppe in

the form of rewards for loyalty to urban centers but also as loot from raiding and conquest.

Although the emphasis on male warrior-deities in Thracian or Scythian cultures tells us little if

anything about their gender roles and kinship patterns, the overwhelming emphasis on a male

warrior class in the Pontic mortuary assemblages likely reflects Pedersen’s observations of SNA

vertical, totemist societies. Nonetheless, like the Halx Mongols, as well as the Buriats and

Altays, the Thracians and Scythians maintained religious traditions akin to, if not directly related

to, shamanic, totemic traditions, albeit in ways in which the shaman was elevated to a holy

“chief” status and even deified as a venerated ancestor-hero.

The Thracian deity Salmoxis might validate this claim. Salmoxis (also spelled

“Zalmoxis” and “Zamolxis” in some translations) first appears in Herodotus’s Histories as a

wily, barbaric charlatan who, after receiving his enlightenment from his Greek master (although

Herodotus explicitly doubts this part of the story), Pythagoras, manages to fool his tribesmen into

believing he was a god:

This Salmoxis I hear from the Hellenes who dwell about the Hellespont and the Pontus,

was a man, and he became a slave in Samos, and was in fact a slave of Pythagoras the

son of Mnesarchos. Then having become free he gained great wealth, and afterwards

returned to his own land. Since the Thracians are both primitive and rather simple-

minded, this Salmoxis, being acquainted with the Ionian way of living and with manners

more complex than the Thracians were used to see, and since he had associated with

Hellenes (not only that but with Pythagoras, not the least able philosopher of the

Hellenes), he prepared a banqueting-hall, where he was received and feasted the chief

men of the tribe and instructed them meanwhile that neither he himself nor his guests nor

their descendants in succession after them would die. They would come to a place where

they would live forever and have all things good. While he was doing and saying these

things, he was making for himself meanwhile a chamber under the ground; and when this

chamber was finished, he disappeared from among the Thracians and went down into the

underground chamber, where he continued to live for three years. They grieved for his

loss and mourned him as dead. Then in the fourth year he appeared to the Thracians, and

in this way the things which Salmoxis said became credible to them. Thus they say that

he did. As to this matter and the chamber underground, I neither disbelieve it nor do I

very strongly believe, but I think that Salmoxis lived many years before Pythagoras.

However, whether there ever lived a man Salmoxis, or whether he is simply a native

deity of the Getai, farewell to him now (Hdt. 4.95-6).

Carpenter (1946:112-32) forwards the idea that the Salmoxis narrative is actually a Hellenic

misunderstanding of northern bear-myths and that the Salmoxian religion was actually an

instance of an indigenous bear cult.

For Carpenter, Salmoxis’s descent into the underground chamber and his emergence as a

deified hero parallels death/resurrection and hibernation myths found throughout the northern

hemisphere in which the “bear, who sleeps as though dead, belongs among the dead and thereby

becomes one of the lords of the underworld” (pp.128-9). As interesting an interpretation as it

may be, Carpenter really only casually lists references to A. I. Hallowell’s Bear Ceremonialism

in the Northern Hemisphere (1926) and James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1926) with no further

inquiry into their analyses. Moreover, like Frazer, Carpenter’s perspective on “primitive

ceremonials” assumes too widely universal a stance. Nevertheless, Carpenter raises an impetuous

question concerning the reanalysis of Salmoxis in terms of the chthonic symbolism of

underworld travel and death/rebirth, which has been noted in bear cults (see Germonpré and

Hämäläinen 2007). That being said, no further proof exists that Salmoxis was a mythic, totemic

bear-deity.

Carpenter’s interpretation did, however, inspire the revision of Salmoxis as a shaman

archetype. Dodds (1951:140-4) considers Salmoxis a “heroised shaman of the distant past,” and

he provides similar interpretations of two other legendary barbarians of Greek lore whom we will

discuss below—Abaris and Orpheus. The idea of Salmoxis as a Thracian shaman also intrigued

the primitivist populizer of shamanism, Mircea Eliade. In 1972 Eliade challenged Dodd’s

interpretation of Salmoxis as an Asiatic shaman, but he did support the idea that the Salmoxis

cult was in fact typical for the religious traditions of most of the ancient Thracian tribes and their

nearby relatives including the Dacians. Salmoxis reemerged in 1990, championed by Donald

Lateiner as a northern shaman whom the Pontic Greeks misunderstood as a sham of a “savage

messiah” (p.245). Lateiner eschews Herodotus’s doubts and instead highlights the Thracian’s

shamanic attributes: “the long sleep, often the mimicry of an underworld journey; occultation or

sudden disappearance and reappearance, usually the shaman’s novitiate; the uncertainty of status

as mortal or immortal being; the attempt to reestablish communication with the spirit world; the

description of an everlasting life of bliss” (pp.243-4). This laundry-list of attributes, which are

indeed common to Eurasian shamanic traditions, especially the chthonic underworld motif, do a

fine job placing Salmoxis in a shamanic light. However, the Herodotean Salmoxis lacks the

spiritual connection to or mastery over the animal-spirit world (or simply, the natural world)

necessary to Northern Eurasian shamanism. One might assume Herodotus, preoccupied with

presenting the tale in Pythagorean terms, simply ignored things the modern observer might

consider totemic or shamanic. For all we know, the Salmoxis narrative might have been

culturally bound-up with the widespread Thracian traditions of the Hero-God and the chthonic,

mythic stag. Furthermore, Herodotus may simply have been using a report of a native Thracian

tradition as a tongue-in-cheek satire of Pythagoras, whom we will also cover towards the end of

this chapter. Nevertheless, Salmoxis the shaman remains mysteriously conjectural despite

Lateiner’s certainty that Herodotus accidentally preserved “genuine characteristics of Dacian and

Scythian religion.”

Herodotus’s report on Salmoxis does tell us something of the exchange or transmission of

ideas and religious traditions across the Greek-Pontic frontier, namely that the traditions of the

northern barbarians had a profound influence on the development of Greek mystery cults.

However, the cultural-borrowing, as will be demonstrated, was rather lop-sided. The Scythians in

particular remained culturally conservative in the face of Greek colonialism and rejected most

Greek religion with zeal. The only potential exceptions are the hero cults of Herakles, Ares, and

Achilles, each of which, as discussed above, may simply have been an adaptation or Hellenic

misinterpretation of indigenous Pontic totemic-ancestor traditions.

The cross-diffusion of religious traditions across the Pontic frontier between nomad and

polis met resistance on the part of the barbarians. Braund (2007:47-52) describes a situation of

rising “religious polemics” between native Scythians and Greek colonists in the colony of Olbia

between the seventh and second centuries BC. In one case, a Greek priest of Apollo wrote of

“hunters of horses” who desecrated the Olbian altars to Apollo. The phraseology of “horse-

hunters,” of course, implies a derogatory slight towards the nomadic Scythians in Hellenic Greek

vernacular. Though the causes for this raid are unclear, given that Olbia was the cultural and

economic hub of the Greek colonies where countless marginalized barbarians were sold into

slavery to the Greeks by their rulers and shipped south the Mediterranean world, the incident is

hardly surprising. Ironically, Apollo was a deity whom the Greek mystics associated with the

“noble” barbarism of the fanciful Hyperboreans (see below).

Two short narratives in Herodotus further highlight Scythian attitudes towards Greek

culture, particularly religion—the stories of Anacharsis and Scyles. Anacharsis, according to

Herodotus, was a Scythian sage who became immersed in Greek life (Hdt. 4.76-7). He learned to

practice Greek religion, and when he brought those rites back to his people, King Saulios of the

Scythians personally shot and killed Anacharsis with an arrow. Herodotus wraps up this lesson

about Scythian aversion of foreign religions with the claim that Scythians deny knowing the sage

altogether because he abandoned the old ways. Simply put, Anacharsis adopted the traditions of

the colonialists in lieu of his ancestral religion. Braund views this story as conveying “a sense of

the uneasy interaction of Olbiopolitans and their Scythian pastoralist neighbors.”

Like Anacharsis, the story of Scyles highlights this theme of Scythian conservatism and

antipathy towards Greek religion, and Herodotus even remarks that Scyles “suffered nearly the

same fate” as Anacharsis (Hdt. 4.78). As the story goes, Scyles was the son of the Scythian King

Ariapeithes and an Istrian woman. When Scyles became king after his father, “he was by no

means satisfied with the Scythian manner of life, but was much more inclined towards Hellenic

ways because of his training.” Thus Scyles would frequently travel to Olbia, leave his men

outside the city-walls, and change into Greek attire once he was inside and out of his men’s

sight. During his month-long stay in Olbia, Scyles would participate in Hellenic customs,

especially religious customs. At some point he apparently decided to join the Cult of Bacchus-

Dionysos, and according to Herodotus this was his fated downfall (Hdt. 4.79).

The Scythians, Herodotus says, had been disgusted with the Cult because they did not

approve of a god who drove men to frenzy. During the initiation rite, some of Scyles’s men

sneaked inside with the help of a local citizen, saw their king in a Bacchic fury, and, dismayed,

informed the rest of their compatriots outside of Scyles’s abominations that they witnessed. The

Scythians then conspired against their king, put his brother on the throne, and exiled Scyles to

Thrace (Hdt. 4.80). Eventually, Scyles’s brother, the new king, received Scyles as a prisoner

from the Thracians and subsequently had him beheaded. As a conclusion to these two morality

tales, Herodotus states: “Thus do the Scythians carefully guard their own customary observances,

and such are the penalties which they inflict upon those who acquire foreign customs beside their

own.” The stories might cause us to wonder how many other such instances of religious polemics

occurred on the Greco-Pontic frontier.

Finally, Herodotus discusses at length the ethnogenesis of the Scythians through two

myths, one native and one colonial Hellenic, as well as one historical anecdote. The first, the

native Scythian myth of their origin (Hdt. 4.5-7), describes their descent from a hero named

Targitaos, the son of Zeus (Papaios) and the daughter of the River Borysthenes (Dnieper). In this

story, Targitaos begat three sons to an unspecified woman—Lipoxaïs, Arpoxaïs, and Colaxaïs.

Four golden items descended from heaven to these brothers—a plough, a yoke, a battle-axe, and

a cup. The elder brothers approached the items to seize them, but the items repelled them with

blazing fire. The youngest brother, Colaxaïs, alone was able to seize the powerful golden items

and thus acquired his kingship. Following Lévi-Strauss’ (1967) and Burridge’s (1967) discussion

of the structural study of myth, we might identify various aspects of Scythian steppe ontology in

this myth. First, the union of Zeus=Daughter of Borysthenes lays out a vertical axis of Sky-

Father/Chthonic-Mother, where the river (i.e., water) signifies life springing from the earth.

Second, the golden items from above descend along that same axis from heaven to earth. Thus,

we might hypothesize that the Scythians understood life as coming from the earth and river but

royal power from above.

Herodotus, in the same passage, describes an annual cultic festival in which the Scythians

sacrifice to the golden relics which might have reiterated, through myth and ritual, Scythian

verticalized social order. Was this how the Royal Scythians dictated tribal or clan social (perhaps

totemic) roles for subservient groups? As Herodotus describes a number of agrarian and semi-

nomadic tribes associated with the Scythians (4.17-20), might the plough and yoke have justified

the establishment of submissive provider groups for the Royal Scythians to whom the battle-axe

and drinking-vessel represent power? Such a juxtaposition of socio-economic roles, as the

previous chapter discussed, is historically typical to large pastoralist societies.

The colonial Hellenic myth of the Scythian ethnogenesis bears some semblance to the

native myth but also demonstrates how the Greek colonists incorporated Anatolian and

Mesopotamian mythology into their understanding of barbarism (Hdt. 4.8-10). This second myth

traces the origin of the Scythians to the union of a snake-goddess with a hero-god, whom

Herodotus interprets as Herakles:

Thence Herakles came to the land now called Scythia; and as a storm came upon him

together with icy cold, he drew over him his lion’s skin and went to sleep. Meanwhile the

mares harnessed in his chariot disappeared by miraculous chance, as they were feeding.

Then when Herakles woke he sought for them; and having gone over the whole land, and

at last he came to the region which is called Hylaia; and there he found in a cave a kind of

twofold creature formed by the union of a maiden and a serpent, whose upper parts from

the buttocks upwards were those of a woman, but her lower parts were those of a snake.

Having seen her and marveled at her, he asked her then whether she had seen any

straying anywhere; and she said that she had them herself and would not give them up

until he lay with her.

In the end, the snake-woman bears three sons to Herakles—Agarthyrsos, Gelonos, and

Skythes—and in exchange for his horses, Herakles offers his bow, his belt, and his drinking-cup

which hangs on his belt as heirlooms for whichever of his sons is strong enough to pull his bow.

As with the native myth, the youngest son—here Skythes—out-performs his older brothers and

earns royal power over them.

Both the native and the colonial myths describe a verticalized order to Scythian society

with a genealogical origin in the union of a Sky-Father and Chthonic-Mother. In the native myth,

Zeus begat the hero, Targitaos, by the daughter of the River-Mother, as rivers symbolize the

chthonic forces of fertility and the Dnieper River (which the Greeks called Borysthenes) was

situated in the Scythian heartland. In the colonial myth, the son of Zeus is Herakles, the famous

Greek hero, rather than Scythian Targitaos. Moreover, whereas the native myth provides no

known wife for the son of the Sky-Father, the colonial myth focuses on the hero’s union with

another chthonic force of fertility, the half-snake, half-woman who dwells in the cave, symbolic

of the netherworld and the womb of the earth. Structurally, both myths trace Scythian origin to

the verticalized union of masculine-sky and feminine-earth, and both myths describe a

justification for the stratification of Scythian society. One might also note in each myth the roles

of a wandering father (or grandfather) juxtaposed with a localized mother (or grandmother),

which might offer a small sherd of evidence for a native tradition of matrilocality. However,

each myth assigns different cultural meaning to the observable social axis of these ancient

barbarians, and as both myths agree on patrilineal inheritance, the meaning revolves around the

order of Scythian society as both observed by Greeks and ritualized by Scythians.

The native myth, as Herodotus has reported it, utilizes the symbols of royal power given

to the “Son of Heaven,” a title which is historically attestable throughout Northern Eurasian

nomadic empires, and associated strata of submission to royal nomadic power. From the royal

nomadic perspective, the agrarian world (i.e., the descendants of the mythic older brothers) is

subservient to the ruling warrior class (i.e., the descendants of the youngest brother), and the

golden relics symbolized this vertical axis in Scythian culture. From the colonial perspective, the

ruling Scythians are the barbarians par excellence, symbolized in Skythes’s bow and his

drinking-vessel hung from his belt, accoutrements typical to both Hellenic artistic renditions of

Pontic barbarians and Scythian artistic self-depiction. The other brothers, Gelonos and

Agarthyrsos, are likewise, linked in name to two other Pontic groups submissive to the Royal

Scythians—the Agarthyrsians and the Gelonians, the latter of whom Herodotus describes

explicitly as tillers of the soil (Hdt. 4.104,108 respectively). Whereas the colonists viewed the

Royal Scythians as barbaric archetypes, the myth made sense of the observable fact that groups

with atypical economies or mixed Hellenic and Thracian customs were subservient to Scythian

power. Thus the colonial myth illustrates popular Hellenic discussions and beliefs about barbaric

social order on their northern colonial frontier, and Herodotus’s attempt to ethnographically map

and correct said discussion.

The colonial myth also injects other non-Greek (i.e., barbarian), yet non-Scythian mythic

material into their understanding of the multitudinous tribes of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. The

snake-woman, typically an ancient Mediterranean-Near Eastern figure, has been the subject of

erroneous discussions of Greek Shamanism. Very early on, Karl Meuli (1935:127-30) considered

the snake-goddess story a motif of Asiatic shamanism, especially the human-animal

transformation. However, Meuli also reads into the passage aspects of ambiguous gender as

further proof of shamanism, despite the fact that nothing in the story suggests anything of that

sort, whereas human-animal liminality might (i.e., human/snake). Psarras notes the Scythian

goddess Api appears in the archaeological records as a woman flanked by two serpents, similar

to motifs of goddesses surrounded by animals across Eurasia (2003:110). Although Herodotus

does describe the Scythian goddess, Api, as analogous to the Earth-Mother, Gaia, the artifact

Psarras refers to (a fourth century BC gold plaque from Kul-Oba) actually appears later in the

Scythian archaeological record, well after colonial contact, and might well indicate cultural

transmission from the Hellenic world rather than native mythology. Hančar (1952) also finds that

the Hero-God/Snake-Goddess motif actually appears quite late in Pontic Scythian archaeology

and in conjunction with increased social complexity.

Despite this fact, Ustinova (2005) favors the interpretation of the snake-goddess story as

shamanic mythology, which she claims was part of a widespread motif of snake-limbed and

tendril-limbed goddesses throughout the southern Pontic, namely Anatolia. Although the

Anatolian archaeological record does show a deep tradition of snake-goddess worship with

plausible connections to the city-state cults of Mesopotamia, the connection Ustinova draws with

Scythian Api-worship is much weaker. These goddesses, she asserts, were part of a pre-Indo-

European mother-goddess mythology, echoing Marija Gimbutas’s hypothesis. The scheme of

history (or prehistory) which she uses, however, relies upon evolutionary conjecture and an

imagined tradition of primordial shamanism. For the Scythians, the daughter of the river-goddess

was the chthonic progenitor deity, but the Greek analogue of the echidna, the snake-woman, was

rather a transmission of Hellenic tradition into the Pontic. Ustinova seems to have forgotten that

Herodotus lists the snake-woman myth as a colonial Hellenic myth of Scythian ethnogenesis

which differs from the native myth. Might the motif have emerged as an adaptation of Greek and

Pontic mythologies within a colonial context? The hero-god paired in mythic dialectic with the

chthonic serpent appears in other Hellenic traditions as well. The cultic traditions which surround

Apollo, especially in his defeat of the Python in the cave at Delphi, utilize similar mythic

structures overlaid with cultic meaning central to Hellenic mysticism.

The Mystery Cults: Survivals of the Greeks’ Shamanic Past or Invented Tradition?

Thus far we have examined the issue of “northern shamanism” in the historical and

archaeological records of indigenous Pontic cultures. Many aspects of the religious traditions of

the Pontic peoples, particularly the Scythians and Thracians, could be described as forms or

variants of shamanism, or perhaps traditions ancestral to more recent Siberian shamanism,

especially given the relationship between Eurasian Steppe cultures and the cultures of Northern

Asia. More importantly, however, the barbarian religions of the ancient Pontic-Caspian Steppe

signified for the Ancient Greeks something akin to the concept of shamanism in the modern,

global sense—symbolic of a primordial, perhaps mythic, past. One can find this connection in

the process through which the Hellenic mystery religions developed and in the significance that

barbarian culture and specifically spirituality held in the mysteries, or at least how the Ancient

Greeks understood those foreign cultures.

A number of scholars (Dodds 1951; LaBarre 1970; Ruck 1986; Littleton 1986; Ustinova

2009) have attempted to extend the category of shamanism to Ancient Greece with most of the

attention focused on mystery religion and a near unhealthy obsession with Altered States of

Consciousness (ASC) and ritual intoxication as means of obtaining mystical, chthonic

knowledge. ASC and ritual intoxication did in fact typify many of the rites of the Greek mystery

religions. However, although Greek religion in general contained some mythic elements of their

Indo-European heritage shared with Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Indo-Iranian groups and others, as

well as elements of Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions, these Hellenic mystery traditions

were not relics of the Greeks’ nomadic Proto-Indo-European past and “primordial shamanism,”

but rather invented traditions built upon the dichotomies of Greek/barbarian and cultivated/wild.

They were, in fact, products of the sedentary, agrarian city-state cultures of the Ancient

Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds.

Invented traditions often give the illusion of antiquity while obscuring their contemporary

origins in the politics of power and control over narratives. In other words, the mystery cults in

many ways imitated Pontic traditions of “northern shamanism” but reconstructed those traditions

within the context of the Hellenic pantheon and priestly, social hierarchies. The mystery cults

claimed a heritage which stretched back to the Golden Age of Greek mythic ontology, an age

which supposedly still existed at the time geographically at the edges of the world among the

Hyperboreans. The ideological system in which the cultic imitation occurred thrived upon and

perpetuated the mythic Hyperborean motif in which barbarians were a source of untainted

Golden Age wisdom. Thus the more proximal Thracians and Scythians became the ignorant

purveyors of Hyperborean tradition for “enlightened” Hellenes initiated into certain cults.

Finally, this system of exploitation might also account in part for the cultural antagonism

between Pontic barbarians and Greeks, such as between the Hellenic cults in Olbia and the

Scythians, despite the supposed similarities between “Greek shamanism” and “northern

shamanism.” Thus the Greek mystery religions are full of paradoxes which reflect Hellenic

idealizing of barbarian noble savages off afar but also chauvinism towards those illiterate and

ignorant savages at hand.

What exactly is a mystery religion? The Hellenic μυστήριον, mysterion, refers to secret

or hidden knowledge, that which is shut, from the Greek μυέω, mueó, to compress the lips,

which is revealed only to the initated, μύστης, mystos. The Greek mysteries were religious

orders, cults which developed hierarchies of knowledge about the deep secrets of Greek

mythology and the relationships between Hellenic civilization and the world of gods and beasts

(See Appendix A, Figure 5). Admittedly, much about the mysteries, aside from their central role

in public religious ceremonies, is unknown today due to their secrecy. What we can glean from

various ancient sources demonstrates the various mystery cults utilized ASC, usually through

ritual intoxication, and layers of primitivist Hyperborean ideology in their interpretations of the

Greek mythos. The cults had varying degrees of initiation, rank, revealed knowledge, and

associated social power. Although mystery cults existed and exist cross-culturally, from Ancient

Egypt and Sumeria to modern Masonic Lodges, Greek mystery religion in particular emerged

with a special relationship with the Greek/barbarian ideology. Here we will examine a few

notable cults.

Orphism

Our first case in point, the Cult of Orpheus, also known as the Orphics and Orphism,

exemplifies Hellenic invented tradition as a product of Greco-Thracian interrelations. The Orphic

mystery tradition first appears in Herodotus (2.81) as bearing resemblance to Pythagoreanism

and Egyptian religion, and we also read of the Orphics in Plato (Symposium 179d) and in

Apollodorus (1.3.2). The structure of the Orphic mythological traditions generally relates a story

of the death of the wife of the Thracian character Orpheus, who subsequently descends into the

underworld in pursuit of his wife. Orphism, the cultic tradition constructed around this myth,

involved beliefs in the transmigration of souls and reincarnation, descent/ascension cycles, as

well as ritual soul-travel and communication with the chthonic underworld. Although Platonism

bears some parallels to Orphism, most markedly in Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic, Plato

criticizes the Orphic tradition, as well as the related Musaeics, concerning their belief in “eternal

drunkenness” as a virtuous reward for the initiated upon their arrival in Hades (Rep. 2.363a-

365b).

M. L. West (1982:5, 144-5; 1998:26) connects Orphism to the “northern shamanism” of

Thrace and Scythia and also finds that the Orphic cult had a strong presence in Olbian Greek

culture from the mid-sixth century BC onward. Similarly, Fol and Marazov (1977:59) note that

both “Orpheus and Zalmoxis had a pronounced chthonian character,” that is, mythic and ritual

connections to the spiritual underworld. However, Orpheus and Orphism, though associated

symbolically with Thrace, do not seem to have originated there or to have been practiced by

native Thracians. Rather, the Orphics likely emerged among Greek colonists and explorers in

imitation of Thracian traditions, like Salmoxism, hence the chthonic parallels. Given that the

Greeks identified Orpheus as a Thracian barbarian born to a Thracian king (Skinner 2012:84),

the Orphic mystery religion likely developed as a Hellenic invented tradition and reinterpretation

of barbarian beliefs and customs likely unrelated to the Hellenic character of Orpheus. As such,

Orpheus is the archetypal noble savage of Hyperborean stature whose path to chthonic wisdom is

ritually emulated by the cultic initiates. Nevertheless, Orphism is a product of Hellenic cultural

imperialism. As the Thracians loved excessive drinking, including in the context of funerary

ritual (Hdt. 5.8), and held beliefs about underworld soul-travel and the afterlife in the examples

of the mythic stag and Salmoxism, so did the Orphic mysteries arise as a Hellenic culturally-

alternative way to exercise and utilize otherwise barbaric ritual and wisdom.

Cult of Dionysus

Like Orphism, the Dionysian mystery religion also exhibits characteristics of traditions

constructed upon the Hellenic noble savage barbarian template. Although the figure of Dionysus

appeared early in Greek history in the Mycenean Linear-B tablets from the isle of Pylos, the

Dionysian mystery cult did not develop until the period of Greek-Pontic colonialism in the Late

Archaic. As a mystery religion, the Cult of Dionysus typically involved ritual intoxication,

animal handling and sacrifice, and beliefs about reconnecting the civilized human soul with the

primitive world of beasts and the chthonic underworld. Centuries later, in the Roman period,

Plutarch, himself an initiate in the Cult of Apollo, reported that the wife of Philip of Macedonia

was known for her wild, divinely inspired participations in the orgiastic rites of the Dionysian

religion in addition to the ritual use of snakes (Plut. Alex. 2). As such, the cult operated on the

same noble savage premise as the Orphic mysteries with the added flair of primitivist ideology.

Like Rousseau’s imagining of himself as an ancient Greek or Roman while reading Plutarch

(Lowenthal 1985:374), or like Lewis Henry Morgan’s “Iroquoian” fraternity (Deloria 1998:218),

the Dionysian cult likely emerged as a sentimental reenactment of an invented Hellenic past in

noble barbarism. Rousseau and Morgan held Romantic notions about the distant past of human

history, and as such they incorporated those views into the construction of their own ideologies.

Likewise, the Dionysian cult may very well have originated as a Hellenic emulation of observed

Thracian and Scythian funerary customs. If so, this may explain the Scythian abhorrence of the

Dionysians in Herodotus’s story of Scyles as a colonialistic profanation of their native customs.

Within Hellenic culture, Dionysus was associated with the tragic dramas in that,

thematically, the tragedies evoke the dialectic of what Carl A. P. Ruck calls the “Wild and the

Cultivated.” Beyond mere drunken revelry and entertainment, the tragedies celebrated a

reconciliation between agrarian-viticultural (i.e., grain and grape agriculture) Greek civilization

and a constructed Jungian shadow of what the Hellenes believed represented their primordial

past. Hence Dionysus represents, in Ruck’s model, the paradox of Greek culture as

cultivated/wild, the synthesis of the polis-civilization in the present and the primitive otherness

of the past bound up in one cultic-mythic tradition of Greek selfness struggling and overcoming

the shadow of primitive otherness. Drama itself becomes a mystery ritual in which the daemon

100

Dionysus, “in this celebration of his evolution to culture, transports and reunites his people with

primordial times of the Golden Age” (Ruck 1986:222). For example, Euripides’s Bacchai (Eu.

Bacc. 677-747) depicts the maenads, female initiates in the Dionysian mysteries, as entering a

drunken frenzy in the wilderness and engaging in cattle raids like a pack of wolves. The drama

here might have represented to the Greeks the reconciliation of the Wild (i.e., hunter society)

with the Cultivated (i.e., sedentary society) through the reenactment of mythic conflict.

To draw an example from Ruck, Dionysus himself was a deity of dialectical dualism in

that he was lord of both the Cultivated grape and the Wild ivy, which the Greeks believed was

the primordial form of the grape vine. In this system of belief, the primordial form is the more

intoxicating but also the more dangerous form from which the cultivated form was believed to

have “evolved.” Additionally, Ruck (1986:185) notes that the “fermented juice of the cultivated

grape, as well as the pre-viticultural magical plants, induces a kind of spiritual communion with

deity.” Ruck’s “magical plants,” which included wild ivy, flowers such as opium, and fungi such

as amanita mushrooms and LSD-producing ergot mold, all inhabit the space of Wild intoxicants

which are reconciled to Hellenic civilization via the Cultivated processes of fermentation in

wine-making and bread-baking. Moreover, Ruck understands these Dionysian domains as

underlined by the chthonic themes of death (e.g., rotting, decay associated with mold, and the

“tomb” of the wine cellar) and resurrection with the spring planting and the opening of new

wine.

Despite Ruck’s rather colorful and creative analysis of the Dionysian mysteries as

celebrations of the “primitive” and “civilized” elements and paradoxes in Hellenic culture, he

takes the mystery religions too seriously and tries in earnest, like his associate V. G. Wasson

with the Vedic traditions of the Ancient Aryans, to historicize the Greek mystery traditions as

101

cultural relics of “primordial shamanism.” The Cultivated/Wild dichotomy stands as an

explanation of Dionysian symbolism and some of the Hellenic beliefs from the time period, but

the tradition is, like Orphism, built upon the noble savage premise. The Wild of the Dionysians

was not historically primordial, nor is it evidence of the survival of any sort of Proto-Indo-

European “shamanism” ancestral to both Vedic and Hellenic traditions. Rather, the cult was the

Hellenic delight in aspects of barbarian cultures they believed were virtuous or necessary to

celebrate as part of their own worldview. The Dionysian mysteries, in essence, were reflections

of the barbarian as Hyperborean and as a source of natural wisdom to be coupled with the

sedentary wisdom of cultivated discussion in symposium or out in the agora. Alternatively, the

Dionysian mysteries could also have represented a celebration of both the divine and bestial

dimensions of barbarism in a dramatic and ritualistic recapturing of the Hesiodic Ages of Man

from Hyperborean Golden Age to the cultivated Iron Age. In other words, the Dionysian rituals

attempted to recapture the primitive state of virtue and reconcile it with the Greek age of

colonialism. Nevertheless, the initiates of the cult were doing nothing more than playing at being

barbarians. Small wonder the Scythians hated the Dionysians.

The Cult of Artemis, Mother Goddess

Though the shamanizers and revisionists give less attention to the Cult of Artemis than to

other cults, this Late-Archaic/Early-Classical mystery tradition exhibits some astounding

evidence of Greek-Pontic cultural transmission, or more accurately, appropriation. Pausanias

(second century AD) relates a Spartan account of a temple dedicated to a “Savior Maid,” which

102

they claim had been founded by either Orpheus the Thracian or Abaris the Hyperborean

(Description of Greece 3.13.2). The ambiguous identity of the goddess of this cult may refer to

either Artemis or Kore-Persephone. Nonetheless, the Spartan attribution of a cult of the “Savior

Maid” to two legendary northern barbarians might indicate the incorporation of native Pontic

religion into the construction of Greek mystery tradition. After all, archaeology reveals the great

importance the Thracian and Dacian cultures gave “Mother” and “Lady” goddesses alongside the

Hero-god archetype (Fol & Marazov 1977; Farkas 1981). Goddess cults with similar

iconographical motifs of matron power occurred throughout the ancient Eastern Mediterranean

and Near East with associated mystery cults and mythologies, such as Ishtar, Isis, Ianna, Astarte,

and others, with potentially widespread prehistoric antecedents.

Feminist scholars such as Marija Gimbutas attribute goddess-cults to a supposedly pre-

patriarchal period of matriarchy in primitive human culture, at the center of which was the

worship of a Mother Goddess (Gimbutas 1974; Bevan 1987; Ustinova 2005; Rountree 2007).

Artemis-Demeter, according to such scholars, is a culturally-specific representation of a

universal earth-mother-goddess ideology which stretches back to at least the Upper Paleolithic

with the Venus of Willendorf. Mother Goddess worship was in fact an important facet of ancient

European societies, and even the Roman historian Tacitus notes the immense cultic reverence the

ancient Germans had for the Earth Mother (Tac. Ger. 40, 45). Although the archaeological

discussion of “Mother” artifacts is beyond the scope of this paper, and the sweeping

amalgamation of goddess mythologies into one essential category rivals the efforts of Sir James

Frazer, a strong link exists between modern feminist mythologizing of a matriarchal past and the

Ancient Greek mythologizing of the barbarian. Some of it is based on hard, empirical evidence,

whereas the rest is the product of fanciful ideology. If anything, like the Amazons in Hellenic

103

consciousness, Mother Goddess cults like Artemis-Demeter represent the primitive otherness of

womanhood regulated within a cultic social space in the masculine Hellenic mind. Recall the

discussion of barbarian women in the previous chapter. Amazonian motifs become realized in

the sacred mystery context whereas they cannot in the profane context of everyday life in the

polis.

Furthermore, Greek Artemis echoes the symbolism of her barbaric counterparts and

moreover, is evidently associated with mythic traditions of northern origin. Artemis, in her

mystery tradition, was goddess of life/death cycles, particularly in the hunt and in childbirth. She

was associated with bears and deer, among other animals, and simultaneously acted as both the

caressing mother-protector of animals and children and the fearsome life-taking and justice-

serving predator. For instance, Bevan (1987) describes a number of archaeological finds and

classical literary references which suggest Artemis’s mysteries and mythic role revolved around

the protection of sacred game animals, the sacrifice of sacred animals, and symbolic, ritualistic

metamorphosis of human to sacred animal.

Typically, Artemis’s subject beast in her rites was the bear. As such, the female initiates

of the Artemis cult at Brauron, for instance, were known as arktoi, or simply “bears” (Cole

1984:241; Bevan 1987:19). In one of Artemis’s initiation rituals called the Arkteia, the initiates

reenact scenes of maiden/bear encounters from the goddess’ mythos. In the Arkteia, initiates

transform into bears via costume. Furthermore, Cole (1984) suggests that the Arkteia and the

human-bear transformation was also a womanhood rite-of-passage for certain Athenian girls

whom the cult chose. Bevan (1987) suggests the metamorphosis to be of the “divine will” of

Artemis, at least in terms of mythology, in the protection of her flocks of bears and deer as she

rears them into motherhood, both in Athens and in the wilderness, something which might echo

104

the Wild/Cultivated dialectic of the Dionysians. Bevan thus deduces a symbolic relationship

between womanhood and the mythic bear of Artemis as the “emblem and supreme pattern” of

motherhood, and she resurrects observations similar to those that J. J. Bachoffen made in 1863.

Whereas Bevan supposes the mother bear tradition evident in the Artemis mysteries was

part of an earlier, local tradition of a mother-goddess which preceded Artemis, the cult may also

have integrated ideas about animal transformation from the northern barbarians. It is during the

colonial period that the evidence for ritual metamorphosis appears in the cult. For instance,

Bevan remarks that a fifth century BC Attic krater which depicts a naked man wearing a bear

mask is the iconographic remains of the “sacred bear cult” (Bevan 1987:18). A number of sites

devoted to Artemis also have yielded possible evidence of bear sacrifice (Laphria), offerings of

bear teeth (Lousoi), and bear figurines (Athenian Acropolis, Spartan Orthia, Thasian Artemesion,

Argive Heraion, Tegea). Tegea in particular yielded a human figurine with a bear’s head dated to

the seventh century BC, possibly the oldest artifact associated with the cult. During the Roman

period, Philostratus (Imagines I.28.6) described a custom in which hunters stopped at Artemis’s

sanctuaries to pray for success on the hunt or to offer the spoils of a successful one.

Recall our discussion of totemism, animal-human metamorphosis, and the mythic stag in

Northern Eurasian archaeology. Could it be possible that the rites of the Artemis mysteries

exhibit cultural borrowings from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe? Superficial likenesses to

shamanism aside, Artemis does have one more connection to the north in the various myths

surrounding her cherished Cerynitian Hind, a mythic female deer with golden antlers whom

Herakles pursued from Greece to Hyperborea in his legendary hunt (Pseudo-Apollodorus,

Bibliotheca 2.81; Callimachus, Hymn 3 to Artemis 98ff). Ruck (1986:230) seems convinced that

these myths are cultural memories of the reindeers (whose females and males both regularly

105

grow antlers) to the north of the Indo-European homeland and far to the north of Greece.

However, given the historical context for the emergence of the cult, the myths of the stags were

more likely influenced by traveler’s tales via the Hellenic filter of the port of Olbia and reflect

the ontologies of indigenous Pontic groups and others further north whose own mythologies

involve the stag (and possibly the reindeer if we include the more northerly groups).

The Eleusinian Mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Panhellenic cult of another mother-goddess, Demeter,

were perhaps the most prestigious of the Greek mystery traditions. Cults dedicated to Demeter

appeared throughout the Greek world, even as far as the Greek colonies in Scythia, Italy, and

Sicily. However, the cult at Eleusis earned the most renowned position in Greek culture as a Pan-

Hellenic cult in which Greeks from all the poleis participated in her seasonal festivals. Thus

Eleusis, once a small village outside of Athens, became an integral religious center in the Greek

world and in Greek identity. Although the festivals grew into a public spectacle, the cult itself

reserved the rituals of the mysteries for the initiated, the mystae of Demeter, “the chosen few

who were properly initiated following the ritual prescribed by Demeter herself” (Mylonas

1947:131). Extremely hierarchical, the Eleusinian mystery cult was organized into Lesser and

Greater degrees of initiation which corresponded to both the seasons and the esoteric knowledge

to which the initiates were exposed. Of this esoteric knowledge itself, little is known.

The rituals went through three phases: first, the dromena, that is, “enacted,” where

Mylonas (1947:143) and Ruck (1986:160) suppose the sacred kykeon potion was ingested to

106

induce a vision; second, the deiknymena, or “shown,” in which the Light of Apollo is revealed in

a vision to the initiates; and third, the legomena, or “explained,” where the hierophant, the

highest level of initiation, lectures the initiates on the secret meaning of the vision. Pausanias,

who himself may have been an initiate, describes how he was forbidden to divulge the sacred

secrets of the mysteries: “After I had intended to go further into this story, and to describe the

contents of the sanctuary at Athens, called the Eleusinium, I was stayed by a vision in a dream. I

shall therefore turn to those things it is lawful to write of to all men” (1.14.3). In reference to a

related cult of Demeter at Thebes, Pausanias reiterates the forbidden nature of the secrets:

Advancing from here twenty-five stades you come to a grove of Cabeirean Demeter and

the Maid. The initiated are permitted to enter it. The sanctuary of the Cabeiri is some

seven stades distant from this grove. I must ask the curious to forgive me if I keep silence

as to who the Cabeiri are, and what is the nature of the ritual performed in honor of them

and of the Mother (9.25.5).

As mentioned above, the cult divided its festivals seasonally into the Lesser and Greater

mysteries, each of which had specific ritual functions in reenacting the mythic narrative of

Demeter and Persephone for the public and initiating new members into the hierarchy of the cult.

The Lesser Mystery took place in the autumn of the year in the Swamp of Dionysus in Athens.

The swamp, which the Greeks believed was an entrance to the underworld and the abode of the

spirits of the dead, represented the scene of Persephone’s abduction to Hades. Within the swamp

was a temple, the doors of which were open for one day only every year during this festival.

Thus the entire swamp was sacred ground and forbidden to mortal use except during the

prescribed annual ritual. The Greater Mystery took place at the neighboring village of Eleusis

and involved a great procession of torch-bearers towards the Eleusinian Temple for the initiation

into the higher mysteries through the ingestion of the kykeon potion. Thematically, Ruck notes

the symbolism of rebirth or ascension from the underworld and the transmutation from the

107

mortal maiden into the mother goddess (1986:165). Thus Ruck finds the Eleusinian Mysteries

composed of Wild/Cultivated aspects of Dionysian life/death cycles and Apollonian wisdom.

The Eleusinian Mysteries of Ancient Greece parallel the far more ancient traditions of

Sacred Marriage Ceremonialism in Mesopotamia. This cultic mytho-ritual tradition is first

attested in the Early Dynastic Period of Ancient Sumer (ca. 3000-2330 BC) and could potentially

have originated even earlier with the rise of sedentary urban centers in the region. These

traditions, in various forms, endured throughout Ancient Near Eastern history well into

Herodotus’s time and beyond. A few concise examples should illustrate our point. Stiebing

(2009:52-53) describes the Sacred Marriage Ceremony as a tradition documented among the

Ancient Akkadian, Babylonian, and Sumerian city-states in which state cults dedicated to a

patron-deity held spring and autumn festivals to ensure fertility for their agrarian economy. The

mythological systems revolved around patterns of a Hero-God (e.g., Dumuzi in Sumerian,

Tammuz in Semitic) who ventures into the netherworld to rescue his goddess-lover (e.g., Inanna

in Sumerian, Ishtar in Semitic); in exchange for her life, the hero agrees to take her place for one

half of the year and leave his sister there for the other half. The Sacred Marriage Ceremony

celebrated the union between the lovers upon their ascension from the netherworld, and

associated cultic rituals reenacted the union in a variety of ways. In general, the mythological

themes of overcoming chthonic forces to ensure fertility coalesced with seasonal planting and

harvesting, similar to the Eleusinian ceremonies and myths surrounding Persephone’s quest.

Even the Sumerian Geshtinanna, sister of the hero Dumuzi, was considered the goddess of grape

vines, and her role in remaining in the netherworld appears again in the form of Dionysus in the

Eleusinian Mysteries (Recall Ruck’s discussion of the wine laid in the “tomb” of the cellar in the

“Wild and the Cultivated”).

108

As with the Eleusinian rites, the Sacred Marriage tradition was supposed to secure

fertility for plant and animal husbandry in the spring and for the fermentation of alcohol in the

harvest. Like the Greek Dionysus, the dialectics of these Mesopotamian myths created in the

ancient mind a synthesis of opposing forces in their worldview, forces which needed to be

appeased to maintain order—Man, the cultivator, and his wife, the primordial birther—polis-

law/abzu-chaos. The same dialectic of appears in Mesopotamian creation myths. The Babylonian

Enuma Elish reiterates the Hero-God/Chthonic-Goddess dialectic in a story of creation out of

conflict: Marduk-Enlil defeats Tiamat and the Abyss (Abzu), out of which the world is created.

This Marduk/Tiamat opposition is comparable to the myth of Apollo defeating the chthonic

Python, and order emerges out of chaos. Thus it is probable that the Greek Mystery Religions

had more in common with the Mesopotamian cultic traditions than with Pontic barbarian

religion.

As mentioned with some of the other mysteries such as the Orphics and Dionysiacs, the

ASC was an important part of the sacred path of primordial knowledge in the Eleusinian

Mysteries. In his exploration of some of the comic representations of Socrates, Ruck focuses on

Socrates as profaner of the mysteries in that he was popularly believed to have used entheogens

outside of their socially prescribed contexts (i.e., the mysteries). Ruck is correct in noting that

Aristophanes’s Birds, a comedic satire of Socrates, contains a hidden gem of insight into this

controversy and into the Eleusinian Mysteries themselves that has gone previously unnoticed.

However, the issue here pertains to necromancy rather than mushrooms. Entheogens, namely

wild mushrooms, probably played an important role in the Mysteries in ritual intoxication and

ASC. Wild amanitas or other psychoactive wild fungi probably were used in the Lesser

Mysteries, which reflected Persephone’s folly of imbibing narcotic plants and consequently

109

falling into Hades; whereas the kykeon potion, which likely contained the psychoactive

chemicals (i.e., ergot fungus on grain) Ruck, Hoffman, and Wasson hypothesized, reflected the

cultivated side of Demeter. These altered states of consciousness were probably part of the

Eleusinian Mysteries, namely the revelation of Light and knowledge. However, so was

necromancy. After all, Socrates, whom the Pythia dubbed the wisest of all men, was the object of

comedic mockery and degradation for supposedly entering the forbidden swamp to commune

with the dead. “How else could he have become wise?” his fellow Athenian may have wondered.

Wisdom came from the dead, who were only to be contacted safely in the proper ritual context,

or so the Athenians and other Greeks believed (Ustinova 2009).

Cults of Apollo, the Oracle at Delphi, and the Hyperboreans

Although not described specifically as a mystery cult, the order of the Temple of Apollo

at Delphi stands out as an exemplary tradition of Hellenic mystery-initiation, altered states of

consciousness, sacred secrecy, and chthonic, often cryptic knowledge drawn up from the abyssal

“Navel of the World,” as the poet Pindar dubbed the Delphic sacred site. Unsurprisingly, Delphi

and its Oracle, the Pythian Priestess, attracts those shamanizing scholars who would view the

Apollonian cult as the epitome of “Greek shamanism” (Dodds 1951; Ruck 1986; Littleton 1986;

Ustinova 2009). For example, Littleton (1986:84) explores what he calls the “fundamentally

shamanic character of the institution and high probability that the Pythia was under the influence

of a drug when she performed.” The Oracle, of course, was always a female whom an order of

Apollonian priests chose from a young age to serve as a prophetess to the god Apollo. The

110

Temple was located on the side of the mountain of Parnassos, in Greek mythology the site where

Apollo slew the Python-dragon, the chthonic, primordial owner of the mountain. The Pythian

Priestess was named after this serpent, and like other Hellenic and Near Eastern traditions

illustrates yet another chthonic snake tradition. Contained within the Temple was a natural

fissure in the earth around which was constructed a basement chamber called the adyton. The

adyton sat beneath the prophetic chamber, called the manteion, and a small shaft ran from adyton

to manteion and served as a flue for the mysteriously intoxicating vapors.

According to a number of Hellenistic and Roman authors, such as Strabo and Plutarch,

the latter of whom was actually an initiated priest, the Oracle sat upon a tripod over the vented

flue and breathed in the intoxicating vapors from the depths of the earth. She would subsequently

become ecstatic or frenzied by the pneuma enthusiastikon, or “inspirational exhalation”

(Fontenrose 1978:198). It was this chthonic spirit, the breath of the netherworld, which ascended

up from the earth-womb (recall that Delphi was the earth’s “navel”), and by which the ancients

believed the Pythian Priestess became ritually possessed by Apollo himself. In light of Hesiod’s

description of the Golden Age folk having gone into the earth, into the bosom of Gaia at the end

of the age, one might even postulate that the breath of the underworld was in fact the voices of

those Hyperborean spirits, or at least the cultists thus might have understood the ritual. Farnell

(1907:189) suggests the “divine afflatus” rose from a natural geological source, but Dodds

(1951:73-4) argues that no geological explanation was necessary, that the Oracle was simply

naturally adept at spirit mediumship and possession, as found throughout human cultures, and

especially in shamanism. Like Dodds, Littleton favors the shamanic explanation of the Oracle,

but he conversely maintains the element of ritual intoxication as an integral part of the ASC.

111

Amusingly, Littleton shamanizes nearly every aspect of the Delphic cult: Apollo is the

shaman-god of light and healing, the tripod symbolizes spiritual ascension under the possession

of Apollo, and the “female shaman,” the Pythian Priestess, serves as Apollo’s mouthpiece in an

ecstatic state “closely resembling those characteristics of shamanic performances observed by

anthropologists in contemporary folk societies” (p.77). Littleton then attempts to identify the

exact substance of the intoxicating vapors. Because the vent of the Navel Stone beneath the

tripod is charred even today, some scholars (Holland 1933; Littleton 1986) have suggested the

priests stoked man-made fires in the adyton, the smoke from which would funnel upward

through the flue and engulf the seated Pythia and fill the manteion chamber with the fumes

which Plutarch described as sweet. According to Littleton, this suggests the priests may have

burned plants which contain mind-altering chemicals responsible for the Pythia’s archaic ecstasy.

Among the possibilities, scholars have cited solanoids such as henbane and jimsonweed (Stefanis

et al. 1975), opium poppies (Latimer & Goldberg 1981), darnel weed (Renfrew 1973:176-7), and

Amanita muscaria, or fly-agaric mushrooms, which, according to Ruck (1986), may have been

associated with Apollo’s cult at the Isle of Delos. However, as Littleton notes with each of these

examples, they are ingested rather than burned, and moreover the ancients may not even have

been aware of the psychoactive properties of some of these plants. Alternately, Littleton

maintains that the Pythians at Delphi smoked Cannabis sativa, more commonly known today as

marijuana.

Cannabis was in fact known in the ancient world, and it certainly grew wild over much of

the Eurasian Steppe. However, among the Hellenes its mind-altering properties were supposedly

known only to “a few esoteric circles,” namely the cultic hierophants (Littleton 1986:82).

Accordingly, the shamanizing scholars believe the high-ranking cult leaders not only possessed

112

intimate knowledge of the religious traditions of their northern neighbors but that they also

imported these traditions to Greece and incorporated them into the mysteries (Littleton 1986;

Ruck 1986). Educated Greeks, whether or not they were members of mystery cults, expressed

knowledge of barbaric ritual cannabis use. Herodotus, for instance, reports two observances of

cannabis-smoking:

After the burial the Scythians cleanse themselves as follows: they anoint and wash their

heads and, for their bodies, set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover these

over with wool mats; then, in the space so enclosed to the best of their ability, they make

a pit in the center beneath the poles and the mats and throw red-hot stones into it. The

Scythians then take the seed of this hemp and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the

red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath

could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor-bath. This serves them

instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water (Hdt. 4.73-75).

Here Herodotus gives an accurate account of the practice of cannabis smoking, common

throughout Eurasia among nomadic cultures, which corresponds with the archaeological record

and appears, at least superficially, very similar to the sweat lodge of many North American

indigenous traditions with the substitution of cannabis for sage. M. D. Merlin (2003:213) verifies

Herodotus’s account with archaeological remains found in the Altai Mountains. Merlin argues

that use of cannabis plants, especially as a ritual intoxicant, originates among Eurasian Steppe

cultures perhaps as early as the fifth millennium BC. By the period of the Scytho-Sarmatian

cultures, cannabis use had become an organized ritual complete with an associated material

culture. It is uncertain whether indigenous groups on the steppe cultivated it or simply harvested

it from the wild, but it was widespread through that part of the world. On cue with Herodotus’s

ethnography of ritual cannabis use, the Pazyryk burial mounds in the Altai region yield a tent

frame and bronze vessels filled with stones and cannabis seeds.

We can also compare this account in Herodotus on the Scythians to his earlier account of

an unnamed group near the Caspian:

113

…and they know (it is said) of trees bearing a fruit whose effect is this: gathering in

groups and kindling a fire, the people sit around it and throw the fruit into the flames;

then the fumes of it as it burns make them drunk as the Greeks are with wine, and more

and more drunk as more fruit is thrown on the fire, until at last they rise up to dance and

even sing. Such is said to be their way of life (Hdt. 1.202).

Here we find a passage nearly parallel to the Scythian account in Book 4. The fruit these

barbarians throw in the fire, the fumes of which intoxicate them, could have come from the

cannabis plant, although opium could also fit the description of this mysterious plant.

The Scythian cannabis passage especially describes ritual cleansing and intoxication as

part of the funeral ceremony, and the occurrence of cannabis remains in grave sites indicates a

funerary ritual importance. Though we could assume that Scythians and other steppe-dwelling

peoples used cannabis recreationally, the fact that they included the plant in their funeral customs

strongly suggests that it held a special status in these societies, perhaps as a ritual link between

the physical and spiritual realms. Furthermore, a study conducted by botanist Ethan B. Russo and

colleagues on cannabis remains from a 2200-2400 year old Central Asian (Turpan, Tarim Basin)

tomb comes to the same conclusion (2008:4179-80). The study determines that the culture

associated with the cannabis from the grave site grew the plant specifically for psychoactive

purposes including divination.

Littleton supposes that the ritual use of cannabis traditional to the northern barbarians of

the Pontic and beyond diffused into the Hellenic world in the latter half of the first millennium

BC as part of the Greek colonial system, possibly via Thrace, which Littleton (1986:87) calls

“the source of the Dionysiac cult and other esoteric beliefs and practices.” Although other

scholars remained unconvinced that ritual cannabis use passed from the barbarians to the Greeks

(Stefanis et al. 1975), Littleton adamantly wanted the opposite to be true. As entertaining as

Littleton’s exposé of Greek cultic drug-use might be, more recent geological and archaeological

114

surveys have discovered a number of fault lines in the region which contain noxious gases,

specifically ethylene, and that in the past the chasms which ran beneath Mount Parnassos

possessed the geologic potential to release pockets of such vapors (de Boer et al. 2001; Piccardi

et al. 2008). Evidence for a natural, local source of an intoxicating pneuma might undermine

Littleton’s cannabis mission. Nonetheless, a natural source of the pneuma enthusiastikon from

the depths of the underworld fits the chthonic symbolism of earthen spirits better than any man-

made fire. If cannabis was a part of the Delphic mysteries at all, it was not the chief intoxicant. It

does not, however, rule out the possibility that the hierophants were privy to the ethnobotanical

and ethnomycological knowledge of the native Pontic cultures. After all, Herodotus observed

such traditions and recorded them for a Hellenic audience.

This could prove especially true if Ruck’s hypothesis that the Delphi’s sister cult, the

Cult of Apollo at Delos, imported entheogenic plants and fungi from the north as part of a

“Hyperborean” tradition which reenacted the Indo-European migration into Greece is correct

(Ruck 1986: 250-6; cf. Hdt. 4.32-5). Nevertheless, can the Oracle at Delphi and the Cult of

Apollo be described as “Greek shamanism?” To describe it and related cults such as Dodona and

Delos as such, as Littleton does, implies the mysteries were in fact part of a primeval religious

tradition. Some scholars have noted a dialectical origin of the Apollonian cultic traditions, that

the mythology which celebrates Apollo’s victory over the Python (sky-god/chthonic beast) might

have derived from the synthesis of northern Indo-European and eastern Anatolian traditions

(Fontenrose 1959, 1978; Ruck 1986). If this is true, then the cultic traditions would indeed have

to be ancient. However, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi dates back to the fourth century BC with

earlier foundations which stretch back to the ninth century—certainly archaic, but not primeval

or primordial, and long after the “coming of the Greeks” (Drews 1988). Moreover, we cannot

115

assume the Oracular traditions of the fourth century were the same as in the ninth, and with the

patterns of cultural borrowing from the Pontic evident in the other mystery religions in mind

between the seventh and first centuries BC, one might suppose Pontic traditions influenced the

Delphic and Delian mysteries as well.

Alternatively, consider the dialectical traditions of Apollo exoterically and esoterically.

Esoterically, the myths celebrate Hyperborean-Apollonian virtue and order over chthonic chaos.

Exoterically, the mythic dialect is the completion of a seasonal cycle in which Apollo travels

from his favored abode in Hyperborea to the place of his Hellenic oracles in Greece, in union

with sky and earth. Ruck (1986:250-6), who is also convinced that the Hyperboreans were the

Hellenic interpretation of the cultures of the distant Altai, also holds that the Delian offerings

from the Hyperboreans (Hdt. 4.33) were actually imported amanita mushrooms. These offerings,

Ruck believes, the Delian cultists of Apollo imported for the preservation of a sacred tradition of

Hyperborean overland trade, the offerings’ symbolic importance in the seasonal transmutation of

the god Apollo from primordial other to civilized self, and their potential use as entheogens in

the mystic oracular context.

While Ruck does a fine job explaining the mytho-cultic significance of the Hyperboreans

in the Apollonian cults, his use of the evidence for “two strains of shamanism” is a bit

misguided. In fact, he, Wasson, and Hoffman let their obsession with mind-altering substances

guide their research while they miss what really might have been going on in the context of

Greek-Pontic colonialism. That being said, Ruck has, perhaps accidentally, revealed that the

mystery cults regularly imported ritual goods from the north under the pretense of Hyperborean

mythology. Though the mysterious offerings may or may not have come all the way from the

Altai, depending on one’s interpretation of the inspiration for the Hyperboreans in Herodotus

116

(Bolton 1962; Romm 1993; Mallory & Mair 2000; Bridgman 2005), the offerings did originate

somewhere in barbarian lands. Given the location in Herodotus (4.33) of the first destination of

the offerings, the lesser known oracle at Dodona, the Thracians, Dacians, or the Celts beyond

them might have been a source. If the offerings did come from much further north and east, the

Argippaians might also be a good candidate for the “Hyperborean” source of ritual goods and

material. This could be especially true if we consider Herodotus’s ethnographic description of

their culture and customs as fairly peaceful, that their neighboring tribes considered them holy,

and the frequency of Greek trade among them (Hdt. 4.23). In any case, Delian and Delphic cults

illustrate the construction of traditions out of the economic exploits of colonialism.

Consequently, the Hyperborean mythos grew among the mystery traditions within this same

cyclical process.

Ustinova (2009:4,153) suggests that the chthonic importance of Delphi as the “Navel of

the Earth” indicates its importance as a nexus between the worlds of the living and the dead:

“Since the dead were believed to know more than the living about earthly affairs, it would only

seem natural for their consultation to be carried out close to their abode, in a cave or

subterranean chamber, and thus, for Gaia’s oracles to be located in grottoes inside the earth.” In

Homer’s Odyssey, for example, Odysseus encounters the shade of the dead prophet Tiresias who

shares secrets with the Greek wayfarer that only the dead could learn in the netherworld (Hom.

Od. 11). The Apollonian cultists at Delphi believed not only that the chasm beneath the Delphic

Temple was one such entrance to the chthonic underworld, but that the nearby Corycian Cave on

the slopes of Mount Parnassos was another. The cave, just as the formal cult temple which

Littleton (1986) describes, played a symbolic role in the ritual ecstasy of the mysteries of Apollo.

Strabo (Geo. 9.3.1) mentions the Corycian Cave as the abode of the nymph by the same name

117

and as part of the greater mythic complex of the mountain sacred to Apollo. In the preceding

chapter we discussed the importance of the Hyperboreans as geo-mythological eschatiai in the

Hellenic worldview. More precisely, recall that the Hyperboreans represented Hesiodic Golden

Age humanity in Greek cultic lore. The Delphic and Delian cults of Apollo esteemed the

Hyperboreans for the favor they believed Apollo held for these mythic people. Moreover, the

Apollonian cults reputedly communicated with Hyperborean entities through chthonic ritual and

believed these noble savages travelled primarily through the underworld (Fontenrose 1959:431;

Ruck 1986:250). Thus, the cultic tradition held that Hyperborean spirits could appear to the

ecstatic mystics of Apollo in the cave and impart wisdom. As mentioned above and in the

previous chapter, Hesiod claimed that the close of the Golden Age brought the noble savages

into the bosom of Gaia where they continued to dwell as spirit guardians, and even Plato

supposed that those Golden Age phantoms inhabited the souls of all wise men. In a fragment (fr.

24) of On Oracles, the Greek philosopher Mnaseas relates how the Apollonian cultists self-

identified as Hyperboreans, at least in a spiritual sense. One might suppose, given the context of

ritual ASC and possession, that the mystics of Apollo could believe themselves possessed by

Hyperborean “ancestors” in addition to possession by Apollo himself. Another possible

explanation is that, like the Orphics, reincarnation was part of their belief system.

Ontologically, the Ancient Greeks believed the underworld, composed of a complex

network of tunnels and passages rooted in Hades, was also connected to the surface world

through sacred caves such as those at Mount Parnassos. Hyperboreans, being the chthonic

children of Gaia, the Earth, were naturally inclined to utilize the underworld for travel to the

sacred places of their god, Apollo. Nevertheless, we do find a few instances of Hyperborean

overland travel in Greek lore. Herodotus mentions in passing an individual named Abaris, “who

118

is reported to have been a Hyperborean, I do not tell, how he carried the arrow about over all the

earth, eating no food” (4.36). This Abaris of Hyperborea apparently earned renown among the

Greeks for his healing abilities, wisdom, and virtue, although little more about this man has

survived the ages (Strab. 7.3.8; Plutarch Adolescens. 1; Ovid Met. 5.86). Plato considered Abaris,

alongside Salmoxis, skilled in healing magic (Charm. 158b), and Pausanias attributes the

founding of a Spartan temple of the Savior Maid to Abaris or Orpheus (3.13.2). Suidas, a tenth

century medieval Byzantine encyclopedia, describes Abaris as the producer of Scythian oracles,

none of which are known to exist today if they ever did.

Despite the obscurity of this Hyperborean Abaris, Dodds and others have reconstructed

the legendary figure within the framework of shamanism (Meuli 1935; Dodds 1951; Lateiner

1990). Lateiner, who had described Salmoxis as evidence of a Greek misunderstanding of

“Asiatic Shamanism,” takes a more reserved stance towards Abaris and notes rather his

asceticism as an Apollonian “pilgrim” (1990:237). Dodds, however, attributes Abaris’s arrow to

Siberian Buriat healing traditions in which the arrow is the shaman’s soul-vehicle, a divining rod

of sorts, in the retrieval and restoration of sick souls from the underworld. Dodds also cites

Tartar shamans’ divination of arrows in flight and shamanic spirit-flights upon a “horse-staff”

among an unnamed group (1951:161, n.34). Bremmer (1983:44, n. 84) disagrees with Dodds’s

interpretation of Abaris on the basis that arrow-divination has not been necessarily bound or

limited to Eurasian shamanism. Nevertheless, Dodds uses the healing context of the arrow

among the Buriat as his main ethnographic point. Regardless, there is little to suggest that Abaris

was a shaman figure, as the ancient sources have not provided a clear context for his carrying the

arrow or that he could “fly” upon it like a witch’s broom. Abaris’s “fast” could also be

interpreted as shamanic, as Northern Eurasian shamans, such as among the Chukchi, have been

119

documented fasting for divination (DuBois 2009:63-4). However, like arrow-divination, spiritual

fasting occurs too universally to be bound up as purely shamanic. Although Abaris attained

legendary status in both the ancient and modern worlds for his rigorous fasting, skills with

healing, and generally spiritual character, we can infer something different from him than the

interpretations Dodds and others provide. I suggest Abaris illustrates the Greek characterization

and personification of mythic Hyperborean virtue and wisdom. His mythic journey, furthermore,

represents the Greek mystery belief of receiving Apollonian wisdom from the north, the

traditional land of the barbarians. In other words, Abaris was a model of virtuous living for

mystics to emulate. Whether or not they based his legend on any real, historical figure is beyond

our capacity to reason with what little information we have.

Another legendary figure in Greek lore, Aristeas of Proconnesus, falls into the bracket of

Apollo-inspired Hyperborean adventure and incidentally sparked discussion of “Greek

shamanism” among modern scholars. Unlike the foreigners Abaris and Orpheus, however,

Aristeas was a Greek who purportedly journeyed among the barbarians of the steppe en route to

the land of the Hyperboreans. Herodotus (4.14-16) relates that this Aristeas mysteriously

vanished from his hometown after he fell into a trance or seizure and reappeared seven years

later with wild tales of the exotic lands which he compiled into an epic poem, the Arimaspeia,

which now exists only in a few fragments cited in Pseudo-Longinus (in Romm 1992:72-3).

Fortunately, Herodotus provides a synopsis of the Arimaspeia as part of his ethnographic section

on the Issedonians and their neighbors. Accordingly, Aristeas, possessed by Apollo, found

himself among the Issedonians from whom he learned stories of the one-eyed, horse-riding

Arimaspians and their wars against the griffins. According to Athenaeus (13.83), Aristeas also

claimed to have gone beyond the Issedonians and Arimaspians under the guidance of Apollo to

120

the blessed Hyperboreans in an inversion of the pilgrimage of Abaris. Finally, Herodotus reports

an account that Aristeas also travelled to Metapontion, Italy where he claimed Apollo

transformed him into a raven and commanded him to establish a shrine in Italy. The

Metapontines communicated with the Delphic oracle, and after they received affirmation from

the cult did as Aristeas and Apollo commanded and built a shrine to Apollo complete with a

secondary statue to Aristeas. Strabo (13.1) outright calls Aristeas a “charlatan,” and Pausanias

(5.7) suggests that Aristeas did not actually visit the Hyperboreans but learned about them from

his Issedonian hosts. Herodotus, too, has his doubts about the veracity of Aristeas’s stories.

Given the episode of Aristeas’s trance or epileptic seizure, his sudden disappearance and

reappearance, time-travelling bilocation, the spirit possession by Apollo, animal metamorphosis,

his Hyperborean quest, and his inspired poetic vision, a number of scholars, unsurprisingly, have

revised the legendary figure as a Greek shaman. As with Abaris, Meuli (1935) and Dodds (1951)

pioneered this hypothesis, and Carpenter (1946:162-2) associates the Apollo-inspired Aristeas

with Aristaios, the “rustic divinity,” assistant to Apollo, “the honey-eater, the disappearing

dweller on the mountains, the Thracian Salmoxis,” as yet another mythological relic of bear

totemism. As Mallory and Mair (2000) note, J. D. P. Bolton (1962) raised the first serious assault

on the view that Aristeas was a “Greek shaman.” Lateiner (1990:240) reopens the debate with his

assertion that the stories of Aristeas “clearly exhibit characteristics of Asiatic shamanism,” and

that his character traits “connect Aristeas with genuine aspects of Siberian ‘medicine men’ or

ecstatic prophets, not to mention isomorphic figures of Greek legend such as Pythagoras and

adjacent peoples’ reincarnation myths.” These “aspects” that Lateiner refers to do in fact find

parallels throughout the indigenous traditions of the world which academia has deemed

121

shamanic, but in terms of cherry-picking parts of various unrelated traditions. Thus, they go well

beyond the constructed category of shamanism.

That being said, Aristeas likely does represent some very real elements of Eurasian

Steppe mythological traditions. Because the Greek colonists, traders, and Hellenic frontiersmen

found themselves in a liminal social frontier of sedentary/nomadic interaction, it was inevitable

that aspects of nomadic steppe culture found their way into the Archaic-Classical Greek

consciousness. Aristeas is representative of this cultural interaction. He was inspired by

Apollo—a god whose cults at Delos and Delphi were obsessed with northern barbarians—and

suddenly left Greece on a holy mission to reach the Hyperboreans. His return brought tales of

death/resurrection, animal transformation, visions which transcended time and space, and

inspired epic poetry, the subject matter of which revolved around the nomadic barbarians of the

Eurasian Steppe. Aristeas’s Arimaspeia was therefore a mythological product of and ideological

contributor to the Hyperborean template of barbarism. Aristeas might also very well infer some

of the cultural exchange which was occurring in the Greco-Pontic frontier zone where Greeks

perceived nomadic barbarian religious traditions through the mytho-cultural lens of

Hyperboreanism. Greeks such as Aristeas may have been inspired by the myths of Apollo and

the Hyperboreans to seek out the northern religions for themselves. Whether or not Aristeas was

a historical person, the legend explains much about how the educated Greeks viewed their place

in the mix of cultures on the frontier.

122

Ancient Greek Philosophy as Mystery Religion

The chthonic aspects of indigenous Pontic traditions including underworld soul-travel

and the transmigration of the immortal soul may have influenced some of the emergent

philosophies of the Late-Archaic and Classical eras, especially those which were alternative to

the accepted public mysteries like Eleusis. Among these, Pythagoreanism garners attention as a

mystical philosophy with striking similarities to Orphism and Salmoxism, at least as Herodotus

presents it. Dodds (1951:167) claims that he does not suggest Pythagoras was entirely a

“development from shamanism,” but he does remain open to the possibility of northern barbarian

influence in the development of Pythagorean doctrines. The Pythagorean cult began under

Pythagoras of Samos in the sixth century BC and thrived in the Greek colony of Croton in Italy

until persecutors killed Pythagoras and scattered his followers (Ring 1987:43-5; Zhmud 2012).

Herodotus, in his report on the Thracians described above, claimed that Salmoxis was reportedly

a former slave to Pythagoras and owed his philosophy, mainly the idea of the immortal soul, or

psyche, to him. Herodotus, however, believed that Salmoxis very likely preceded Pythagoras

historically and that the Samian’s philosophy instead should be attributed to the Egyptians (see

Hdt. 2.123, 4.96). Lateiner (1990:243, n.35), however, argues that Herodotus wrongly attributed

the concept of metempsychosis, that is the transmigration of souls, to the Egyptians when in fact

Ancient Egyptian religion described no such belief and Pontic religions did. According to third

century historian Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers (8.1.1-50), Pythagoras was

“initiated into all the mysteries and rites not only of Greece but also foreign countries,” and he

journeyed in search of wisdom among the Cretans, Egyptians, Chaldeans, and the Magi (of either

the Medes or Persians), much like a modern New Age enthusiast.

123

In addition, Pythagoras supposedly claimed to have traveled through Hades, although

Diogenes presents alternate narratives in which Pythagoras built a secret subterranean chamber

in Italy in which he meditated for a long period of time. When he ascended from the chamber

“looking like a skeleton” he declared he had been to Hades, and hence his followers believed he

was Apollo himself come down to them from the Hyperborean north. The parallels with

Salmoxis are more than uncanny, and Lateiner understands Herodotus’s treatment of Salmoxis as

an attempt to render native Thracian mythology intelligible to a Greek audience through the

template of Pythagorean “strangeness.” However, with the prominence of mystery traditions like

Orphism in Greece, would this rendering have even been necessary for Herodotus? Thus it is

more likely that Herodotus had used the Thracian Salmoxis story as a lampoon of the culturally

deviant Pythagorean cultic and philosophic tradition.

In spite of the unpopularity of Pythagoreanism, the chthonic symbolism in the

movement’s ontology, as evident in Pythagoras’s spiritual underworld adventure, was utilized in

the works of Plato as well. The Myth of Er in The Republic (10.614b-621c) reiterates the same

pattern of soul-travelling through Tartarus and Hades as well as the doctrine of metempsychosis.

Plato’s nearly Pythagorean understanding of the soul is also evident in Phaedo, where the

reincarnated soul “recollects” past knowledge, as his theory of human epistemology, and more so

in Meno, where he describes the soul as having often travelled through the underworld where it

receives true knowledge (Meno 81b-d). One might even note the vertical ontological symbolism

of the Allegory of the Cave (Rep. 7) which describes epistemology as the process of ascension

out of the chthonic realm, that one finds knowledge on a journey upward from the depths of the

underworld to the upper realms of light. Michael Harner (1980) describes similar patterns in so-

called shamanic paths to wisdom, but the shamanizing of Plato is perhaps a bit far-reaching.

124

Dodds (1951:151) connects Plato’s and Pythagoras’s doctrines with shamanism and claims,

unsurprisingly, that their philosophies represent the “original Greek point of view” on the soul.

Specifically, Dodds associates Pythagoras’s advances in musical theory with shamanism: “Music

is used by modern shamans to summon or banish spirits…and it seems likely that the

Pythagorean use of it derives in part at least from shamanistic tradition” (p.175).

However, Platonic and Pythagorean thought actually have more in common with Hellenic

mystery religions than with Dodds’s concept of shamanism, and we might more accurately

describe them as mystery religions. The Pythagoreans had a rigorous initiation in which the

initiate must sit outside of the cult’s gathering place in silence, listening to Pythagoras’s lectures

without physically seeing him. This continues for five years when the initiate is finally tested on

what he or she learned. The Platonic tradition, conversely, despite its use of chthonic symbolism

and seemingly esoteric knowledge, had no mystical initiation until the emergence of Neo-

Platonism much later in the Hellenistic period. Thus Platonism in Hellenic Greece could not be

accurately described as a mystery cult. Nevertheless, Ruck (1986) views Socrates as a “profaner

of the mysteries” and an Eleusinian do-it-yourselfer who democratized the otherwise esoteric

pursuit of wisdom. Ruck claims that Socrates transgressed the sacred initiations and conducted

the mysteries (including imbibing the sacred Eleusinian potion, which Ruck surmises is a

primitive form of LSD made from ergot fungus) outside the hierarchies of the Temple. Ruck,

however, bases this observation on the comedies of Aristophanes and, hence, might reveal more

about public opinions about what Socrates was doing than the philosopher’s actual activities.

125

Concluding Remarks on Chapter 3

The superficial parallels between Hellenic and Pontic religious traditions have tempted

Romanticist scholars of religion to “shamanize” Greek traditions and place them within a scheme

of cultural evolution in which “civilized” Greek culture supposedly preserved elements of a

shamanic past. Scholars typically identify these elements in terms of chthonic symbolism in both

myth and ritual, ritual intoxication or altered states of consciousness, and human/non-human

(e.g., spirit, ancestor, or animal) socialization. Additionally, these scholars cite a plethora of

ethnographic analogues from which they choose ritual elements and mythic archetypes that suit

their agendas. Almost uniformly, the scholars focus on Greek mystery cults as exhibitors par

excellence of “Greek shamanism.” In other words, they believe the Greek mysteries were

survivals of pre-agrarian steppe shamanism which became transformed with the development of

Archaic Greek civilization but also preserved crucial elements of a primordial Proto-Indo-

European shadow.

In reality, the historical interactions between Greeks and barbarians in the Pontic region

generated the conditions for the construction of the mystery traditions in Late Archaic and

Classical Greece. Though the mystery cults certainly exhibit some elements of Northern

Eurasian shamanism, those traditions were constructed as the result of cultural borrowing from

the colonized indigenous folk of the Pontic. The constructed Greek/barbarian dichotomy, and

especially the idea of the Hyperborean noble savage, fueled the process of cultural borrowing in

that the Hyperboreans represented, to the Hellenic Greeks, an idealized primordial purity and a

wealth of wisdom and virtue associated with gods such as Apollo. Thus the Greeks, operating

under this paradigm, maintained a reconciliation between the Wild and the Cultivated through

126

the cultural appropriation of foreign traditions which fit their own narratives of cultural evolution

where indigenous was equated with the primordial shadow of the Hellenes’s invented past.

Finally, the constructed traditions of the mysteries revolved around obtaining and

preserving esoteric knowledge. Divine wisdom, believed to come from altered states of

consciousness and communication with the chthonic otherworld, was reserved for a worthy,

privileged few who then mitigated that wisdom through a rigid hierarchy to the masses through a

well-layered mythos and initiation through ASC. The purpose was quite clear: to perpetuate the

ideology of the Greek/barbarian dichotomy and guarantee their own social space and access to

esoteric knowledge of the past. It was the politics of culture manifested in an ancient context.

First, this reinforced social order both within Greek society and in the Hellenic worldview, at the

periphery of which were both phantasmal, mythical noble savages and tangible and exploitable

indigenous peoples. Secondly, the constructed system allowed the higher classes of hierophants

to preserve both their cultural authority and their access to divine knowledge. In the end, it was

all based upon the imagined otherness of the barbarian. Even if the Pontic barbarian religions

were technically not shamanic in the modern sense, those religions occupied a space in which

they operated for the Ancient Greeks in a way very similar to the way indigenous religions today

operate for us. As Harry Levin described the transfer of ancient primitivist ideas into Early

Modern European consciousness, “The golden age, a fiction of the Old World, is realized in the

New” (1969:68).

127

Chapter 4

The Indigenous Barbarian and His Religion

One might wonder how the discussion of Greeks and barbarians relates to shamanism

beyond a few scholars’ attempts to inject a modern construct into ancient contexts. It very well

may have seemed a long digression away from anthropology and into the realms of classical

history, philosophy, and philology. However, good history is anthropological, and anthropology

has a wealth of history at its disposal. Particularly, the Greek/barbarian discussion illustrates that

the structuralist problem of the self/other contradistinction that has been a persistent one in

human history, not just the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Moreover, the contradistinction,

though universal, varies in the relationship between the twain, rather than in form, as things good

to think with. Although the barbarian reflected Hellenic notions about human virtue and vice

more than actual native Pontic characteristics, it emerged out of the relationship between Greek

colonists and native Pontic groups and shaped the future of those relationships. Thus Thracians

and Scythians made good slaves for Greek politicians like Speusis (see Ch. 2), and their religious

traditions made good source material for budding philosophers and cultists like Pythagoras (see

Ch. 3).

The barbarians were utterly other because of their social position in relation to the polis

system, from the perspective of the polis, that is. In the Hellenic worldview, the barbarians were

by nature free of Hellenic nomos yet could only integrate into the nomos of the polis through the

institution of slavery. They were by nature also relics of the past stages of the Hellenes’ own

128

history and cultural evolution as they believed it. This is why Herodotus described the Scythians

as a “young” people, because the Greeks believed the barbarians were in a much earlier stage of

social maturation. Moreover, the barbarians, being outside the polis, were a constant threat to the

order of the polis in which the cultural characterization of the other represented both Hellenic

insecurities and real dialectics of power. For example, Amazonomachy as a motif in art and

mythology represented Greek understandings of exotic Pontic-Caspian non-patriarchal societies

and also Greek fears of foreign threats to the patriarchal order of the polis (Tarbell 1920).

Thus the discussion of Greeks and barbarians is anthropological due to the persistent

occurrence of social analogues of this dichotomy throughout history, especially between

sedentary and nomadic societies, and in light of the effects of globalization today, the category of

indigenous other. However, in order to put to rest such reservations, we will depart in this

chapter from the distant past for the present and examine the discussion of shamanism in the

contemporary context. Nonetheless, the previous chapters on Greeks and barbarians should

demonstrate the processes of history in which socio-cultural systems inevitably generate

ontologically marginal space from which they draw the material for the construction of

otherness. Shamanism is one such construction of otherness in the historical context of

globalization.

In this chapter, we will connect the Ancient Barbarian with the Barbarian of the New Age

and reveal the mental structures which have imagined both. First, we will summarize some of the

important points this thesis has already made about the ancient relationship between polis core

and periphery. We will then examine the issues of how shamanism is constructed, and what it

means in a global consciousness, and how it manifests in various forms of new traditions in the

129

political mire of voice, agency, and narrative. Finally, we will examine the construction of the

barbarian of the new, global age and challenges to the field.

The Ontological Space of the Other

I call this space ontological in that, from the perspective of the proverbial polis, the outer

zones of existence, of time and space, contain the good and bad attributes of the past, or the

primitive state of man, a form of ancient evolutionary anthropology with a Romantic flavor.

Although the ontological vista from the polis walls may have integrated a priori mythological

presumptions about the wilds beyond the civilized lands, it was still anthropological in that it

encompassed sedentary cultural attempts to make sense of the human condition within and

without the polis. For some, such as Hesiod and Homer, it was a poetic endeavor. For others like

Herodotus and Aristotle, the pursuit was a classically rational investigation. Though we might

not consider these works good science today, they still have ethnographic value (Thomas 2000;

Skinner 2012). Siep Stuurman (2008) calls this the “anthropological turn” in the history of

civilizations, and he notes this pattern cross-culturally in both Ancient Greek and Ancient

Chinese perspectives on the frontier zones beyond their sedentary centers. The steppe and taiga

lands at times appeared to be a chaotic wilderness in conflict with the cultivated lands and at

other times the pure domain of the “prehistoric” past untainted by the march of time. The human

condition, from this ancient perspective as “invented other,” reflected these natural states.

The space outside the polis is marginal in that its inhabitants occupy an exploitable

peripheral zone relative to the polis-core. As a number of scholars of Central Asian history and

130

anthropology have noted (Saunders 1971; Lattimore 1979; Khazanov 1984; DiCosmo 1994; Liu

2001; Kradin 2002, 2006; Skaff 2004; Frachetti 2012), the age-old cultural dialectic that emerges

between the sedentary core and the nomad further generates 1) varying ideas, from the

perspective of the sedentary core, about the supposed lawlessness or irrationality of the cultures

of the periphery with associated injections of discussions of morality and human nature; and 2) a

tangible, exploitable semi-periphery which both the sedentary core and the nomadic periphery

might take advantage of and in which the dialectical twain might even come into conflict.

This dialectic is not as black and white as it seems. Rather the semiperiphery, or “frontier

zone” of Skaff (2004), becomes its own marginal space within marginal space, a fluid, liminal

zone in which marital alliances are built, slaves and goods are exchanged, barbarian kings find

Bacchus, golden artifacts fall from heaven, and conflicts of all sorts occur. Peripheral groups

become dependent, to a degree, upon goods produced in the core, and the semi-periphery

becomes the zone in which they most frequently obtain those goods through either trading or

raiding, and, when the opportunities present themselves, the creation of large kingdoms or

empires. Likewise, the core utilizes the semi-periphery zone as its own means of obtaining raw

goods from the hinterlands and beyond, as well as supporting its own centralized system through

the exercise of its power, both politically and technologically. Moreover, the self/other

dichotomy becomes bracketed in the complex power structure and framework of polis/nomad

interactions. The history of interactions between native Pontic and Ancient Greek colonial

cultural systems further illustrates this historical process.

As the Ancient Greeks departed from their own historical Dark Age and entered a period

of expansion into the larger Pontic-Mediterranean world, the “barbarian” came to occupy the

space of “indigenous other” in the Greek worldview. At the same time curiosity about a

131

constructed past that was, even at that time, ancient led to the investigation of the religious

traditions of so-called barbarian cultures on the part of educated Greek thinkers and

mystagogues. The result: the collective of various sources on foreign, “barbarian” religions

gradually fed into the construction of the Hellenic cultic traditions under the pedigree of

Hyperborean Golden Age antiquity. One possible explanation I offer notes a Romanticist-type of

ideology in the mytho-religious ontology of the Ancient Greeks which 1) fostered feelings of

sorrow for leaving the past behind, as they imagined it, for the progress of seemingly more

complex eras, and 2) grief for subjecting more “primitive” peoples to the yoke of polis-

civilization and thus polluting their Hyperborean virtue. These may have been popular

sentiments which myths about Hyperboreans and the Golden Age perpetuated via elite cultic

traditions. Moreover, they paradoxically coincided with bigoted notions of barbarians as

exploitable, lawless savages incapable of cultural progress. Finally, these sentiments did not

typify all of Hellenic society but did typify the ideologies of mystery societies.

The Enlightenment recapitulated this entire process with a different set of variables.

Primitives of the global periphery inevitably represent in the Western mind what once was,

despite ethnology to the contrary. As the Scythians were to the Greeks, and as the Germans were

to the Romans, the “Indians” were to the Europeans of the colonial period and beyond, an

observation which Kehoe (1996, 2007), Romm (1992), and Feest (2007) also make. Given the

Enlightenment thinkers’ obsession with Ancient Greek and Roman literature, in addition to

Renaissance geographers’ utilization of Classical sources, the construction of the otherness of

indigenous peoples in newly colonized lands, especially the Native American peoples,

essentially emerged out of the same Classical understanding of human nature as did the

barbarian. They inevitably tried to understand indigenous groups through their own

132

preconceived, Eurocentric notions about human nature. Was there any way around this however?

As Feest notes (2007:328), “all academic approaches, no matter how politically detached and

theoretically innovative, are ultimately part of a European and not an indigenous American

tradition of looking at the world.”

Colonialism inevitably marginalized the “savages,” no matter how “noble” armchair

scholars thought the world’s natives were. Now, in a globalized era, voices from the otherized

groups grow in volume, and the perspectives from the fringes are entering the main stream of

discussion (e.g., the Trask-Keesing debate, dealt with below). As Western consciousness is made

to feel collective guilt over the effects of colonialism and globalism (despite globalization being

an urban-industrialism problem, not just a “Western” problem), as well as industrialism,

consumerism, etc., the “indigenous other” has become the Hyperborean analogue in its

construction. Consequently, Kehoe (2007:194) remarks that “thousands of Americans and

Europeans believe…that American Indians retain a primordial wisdom that could heal our

troubled world.” As good-natured as such beliefs are, they unfortunately originate in a long

historical context of colonialism. In reality, the same problems which plague marginal sectors of

Appalachian and Rust Belt America plague many of the Indian Reservations. Yet, many people

revere the archetypal Indian as somehow spiritually untainted by history. I posit that this

Eurocentric, Hyperborean view incorporates not only the aboriginal cultures of the Americas but

the entire category of “indigenous” culture as a whole globally into a tradition in which their

identities have already been invented or prepared for them as “indigenous other.”

The current emergent esoteric religions, which this chapter addresses, seek to return to a

Golden Age that-never-was, a Romantic, evolutionary myth about the root of all religions in

“primitive man.” Almost laughably, the indigenous other becomes, from the urban perspective of

133

the modern polis, a vestige of simplistic paradise and closeness to Mother Earth. Movements

such as neo-shamanism, neo-paganism, witchcraft, and theosophy claim both ancient, primordial

origins and access to pre-modern wisdom that has been lost over time. However, movements

such as these originate not in the distant past but in a very contemporary, educated context. They

are among the many products of Enlightenment-era discussions about ancient civilizations and

primitive man, and more accurately, part of the school of thought which became Romanticism.

The context of the times always determines the subject matter of the Modern esoteric, occult

traditions—Classicism for T. K. Oesterreich, Orientalism for Aleister Crowley, Nordicism for

Helena Blavatsky, and primitivism for Mircea Eliade—but the object always revolved around

access to so-called forgotten knowledge of the ancients. Subsequently, the real issues were: who

were these ancients? What is the source material of the knowledge base for these esoteric

traditions? And what was the context, social and historical, in which that knowledge was

acquired? The problem emerges as one of the politics of culture. The “ancients” become a

Romanticized or exoticized other, and the knowledge, if it has any authenticity whatsoever, is

disembedded and reinvented to fit the new paradigm. Ancient European religions like Greek,

Celtic, and Roman mysticism, long dead, are resurrected through Classical literature and a

philosopher’s drive to emulate the glorified ancients. Orientalistic mysticism is invented from the

conflation of modern Islamic civilization, as if an unchanging body of culture, with Ancient

Egyptian and Akkadian imagery and reconstructed mythologies for an English eccentric.

Nordicism blends Indo-European research with the Romanticization of the Germanic barbarians,

politically charged ideas about race, and seemingly pure fantasy in the mind of a Russian spirit

medium. Has Mircea Eliade followed in the footsteps of his mystic predecessors rather than the

footsteps of his beloved prehistoric forebears?

134

The Invention of Shamanism

This thesis thus far has examined the socio-cultural context in which the Ancient Greeks

invented the traditions of barbarian identity and religion within their own mythopoeic ontology

of Hyperboreanism and the mystery cults which emerged from that process. All the while the

issue of shamanism persists throughout the discussion, as some scholars claim it relates to both

to Greek mystery religion and native Pontic religion. The latter category might have a stronger

claim to that assertion than the former given its connection to trans-Eurasian steppe-taiga cultural

groups we discussed in the last chapter. Nevertheless, the fact remains that shamanism, in a

contemporary sense, is the product of Western thought, much like the barbarian was a product of

Ancient Greek thought. However wide-sweeping, shamanism is based upon real empirical

observations and literary/oral traditions of extant indigenous groups, archaeological assemblages,

and historical literature, whether or not those groups have any substantial relationship to one

another.

Despite those scholarly efforts, shamanism is pieced together as a composite category in

which the components represent supposed links to a remote past, a mythic phase of human

evolution. As such, in a global age shamanism has become a culturally recognizable tradition

that draws its authority from its supposed antiquity as the primordial root religion of all

humanity. Like the Ancient Greek mystery cults, shamanism fantasizes about the primitive purity

of the past and glorifies the indigenous other as manifestations of that purity with little or no

grounding in the real conditions of the non-indigenous/indigenous relationship which brought

indigenous traditions into the non-indigenous episteme. Thus shamanism is an invented tradition

135

borne not out of the great depths of history but out of relatively recent socio-cultural

circumstances which the modern, globalized world has shaped. This process is nothing new in

history (e.g., Greeks and barbarians); it occurs now under a new name and with a different cast

of characters.

Let us better clarify what an invented tradition is, since I have liberally applied this term

throughout my research. E. J. Hobsbawm describes an invented tradition as “a set of practices,

normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which

seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically

implies continuity with the past” (1983:1). This is precisely what shamanism is, at least as a

category of Western thought. Although Hobsbawm and other members of his camp apply this

concept to history at large, I do not. And although history is certainly bound to the cultural

context in which it is recorded and is often hence a “foreign country” to the modern reader (see

Lowenthal 1985), not all history is pure fantasy, nor does “tradition” automatically imply

“invented.” That being said, traditions do run the risk of alteration at the hands of those who

control the narrative, and some narratives, though not all, can become entirely concocted. Thus, I

do find the concept of the “invention of tradition” useful for describing specific instances of

tradition-inventing, and I find that shamanism is one such case. Thanks to Eliade, Hultkrantz,

Harner, and others, the narrative of shamanism as universally “indigenous” and “ancient” is

repeated in popular culture and to an extent in academia. Because it is associated with the vague,

usually homogenized category of indigenous other, the myth that shamanism represents pre-

colonial religious traditions around the world persists.

The obvious problem with shamanism, even as an analytic tool is the sheer volume of

multifarious cultural traditions which scholars and enthusiasts include within the shamanic

136

bracket, so much that some scholars have called for discussion of “shamanisms” in the plural

rather than the unified singular (Atkinson 1992). Moreover, from one end to another the

multitude of traditions contrast with and contradict one another so that one can discern no unified

body of rituals, beliefs, etc., which one could accurately call “shamanism.” For the sake of

illustration, one might face some difficulty linking the spiritual traditions of the modern

Yukaghir (Pedersen 2001) with those of the medieval Altai Turks (Saunders 1971). One would

face insurmountably more difficulty linking Kwaio ancestor worship in twentieth-century

Solomon Islands (Keesing 1982) to Upper Paleolithic bear ceremonialism in Northern Europe

(Germonpré & Hämäläinen 1997). In each of these arbitrarily chosen examples, the respective

scholar sparingly, critically, and carefully uses the term “shamanism” in the discussion of their

respective topics. However, the only supposed link between each of these traditions is their

origin as indigenous or primitive. From the Western-global perspective, shamanism is the

religion of a newly constructed category of barbarians.

The unified shamanism of Eliade et al. would include each of the cultural examples

above among countless others as evidence of the wide distribution of the most ancient of

religions. The prerequisite for shamanism, in the Eliadic mind, is not necessarily any parallel in

cosmology, mythology, ritual, social structure, etc., but rather that the subject tradition is either

indigenous, ancient, or both. Most often the two have been conflated. Pan-Shamanism has thus

essentially constructed itself as the catchall of supposedly pre-Modern or prehistoric religion. In

a Jungian sense, the emergence of urban or neo-shamanism and related traditions among

contemporary Westerners signifies a cultural encounter with the primordial shadow of

humanity’s savage past, albeit a past which never really was. It chases a fantasy, a patchwork

myth, in search of wisdom which the progress of history allegedly left behind and aboriginals of

137

the world have carefully guarded for countless millennia. Whisker (2013:359) scoffs at such

“naïve and romantic conservatism” which neo-shamanism becomes: “To suggest that

contemporary modes of ‘spirituality,’ including ‘neo-shamanism,’ are a ‘rediscovery’ of ancient

truths offers a circular justification of the post-Jungian framework which the anthropological

archive does not support.” Atkinson (1992:322-3) holds similar reservations, especially with the

emergence of “urban shamanism,” which “aligns its adherents at once with Nature and the

primordial Other, in opposition to institutionalized Western religions and indeed Western

political and economic orders.” As such, many Western neo-shaman enthusiasts would find it

problematic that many so-called indigenous groups around the world have chosen the religions

of the colonialists, that they would be Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists rather than follow

their primitive root religion of shamanism. How dare those indigenous peoples! Don’t they know

any better?

Atkinson and Whisker thus agree that the current construction of shamanism is based

upon Jung’s psychological shadow, the primitive other. In the shamanic paradigm, self-

actualization occurs as the dialectical synthesis of the Cultivated, modern-Western self with the

prehistoric, Wild other. For neo-shamanists like Michael Harner and followers of the New Age

philosophy, shamanism is a critique of Western culture through contradistinction with a

constructed noble other. Recall our discussion of paradeigmata as an Ancient Greek literary

trope (Hartog 1988; Romm 1992). Hartog especially favors the interpretation of the barbarian-

other as a “mirror” of the Greek-self rather than as ethnographically accurate depictions of

Pontic-Caspian Steppe lifeways. Basically, Hartog argues that the Ancient Greeks embedded

their own societal deficiencies into the construction of otherness, that the barbarian merely

shadowed the Greek, at times criticizing the complexities and hypocrisies of polis-lifeways, at

138

other times representing the darker, chaotic past of the Hellenic mythos (see Shaw 1982-3 for a

similar examination of pastoral nomadism and barbarian otherness). The indigenous shaman, as a

modern trope of sorts, operates in like fashion. Abstracted as other, the shaman is subject to the

context of the polis-self and becomes both a criticism of the shortcomings of modernity and the

idealized spiritualist of modernity’s forgotten past. In reality, shamanism has about as much

basis in reality as Hyperboreanism and Abaris. That the shamanism construct bears so much

resemblance to the Greek construction of the barbarian cultural traditions should come with little

surprise. Rather, one can find more surprise in the history of the theory of shamanism, that is, in

the origins of the construct as it stands today as an emergent religious movement.

Shamanism’s own origins are relatively recent. Enlightenment thinkers, and the

Romanticists who followed them, steeped in classical literature and inevitably confronted with

the ancient idea of the noble savage, thus interpreted their own worlds through a privileged

classicist’s lens. Their Enlightenment theories were put to the test as colonialism and imperialism

ever expanded the frontiers of knowledge beyond even the exotic Orient to the apparent

simplicity of primitive cultures on every fringe of the map. One only needs to read The Travels

of Sir John Mandeville to see how the peoples at the ends of the earth represented the primitive

state of man for Late Medieval and Early Modern Europeans in the same way Herodotus and

other ancient scholars and artists described distant foreigners from Hyperboreans to Pygmies.

As Znamenski (2007) notes, the Romanticist thinkers tried to fit the primitives into their

own notions of cultural evolution and origins of traditions, and the term shaman itself originates

in the context of Russian imperial expansion into inner Asia. Encounters with native spiritualists

of various sorts, especially among the widespread Tungus people, fashioned a niche in the minds

of the European explorers which they came to call “shaman.” Through the nineteenth and the

139

first half of the twentieth century, shamanism has expanded to include the native religious

traditions of just about every conceivable geographic and chronological space. Even after

cultural evolution fell out of style in ethnology, shamanism remained, and very well remains, the

last bastion of the evolutionary paradigm. Even as the theoretical frameworks changed,

shamanism maintained a distinction as the religion(s) of the savage, which left the theorizing to

the discussions of sorcery, totemism, animism, magic, etc. All the while, few scholars attempted

to dissect what shamanism really was beyond its use in qualitative descriptions of various

“primitive” or “indigenous” religions. Thus it remained a putative scholarly category up through

its popularization beyond anthropology in the mid-twentieth century. Sidky’s recent ethnography

of the native religious traditions of Nepal offers a better criterion for describing shamanism as

spirit-mastery, but the analysis still lacks a more careful consideration of indigenous-ness as the

essence of the larger conception of shamanism within academia and beyond. However, I still

applaud Sidky’s efforts for his rejection of Eliade’s paradigm and the maintenance of the Central

Eurasian context for understanding the shaman.

As for shamanism’s resiliency as a topic of discussion, Atkinson (1992:308) remarks that,

rather than perpetuate an evolutionary model of shamanism, recent psychological research on

altered states of consciousness has sought alternate explanations for shamanism in supposed

“universal human proclivities.” Although Atkinson criticizes the psychological perspective of

shamanism for its reliance upon neurophysiology and lack of regard for “associated structures of

ritual, knowledge, and society,” she notes the strength of the psychological perspective in that it

stresses the epistemological dimension of the category (pp.311-12). The object of studying

shamanism at this point aimed to uncover the ways in which shamanism describes indigenous

modes of knowing the world which separate them from the Western modes of thought. In this

140

way, the Altered State of Consciousness (ASC) makes shamanic epistemology “revelatory”

within its own cultural framework. In the words of Pedersen, shamanism here might refer to

indigenous ontology as relying upon ASC as a path to knowledge offering an alternative to

Western rationalism. I still find this an overgeneralized understanding of indigenous religions,

indicating more about Westerners, in bouts of postmodern nihilism, looking to the spiritual in

response to a supposedly unspiritual society in which Westerners find themselves.

Postmodern criticism of scientific empiricism fueled the serious reexamination of

shamanism as a reputable and reliable epistemological alternative to Western knowledge in the

late twentieth century. The detrimental socio-economic and environmental effects of

industrialism, urban-sprawl, and post-colonialism further prompted this reexamination. Thus

modern consciousness began to view the primitive other as a source of prelapsarian wisdom, and

shamanism began to take on eschatological tones of salvation in an age of rapid globalization.

Those who take Eliade seriously would view shamanism as the only route back to Eden and the

answer to our supposed “yearning for paradise” (see Eliade 1959). Consequently, Michael

Harner (1980) provides the “how-to” with his step-by-step instructions and ethnographic tidbits

for the fledgling shamanist on her or his way back to the Hyperborean bliss of the Paleolithic

Golden Age.

The emphasis on the need for healing, both physical and spiritual, in the modern human

condition has also attracted medical anthropology and alternative medicine to the study of

shamanism. As Atkinson (1992) relates, psychological theories of shamanism have contributed

to this trend through their focus on ASC and healing. Porterfield (1987) and McClenon (1997)

agree with the interpretation that shamanism represents the most ancient form of healing and

psychotherapy in human cultures. Medical anthropology offers reconsiderations of indigenous

141

healing systems as alternative medicine, and neo-shamanism makes ample use of such traditions

(Fotiou 2016). Again, Michael Harner (1980) even becomes a DIY self-healing manual in this

context. Harner also advocates the anthropologist as a sort of shamanic savior to the ills of

indigenous people (Harner 1996). While the global social and environmental ills are real, does

the study of shamanism offer any real solution for those in the most marginal of space in the

globe? Or are we, the anthros, to become Salmoxian charlatans and deceivers? This remains to

be seen, but we should also consider the context in which information on indigenous traditions of

spirituality and healing is absorbed into the conglomerated category of shamanism.

It is out of these workings that the emergent religions of neo-paganism and the New Age

appeared alongside and, more precisely, as a part of the developing world religion of shamanism,

or to use the more precise terminology of recent literature, neo-shamanism. Because of their

origins as Western invented traditions which glorify the constructed “primitive other,” as the

Greeks did the mythic Hyperboreans, neo-paganism, New Ageism, and urban or neo-shamanism

are really variations of the same cultural phenomenon. They exist in opposition to the accepted

dominant paradigms and ideology and claim primitive or pan-indigenous origins. Although these

movements boast respect for indigenous cultures, spirituality, and nature, they ultimately

originate in Euro-American, educated, urban culture-centers. The world of the indigenous, of the

spiritual, of the natural is alien and other, outside the polis, from the comfortable perspectives of

the urban shamans and initiated mystagogues. Thus, as these shamanic movements utilize an

ethnographic grab-bag of traditions, politics of voice and narrative determine what is shamanic

and what is not rather than allow the indigenous their own agency.

142

The New Age and the Politics of Culture

The New Age movement, like shamanism, is difficult to define because it more

accurately refers not to a unified religious tradition but to a wide variety of modern cultural

phenomena amalgamated under a post-globalized, post-Western ideology. The term originated in

the twentieth century as the culmination of esoteric thought and Eliade’s concept of pan-

shamanism. Esoteric mysticism, also known as theosophy, was popularized in the late-nineteenth

and early-twentieth centuries with figures such as Helena Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley.

Theosophy itself is somewhat of an amalgamation of Eastern philosophies, European mythology,

and Enlightenment-Orientalist ideals, such as the noble savage. Though theosophy fell out of

style by the middle of the twentieth century, its emphasis on religious universalism and

Romanticized roots influenced the writings of Mircea Eliade, who posited shamanism as the root

of all spirituality. Consequently, the New Age movements of the latter half of the century

essentially combined theosophy and shamanism into a new world religion in preparation for a

purportedly utopian, global age of human evolutionary history.

Early criticisms of this New Age movement began in the 1970s with direct scholarly

opposition to Eliade’s shamanism (see Ch. 1). However, most anthropologists of shamanism

have and continue to use modified versions of pan-shamanism, if for nothing more than the

concept’s categorical convenience. Some, such as Michael Harner, popularized shamanism

outside of academia to a public, having emerged from the cultural revolution of the 1960s into an

expanded global self-awareness. The industrial world of the West retreated to the Third World in

143

the decades to follow, and the world economy grew into a complex web and hierarchy of

socialization more powerful than anything the human race has seen before. Finally, the arrival

and expansion of the internet all but completed this socio-economic labyrinth. The world

suddenly found itself in a maelstrom of communication, and aboriginals, whose worldviews

would otherwise go unseen by Western viewers, are now posting statuses on corporate social

media outlets and contributing to this process. More importantly, they see the worldviews of

Westerners through social media, and they have access to many of the same sources of

information (e.g., YouTube, blogs, news sites, encyclopedias, and scholarly literature). Western

New Age traditions capitalize on the wealth of indigenous information and worldviews they find

through various global media; yet indigenous groups with access to the same media have fared

differently. Has the information boom affected indigenous views of themselves and of their

religious traditions? Does the concept of shamanism, information on which is available all over

the internet, alter localized native traditions? This remains to be seen.

Their inclusion in the global socio-economic system has turned indigenous traditions of

art, religion, and identity into commodities, mostly for New Age consumers, however. These

New Age consumers of tradition may be in search of wisdom, but they miss the fact that the very

system upon which they rely to discover this wisdom also exploits, both culturally and socio-

economically, indigenous peoples on a global scale. Very few, if any, cultures have escaped the

impact of this growth of global imperialism which emanated from the Western world centuries

ago, despite recurrent legends of “uncontacted” tribes in this or that place. Furthermore, New

Agers are guilty of disembedding the material for their philosophies from indigenous sources

with little attention to context. Rather, they cherry-pick elements of various traditions and

combine them into entirely individualistic and personalized ontologies. So-called Eastern

144

traditions, like Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Ancient Mesopotamian/Egyptian religions,

have long been a part of theosophy and other occult ideologies and practices via Orientalism, and

they are fundamentally important to New Age philosophy. However, it is the inclusion of

shamanic indigenous religions into Western consciousness that makes the New Age what it is—a

global ontology created, like the rest of the global socio-economic system, through imperialism.

Still, few anthropologists have methodically criticized the New Age, and most have either

dismissed the movement as a fad, like the hippie movement, or ignored the issue altogether. A

minority actually show some support for New Age and Neo-Pagan groups, perhaps with the

intention of providing a contextual basis for the ideologies of these groups. For example, Ruth

Prince and David Riches understand the Glastonbury New Age community in the United

Kingdom “as endeavouring to reestablish the fundamentals of human social life and as

attempting to put such fundamentals into daily practice” (1999:119). Though the authors are

critical of New Age interpretations of hunter/gatherer social systems, Prince and Riches gleefully

contribute academically to their “genuine and conscious social experiment devoted to social first

principles,” yet without dissecting what these supposed first principles really are. Nevertheless,

the authors either ignore or have not realized that, in spite of New Age ideology’s denouncement

of materialism, followers of New Age ideology are still part of the consumer system as

consumers and purveyors of indigenous traditions.

In another study, Daniel P. Mears and Christopher G. Ellison (2000) surveyed the Austin,

Texas area on the issue of the consumption of New Age materials and paraphernalia, and they

found it is widespread, yet they make no major theoretical claim about this trend beyond the

study’s scope in central Texas. Similarly, Arthur A. Dole’s survey noted the lack of systematic

perspectives on the New Age movement, yet he offered little more than the suggestion that

145

critics should take a closer look at the socio-cultural forces behind the movement (1993:275).

More recently, Maria Julia Carozzi demonstrates her support for the New Age communities in

Buenos Aires, Argentina, and like Prince and Riches she contributes ideologically with her

discussion of some of the more esoteric areas of New Age philosophy (2004:607). More

importantly, she identifies a socio-cultural dichotomy in Buenos Aires, particularly concerning

the class division between lower-class Pentecostal Christians and upper-middle class New Agers.

This gives the reader some insight into the kind of privilege New Age enthusiasts enjoy.

Scholars have brought up similar criticisms in discussion of European Neo-Pagan

movements, namely due to their reliance upon reinventions of an era of European culture which

has long since passed. Marija Gimbutas’s research on a supposedly pre-Indo-European, “Old

Europe” Mother Goddess cult, for instance, has inspired some feminist scholars and Neo-Pagan

groups to adopt a pan-goddess tradition which contends with the academic mainstream (Bevan

1987; Rountree 2007). Goddess Feminists, for example, operate cultic tours and ceremonies at

the Çatalhöyük site in Turkey, supposedly the location of a Neolithic Mother Goddess cult. The

Goddess tours draw pilgrims from around the world, but typically from a milieu of college-

educated Westerners. Rountree (2007) admits that the movement is based more in the politics of

discourse and multivocality than in tradition.

In non-feminist discussions of Neo-Paganism, Michael York (1999) describes Neo-Pagan

movements, such as Wicca in England, as “invented traditions,” and Adrian Ivakhiv (2005)

contextualizes post-Soviet Ukrainian Neopaganism in terms of its ethno-nationalistic political

leanings. Michael Strmiska (2000), on the other hand, praises the Asatru movement of Iceland

for its openness, in contrast to the xenophobic and racially-driven Neo-Pagan movements of

mainland Scandinavia. These Neo-Pagan movements began with the Theosophy movement of

146

Helena Blavatsky, whose ideology of Nordicism (i.e., the belief in the spiritual-evolutionary

supremacy of the Nordic race) influenced the ideology of the Nazi party. However, Scandinavian

Neo-Paganism did not gain popularity until the 1980s, decades after the Wiccan and Druidic

movements of the British Isles had been well established. When it did, it emerged as the

byproduct of the subversive, underground metal music scenes.

Musicians such as Quorthon (deceased) of Bathory and Gaahl of Gorgoroth and

Wardruna, among countless others, draw upon Norse mythology and imagery in a revival of

cultural pride in pre-modern/pre-Christian European culture and in environmental purity, what

might together be called “pagan purity.” Moreover, Wardruna’s message of “sowing new seeds

and strengthening old roots” summarizes their primitivist outlook. The Viking and Black metal

scenes are ideologically rooted in anti-Christian ideology and satanic and pagan imagery, staples

in heavy metal music since the late 1960s for their counter-cultural potency. Scandinavian Neo-

Paganism grew out of this trend in music history as the interests of “metalheads” turned towards

their own Northern European heritage for inspiration. Kennet Granholm, in “‘Sons of Northern

Darkness:’ Heathen Influences in Black Metal and Neofolk Music,” examines this overlap and

the reinvention of tradition in Scandinavia as a turning to “European pre-Christian Traditions”.

The crux of his argument is that the

key characteristic of Traditionalism, as well as the later Radical Traditionalist movement,

is the rejection of dominant Western cultural and societal values and norms. Instead, the

attention is shifted away from the modern West, and to what is considered to be more

authentic culture and uncorrupted expressions of eternal wisdom (2011:537-38).

This translates to Scandinavian musicians looking to past folkloric traditions in their homeland

for lyrical source materials and often a folkish arrangement of style and instrumentation.

By the 1990s, extremists in the Neo-Pagan scene, notably Varg Vikernes of Burzum,

turned ideological opposition into “lone wolf” acts of terrorism. Although the majority of

147

Scandinavian Neo-Pagans view themselves as outside of a corrupted cultural system and attempt

to return to their cultural roots, they do not burn churches or stockpile weapons and explosives.

Only a small minority commits these acts; and yet, even Vikernes enjoys the privilege of

disseminating his Neo-Pagan ideology via his website (ancestralcult) and Youtube page

(ThuleanPerspective) for consumers of both black metal music and Neo-Pagan literature and

ideology. He lives today with his wife and children “off the grid” on a farm in rural France

conducting a social experiment of his own by supposedly getting back to his roots.

Vikernes and the various European Neo-Pagan groups have in common the opinion that

their traditions are in fact traditional and, therefore, of a nobler virtue than modern scientific and

Christian traditions. However, like neo-shamanism, these traditions are invented upon the

premise that they represent the indigenous traditions of Europe before the advance of history

silenced them long ago. In reality Neo-Paganism is something more like fantasy and

Romanticism mixed with scant primary texts, ethnographic literature on unrelated cultures, and

political narratives regarding claims to “holy sites” like Stonehenge. For Neo-Pagans, the pre-

Christian barbarians of Europe represent something like the Hyperboreans of Hellenic lore. In

other words, they are creating the past to affirm their own new identity. As such this assumes a

political stance in the authority of the narrative about the past. Combine this with the current

situation of seemingly unbridled immigration of Eastern “others” and a supposedly leftist

Christian culture doing nothing to resist it in most European countries, it is not hard to see at

least why far-right neo-paganism is gaining more and more strength. Vikernes is happy to

disseminate his views on this topic on ThuleanPerspective. Like neo-shamanism, neo-paganism

also carries eschatological tones in an age of increasing chaos and rising “tribalism,” whereas

Christianity becomes an easy scapegoat for neo-pagans and European black metal fans.

148

Roger Keesing (1989) notes this same process at work in many native Pacific Island

groups who reinvent the narrative of their histories in a post-colonial context. Like his

contemporaries, Handler and Linnekin (1984), Keesing claims that indigenous Pacific writers

have managed to integrate Western noble savage ideas into their own historical identities, redact

those aspects of their past which contradict that image, such as human sacrifice, and that the

natives thus “are creating pasts, myths of ancestral ways of life that serve as powerful political

symbols” (1989:19). The mythic past, in essence, becomes the idyllic solution to the socio-

political problem of self-identity in the present context of decolonization. Keesing raises the

question, are these indigenous traditions actually traditional after centuries of integration into the

Western global system? Or, like the shortcomings of Eliade’s shamanism, are they merely part of

a Romantic attempt to return to a Golden Age?

This sparked a heated debate with native Hawaiian activist and scholar Haunani-Kay

Trask (1991) who contended that indigenous peoples should be given the dignity of determining

their own histories however they want, and any criticism from an outsider is a recapitulation of

the colonialist mentality. It is an issue of power over the narrative and over the actualization of

self-identity over other-identity:

For Hawaiians, anthropologists in general (and Keesing in particular) are part of the

colonizing horde because they seek to take away from us the power to define who and

what we are, and how we should behave politically and culturally (Trask 1991:162).

Keesing (1991) retorted that the politics of the narrative do not change the historical facts about

the natives’ identity before colonization and how the process of colonization has altered their

perceptions of that history. Trask herself is educated in the American school system with a PhD

in political science from Wisconsin-Madison. Does this fact ultimately devalue or strengthen her

position? Keesing treats her as a peer in the academic arena, but Trask’s identity as indigenous

149

also plays into the politics of the narrative. Does Keesing have the right to criticize her stance?

Or does his position as a privileged, white, male scholar deny him that right? Who does have the

right to determine the facts of the narrative? Similar indigenous criticisms have been laid against

the European Orientalist school in the twentieth century, with Edward Said leading the charge

against the antiquated and inaccurate view that the “Orient” was “timeless and unchanging”

(Said 1978; Gershoni et al. 2006:32). Indigenous cultures are no more timeless than the Orient,

despite the Romantic-primitivist notion that they are. Rather, contemporary indigenous cultures

are as embedded in historical contexts as the rest of the world, particularly in a globalized age.

This issue of the politics of narrative and tradition is widespread throughout the

discussion of indigenous religions, shamanism, and the emergent Western “primitivist”

traditions. This is now especially true as more and more people from marginalized cultures and

indigenous backgrounds enter the discussion of traditions. This gives the voiceless the political

clout to determine the narratives of their traditions, but it also runs the risk of amalgamating and

re-colonizing local traditions into a global consciousness of traditions, as is the case with the

New Age. Before the approach of the popularly anticipated year 2012, Robert K. Sitler (2006)

criticizes the consensus among “millennial” New Age enthusiasts for their misappropriation of

Mayan tradition concerning the “Long Count” calendar. According to Sitler, the Mayan calendar

was merely a small part in the traditional Mayan ontology in which time occurs infinitely in

cycles which each span several millennia. As with theosophist Helena Blavatsky’s ontology of

cyclical ages, New Age philosophy understands the universe in terms of cycles. Mayan

civilization’s non-Western and ancient origins further legitimate Mayan status as primordial

wisdom. Thus it is unsurprising that the Mayan calendar became fodder for New Age consumers.

150

Sitler describes how José Argüelles, “the Mexican-American spiritual teacher responsible

for the so-called Harmonic Convergence that took place in mid-August 1987,” brought the

Mayan calendar into New Age, Western consciousness through the internet (2006:25). Argüelles

even sells Mayan calendar merchandise on his official website. However convenient this might

be for New Age enthusiasts and ideologues—and profitable for the latter—it consequently does

little to present accurate information on the indigenous Mayan culture today. Rather, it masks the

reality of the position of indigenous traditions in the world system—a raw good to be exploited

and processed for consumption in the First World. In the instance of the 2012 hype, Silter

explains the impact of globalism on Maya tradition:

Many of the self-proclaimed [New Age] leaders of the 2012 movement have successfully

appropriated this date from an ancient Mayan calendar by explicitly linking themselves to

the living Mayan world. They have done so with the help of a small group of Maya men

who lend an air of indigenous authenticity to their 2012 teachings but who lack a

substantial base in their own cultural heritage. In doing so, 2012 proponents have

transformed belief in the global significance of the December 21 date into a snowballing

phenomenon that no amount of evidence can constrain (p.34).

Carreño (2014) examines the interface of indigenous Peruvian traditions and New Age

enthusiasts, and he finds a rather drastic contrast between the worldviews of the participants in a

certain annual pilgrimage and festival. Basically, whereas the locals came from impoverished

marginal space and went on the pilgrimage in hopes of alleviating the pain of their poverty, the

Euro-American New Agers, he reports, expressed disappointment at the locals’ lack of focus on

spiritual enlightenment. Here, the politics of culture could not be more pronounced as the New

Agers exercise imperialistic power through attending such exotic spiritual retreats:

Their return to nature is launched from particularly privileged positions within the

lifeworlds that have emerged from the modern ways of objectification implicated in the

work of purification. Having taken for granted benefits of being US or European middle

classes, New Age pilgrims seem to be able to disassociate the material means that allow

151

them to be comfortably present in the pilgrimage from their spiritual task of reconnecting

with the spirits of nature (pp.198-99).

Consequently, the New Age domination of the symbolic meaning of the pilgrimage in this case

wrests the narrative from the hands of the indigenous and brushes them off to the side as fossil

tokens whose only purpose is to add to the “authentic” aesthetic for the Westerners. The

pilgrimage symbolizes much more to the locals than a privileged eco/ethno-tourist could ever

know. Similar issues occur with the emergent ayahuasca-tourism in the Amazon in which

traditions of healing and rites of passage of immense importance to the people who occupy the

marginal space of the Amazon, have gradually experienced an increasingly problematic influx

Western tourism since the days of Michael Harner, where educated Westerners make the

expensive journey to the Amazon to have a supposedly authentic experience of the exotic other

(Fotiou 2016).

The salient issue with the neo-shamanic movements under the banners of the New Age,

neo-paganism, and the like, is their origin as “Western” phenomena. They are traditions

reinvented in the confluence of contemporary narratives about pre-Christian, pre-Modern

European culture and, in the wake of globalization, the Western-self looking at a constructed

global indigenous-other. Thus a plethora of local mythologies, folk medicines, healing traditions,

and anything that remotely appears to tap into a nexus of the spiritual and natural worlds, have

found their ways into reconstructed New Age philosophies, Pagan rituals, and the personal

worldviews of educated urbanites. Schnurbein (2003), for example, notes how the Norse neo-

pagans rely upon literature on shamanism to fill in the cracks, so to speak, of a resurrected

religious tradition.

Thus contemporary, globalized shamanism originated in and thrives in the deeper pool of

the politics of culture, the great dialectic of narratives which dictate tradition. In many ways, the

152

evolution of the narrative has turned the noble savage archetype of the indigenous other into the

dominant popular construct of the other. Revisionist history has certainly contributed to the wide

acceptance of the noble indigenous other through the rejection of the noble savage’s Jungian

shadow, the bestial savage, despite sources in history, archaeology, or ethnology which

contradict any binary paradigm. For instance, in North America, the history of scalping has

proven problematic for Western advocates of the “Indian” other as noble savage as well as

American aboriginals’ trying to establish their own voice in the general narrative (Axtell &

Sturtevant 1980). It is true that colonialists offered bounties for scalps, as Axtell and Sturtevant

(1980) make clear. However, this does not necessarily indicate that the practice was introduced

from Europe, as no evidence exists of scalping as a practice in Europe at the same time. Despite

a wealth of evidence to the contrary, those who wish to abjure the native origin of scalping rather

put forward an alternate narrative which paints scalping as a barbaric European practice given to

the Indians, who essentially lost their innocence to European invasion. Oddly enough, Herodotus

provides the lone source for this revisionist history of scalping, as he mentions the Scythian

nomads, hardly a European group in the modern Western sense, as having practiced this custom

of trophy-taking in war thousands of years before the Age of Colonialism (see Hdt. 4.64-66 for

Scythian trophy-taking).

Trophy-taking in warfare was hardly anything novel in the Old or New Worlds (see

Rosaldo 1980; Seeman 2007). The problem lies not in who started scalping first but the politics

of the narrative. If you dig up enough dirt, you could accuse any group of being barbaric, savage,

crude, etc. Instead, look at the ideology any accusation upholds. In the revisionist histories of

indigenous traditions, the ideology usually posits an exotic other constructed as noble savage,

just as colonialist histories justified their own injustices through the dehumanizing of natives.

153

The persistent Rousseau/Hobbes dialectic is thus manifest in the historical process of

globalization. Furthermore, the template of otherness emerges in reaction to the cultural

hegemony (e.g., Westernism, Colonialism, Modernity, etc.) but also as an ideological product of

that same hegemony rather than as a product of the other. Such is the case in the Keesing-Trask

debate (Keesing 1989, 1991; Trask 1991). Feinberg (1994, 1995) notes that the political issues of

tradition, narrative, and indigenous identity have plagued the discipline of anthropology since at

least the 1980s.

As the world has become more intricately connected over the past three decades since the

internet exploded, and since more and more “natives” have become educated and even

contributors to anthropology, critics have questioned anthropologists’ authority in representing

the indigenous other. Moreover, anthropologists’ works are now almost always accessible to the

subject culture, which allows for a new type of ethnographic “peer review.” Thus there is more

native/anthropologist interaction than ever before in the discussion of culture. This has not

always run smoothly, but it does allow for greater indigenous agency and vocalization. The

Keesing-Trask debate is nearly a textbook classic example of this trend currently, yet it is only

one instance and a negative one at that.

Either way, the object of the Trask narrative is to vocalize a constructed other using the

Western template of noble savage. Ironically, in the attempt to convey the perspective of the pre-

contact indigenous group, this silences the indigenous as-self in favor of as-other. This was

Keesing’s main concern with the trend in the Pacific, that the historical context of Western

cultural influence could not be redacted from the current indigenous voice. Rather, native writers

and activists needed to find a way to come to terms with the historical context in the vocalization

of their traditions. Herodotus faced the same postmodern dilemma in his Histories, as classical

154

scholars have noted (Chamberlain 2001). In his attempt to vocalize whole groups of others (i.e.,

barbarians), he ultimately constructs characterizations of otherness which offer uniform, first-

person narratives and paint images of the barbarians as static “we the others.” The barbarian

existed in the minds of the writer and of his Hellenic audience as a pre-constructed mouthpiece

through which Herodotus dictated his histories. The indigenous other operates much the same

today in the invention of shamanism as a world religion. Native subjects, accurately portrayed or

not, add authenticity to tradition in the eyes of Western readers, unfortunately.

As scholarly and popular literature both currently hold, shamanism refers to (or perhaps

symbolizes) the pre-contact religion of the indigenous minority of the world, whether or not the

writers believe it is imaginary or hypothetical at best to an outright literalist interpretation that

shamanism is indeed the universally primordial human religion. Either way, it exists, as of now,

purely in the minds of those educated in Western style schools, whereas the indigenous subjects

of the theory exist independently of the paradigm as self with their own localized contexts and

histories. It is only a very recent development, perhaps towards the end of the twentieth century,

that the indigenous “others” have come to adopt and contribute to the ideological evolution of

the theoretical category of shamanism. Have natives had any voice historically, or have

individuals become idealized? A number of American Indian chiefs have appeared in the form of

half legendary, half historical vocalized characters in the histories of the American Frontier such

as Pontiac in Robert Rogers’s play Ponteach: or the Savages of America (1765). Other

monumental native leaders could be listed for the American region of the globe alone—

Tecumseh, Cornplanter, Bluejacket, Joseph. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Lame

Deer and Vine Deloria, Jr. became the powerful spokesmen of American indigenous traditions.

155

The figure of the indigenous leader as a spiritual and charismatic individual has been

established. The chaos of the early modern frontier of the globe generated a drama in which

heroic figures could appear and unite others towards the action of seizing every advantage in

survival in the unexpected social, environmental, and geopolitical upheaval that was colonialism.

This was nothing new on the globe, only new in scale. It was a process that had been occurring

around the world on smaller scales for millennia. The domestication of the horse on the Eurasian

Steppe had similar consequences in a different set of circumstances (Anthony 2007). The

manifold indigenous culture groups of the prehistoric Americas experienced similar historical

cycles, such as Ohio Valley civilizations in the phases of the Woodland Period (Seeman 2007;

Cook 2012), or the unforeseen consequences of an unintended social experiment that was the

introduction of the horse to historic North American aboriginals (Hämäläinen 2003). The

development of cultural power centers such as cult life and politics of tradition, in addition to

organized martial activities, creates and utilizes chaos for the sake of survival, whether

Midewiwin (Howey & O’Shea 2006) or Sun-Dance (Stover 2001). We will deal with this further

below in the next section, but it is worth mentioning that the cycle also enters a spiritual

dimension in the resulting politics of culture, especially for control over the narrative and for

self-actualization on the part of the indigenous other. Either way, the narrative at times paints a

picture of a spiritual native in the face of an oppressive, unspiritual cultural power.

The occasional token indigenous spiritualist makes his (almost always male) way into the

fore of the scholarly discussion with full authoritative vocalization of his perspective—Black

Elk, Lame Deer, Dorji Banzarov to name a few—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The

end of the twentieth century brought the indigenous into the cultural power structure of academia

where the politics of culture are played out ideologically. The Keesing-Trask debate

156

demonstrates the democratic vocalization the indigenous scholars can wield in the field which

once helped create the ideology of indigenous otherness, especially concerning the invention of

shamanism. Moreover, contemporary indigenous spiritualists are embracing the concept of neo-

shamanism. Thomas DuBois notes that a student of his, a Hmong, was enthused with the

prospect of learning about the supposedly similar shamanism of the Saami people (DuBois

2009:292). That a native of Laos perceived underlying similarities with the religion of European

Arctic natives could say just as much about the globalization of shamanism as it does about any

inherent universal between unrelated traditions. Similarly, in the summer of 2014 I visited a

Curve-Lake Anishinabe elder and keeper of the local lore at Petroglyph Provincial Park, outside

Peterborough, Ontario. A humble man, yet keenly aware of geo-political and environmental

issues, he informed me that a number of indigenous spiritualists from South America had

recently visited and paid homage at his sacred site. I also met a Lakota spiritualist in Kent, Ohio

who not only was educated in psychology but also claimed to be a reincarnated Tibetan.

Nothing is necessarily wrong with these individuals’ views. Rather, these instances

demonstrate the globalization of indigenous identity and tradition. However, these men are also

not fossils of prehistoric culture. They are just as much products of the times as I am. They are

also players in a much larger game in which shamanism has become the proverbial snowball. We

are witnessing a global paradigm shift in which shamanism, as a constructed product of globalist

imperialism, becomes a world religion. What will become of the countless local traditions of

cultural groups around the world bracketed as “indigenous” is unknown. Many will likely profit

from the Western attention given to the exotic other. Many more, as with numerous lost

languages for example, will likely transpire and disappear, or at least become absorbed into the

larger categorical entity of global shamanism. Consequently, as indigenous groups accept the

157

Western-originating idea of shamanism, they also accept as self-identity the Western idea of

otherness, the very thing Keesing criticized native Pacific histories for.

The Indigenous Other

The other is nothing new in human experience, although it appears within different

ontological frameworks cross-culturally. The division between one’s self and the non-self world

outside of self is perhaps the most basic first principle in human epistemology, what Martin

Heidegger calls dasein, or “being-here” (1964:96-7). However, this first-principle of human

consciousness, as Heidegger explains, varies due to one’s own specific experiential contexts.

This becomes manifest in terms of the relationship between the ideology of one’s culture cultural

and social relationships between selves and others. As such, the self/other dichotomy bisects

culturally specific understandings of different groupings from gender to ethnicity. Consequently,

self/other contradistinction has fueled anthropological and philosophical inquiry and perhaps lies

at the very root of anthropology as a discipline which too often studies the interaction between

the academic self and exotic other. Yet is this drive also universally human? If one accepts the

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as viable, one can see how even linguistically the distinction between

first and second-third persons is a psychological and cultural universal, yet it is also malleable to

culturally relative contexts. For example, both a Yukaghir reindeer herder and a German

philosopher view the world in terms of a distinction between self and other, but it is the nature of

that distinction in the relationship between the categories which varies.

158

Ethnographically, and also relevant to the discussion of the people who have served as

subjects of shamanic studies, this is demonstrable in the ontological principles of animism,

totemism, and perspectivism among various indigenous groups, as discussed in the previous

chapter. According to Morten A. Pedersen, totemism among Northern Asian nomadic groups

such as the Halx and the Darxad exhibits a type of structuralistic ontology of binary categories,

or “homologous differentiation” between self and other (2001:417). Following the Lévi-

Straussian distinction between “identities in content” and “identities in form,” Pedersen

essentially proposes that totemism is the mental mapping of formal categories of binary

differences on a bounded grid, i.e., “the difference between Species A and Species B is similar to

the difference between Clan 1 and Clan 2.” Self and other thus fall somewhere within opposing

categories within the ontological grid work and operate on the terms of that specific culture. Self

and other also inhabit fundamental space in animist ontologies albeit in terms of categorical

spaces between which identity is fluid and transient and whose relationships might not be as

structured as totemic categories (Bird-David 1999; Pedersen 2001).

In animistic worldviews, the other and self both exist, but the identities of either might be

swapped depending on the social context between specific instances of self/other interactions.

For instance, Rane Willerslev (2007) demonstrates the sociality of hunting among the Yukaghir

where the categories of self/other meet at and cross the liminal space between hunter and prey.

Although self and other are distinct categories, their meaning depends in this case on the specific

cultural context of hunting in Yukaghir animist ontology. As we discussed in my third chapter,

the supposed division between animism and totemism is one in theory rather than reality, as

elements of both can occur simultaneously within the same culture group. Pedersen finds that

animism and totemism are found throughout North Asia and are not mutually exclusive

159

categories but rather “governing principles” of culturally specific social contexts. Rather, the

division is in the context of socialization between individuals, whether between humans, non-

humans, or human-non-human interactions.

As the social relationship changes, the meaning of self/other does as well. As Pedersen

(2001) and Willerslev (2007) have noted, a Yukaghir hunter’s encounter with the otherness of

the prey incorporates a different sense of self/other interaction in which the perspectives of

hunter and hunted are temporarily swapped until the pull of the hunter’s trigger. Viveiros de

Castro (1998) calls this perspectivism. The relationship of self/other might change depending on

the context, as in the mediation of a Yukaghir healing ceremony for the sick or in funerary

customs. Self/other for the Yukaghir people also means something quite different from the

self/other concept of the Ancient Greeks. Whereas the relationship between a Yukaghir hunter

and a deer as self and other emerges out of immediate subsistence, the relationship between

Hellenic-self and barbarian-other grew out of the complex colonial economies of the Ancient

Greek polis-systems. Pedersen’s theory of the horizontal-versus-vertical social systems of

animism/totemism posits a correlation between self/other ontological categories and the social

context of a particular cultural system. Northern North Asian groups might tend more towards

animistic principles in their socialization of self/other, whereas Southern North Asian groups

tend more towards the totem.

This difference is further intensified as one examines the social relationships between

complex sedentary core civilizations, like the Greek poleis, and peripheral nomadic groups, such

as the Scythians. Outside of the polis, the domain of gods and beasts, the Hellenes imagined man

existed in various degrees of primitive states. The Hyperboreans were the most geographically

removed from the polis and the closest to the gods and the virtues of the Golden Age. Mythical

160

and semi-legendary races of Arimaspians, Pygmies, and Amazons represented the impiety and

strife of the matriarchal Silver Age which followed the fall from the Golden Age. The feral and

warlike peoples near to and often homogenized with the Scythians and other nomadic barbarians

who were quite near to yet outside of the world of the polis represented with variation the chaos

of the Bronze Age and the virtues of the Heroic Age. One might also include the Near Eastern

and Egyptian civilizations connected to but outside of the Greek world as part of the Hellenic

idea of the Bronze and Heroic Ages of man, and even the northern Greeks, especially the groups

who tended towards equestrian traditions such as the Macedonians and Thessalians, often

appeared in ancient art and literature almost as living fossils of the Homeric heroes.

Essentially, otherness in the Greek perspective was constructed upon the polis-premise,

that is, from the perspective of the cultural hegemony of sedentary-agrarian cultural centers and

through a colonial socio-economic system. Barbarians are other because they are outside of the

polis domain. The other is a space which socio-economic and ideological centers generate

systematically. The other is also fictive, a phantasmal product of the civilizational imagination.

Paradoxically, the other is also a concrete reality. In this way, other is a space, a slot, a

category—a hole in Pedersen’s animistic Swiss Cheese—which the interaction of culture-

structure and ecological parameters creates, and which certain individuals or groups occupy or

are pushed into. The exotic barbarian-indigenous-other therefore becomes real through the

structure of civilization.

Despite the ideology of binary difference, however, between Greek and barbarian, the

socio-economic reality was a complex frontier zone, typical of semi-peripheries, the liminal

space between imagined categories where literal exchanges between cultures occurred. Semi-

peripheries themselves become microcosms of the larger core-periphery relationship, and local

161

individuals and groups often find opportunities for growth in power as well as threats from both

core and periphery powers. As Khazanov and DiCosmo have both noted about historical Central

Asian societies, the semi-periphery is an exploitable, volatile frontier. The Chinese civilizations

viewed the fierce nomad cultures on their northern and western frontiers in much the same way

the Greeks viewed the Pontic nomads. Yet it was the semi-peripheral zones where sedentary

protectorate kingdoms emerged to take advantage of increasingly complex systems of trade with

other more distant core cultures, but also where conflicts between Chinese powers and nomadic

confederations took place (e.g., see V. Bartold 1958 on the multitude of small city-states and

kingdoms of Central Asia, such as those of the Tarim Basin, which at times were powers in their

own rights and at other times mere pawns to both core and peripheral powers).

The lands in which Greek colonies flourished were no different. Joseph Skinner makes

clear that the Greek colonies themselves emerged and thrived in regions which were, in

antiquity, fertile and wealthy in agricultural and other natural resources,

…the colonialist assumptions that have at times underpinned narratives of Hellenization

have been countered by recent research stressing both the agency of local indigenous

populations and the extent to which trends in urbanization were already in evidence long

before Greek settlers became firmly established in the region (Skinner 2012:185-6).

Furthermore, I find that this fact fosters a dynamic of power in the relationship between

colonist/indigenous with countless historical analogues. Like the nomads of Central Asia

mentioned above, or the various tribal confederations of Ancient Northern Europe (Haywood

2007) and of Early Historic Eastern Woodlands (Fenton 1998; Bailyn 2012), the Scythians and

Thracians became powerful middlemen who took advantage of the volatile situation that arose

out of the spread of foreign civilizations into their native lands. As demand for northern goods

and slaves grew among the sedentary civilizations of the Near East and Mediterranean, Greek

colonialism and powerful barbarian kingdoms emerged in response to the demand. Perhaps more

162

than any other Pontic tribe at the time, the Scythians seized the advantage of 1) a wealth of

natural resources, 2) political chaos or fluidity among neighboring nomadic and semi-sedentary

groups, and 3) the demand for resources in the south via colonialism. Thus the Scythians

dominated the Pontic scene as barbarians par excellence and at times were able to pose a real

threat to the southern urban centers and colonies. So who is really exploiting whom?

As Skinner (2012:236) notes, ethnographic information in various forms appears in the

Hellenic cultural system along with the rise of colonialism abroad. It is no coincidence that a

dominant ideological template of barbarism with clear Northern-Pontic attributes developed

simultaneously with the rise of colonialism. The idea of the barbarian-other, though malleable to

the political narrative of the Greek-self, perpetuated the demand in the south for the exports of

northern culture, both practically in terms of socio-economic relations of center/periphery and

ideotechnically as self-actualization and domination over a constructed other. Skinner (p.243)

also describes this process as both “self-fashioning” and legitimate curiosity about an exotic

other. This was due to emergent ideological power structures within the political power structure

of the polis which controlled the evolution and flow of the narrative and imagining of the other.

Prominent mystery cults with their own esoteric hierarchies such as Delphi and Eleusis

dominated the politics of narrative therein, although occasional influential individuals generated

rival, vocal “cult” followings as well (e.g., Socrates, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, and perhaps even

Herodotus). Thus the Greek/barbarian construct was the product of the politics of culture.

The indigenous Pontic groups had no voice in the narrative of their barbaric identities,

and any barbarian vocalization was filtered through the Hellenic medium. There was no

Haunani-Kay Trask for the Pontic barbarians to criticize Herodotus’s descriptions of Pontic

cultures, at least to the point that Herodotus and his colleagues would take that person seriously.

163

Herodotus’s descriptive digressions on individual native groups, such as the Massagetai, may

have been more ethnologically sound than Aristeas’s cryptic Arimaspeia, but both operated from

a position of colonial power of Greek-self over barbarian-other. The space of other really is

constructed as a social space and reinforced ideologically through any power structure.

The Roman Empire, for example, emerged as arguably the most dominant socio-political

and socio-economic power structure of the ancient Mediterranean world. Consequently, Roman

civilization created barbarian-other space on its frontiers as it expanded through conquest,

colonialism, and an ever more complex system of trade. As it built upon preexisting sedentary

systems of the European, Mediterranean, North African, Near Eastern, and Pontic-Caspian

worlds, it integrated their cultural systems into a unified system of power with rigid ideas about

the contradistinction between Roman and barbarian societies. Barbarians integrated into the core

as they always have—as slaves—or they were alternately driven to marginal space as the poor on

the fringe or beyond in the realm of gods and beasts.

The mystery cults were the driving ideological producers of barbarian characterizations

through which the power structures understood their encounters with the other. Today

shamanism, in zeitgeist, creates the idea of other-space as the archetypal noble savage, but it also

creates an eschatological goal of returning to the virtues of the primitive as an escape from the

ills of the global power structure. Mystery religions offered the same return to the primitive, but

the “primitive” returned to Rome in the form of barbarian power. The Germans may have at

times appeared as Hyperborean-type groups in Roman traditions at times (See Tacitus’s

Germania), but the Roman civilization, in moral and socio-economic decay, ultimately fell into

the hands of opportunistic barbarian conquests.

164

The nature of the categorical other-slot is dependent on the socio-political agenda and

socio-economic relations of the component dialectical categories of the core/periphery. What this

boils down to is the simple, yet erroneous, idea that native peoples are static fossils of a remote,

imagined past. This was the case with the Hellenic invention of the barbarian and carried over

into the Roman worldview. It was the case with the Orientalist understanding of Islamic and East

Asian civilizations. It was the case with Enlightenment views of colonized natives. It is also

persistent today in a multitude of descriptions of cultures bracketed within the category of

indigenous.

Like shamanism, the category of indigenous is problematic in its lack of clear definition

and politically-charged connotations. A study conducted by Chris Cunningham and Fiona

Stanley basically claims that the term indigenous refers to people around the world who are or

were once in touch with nature and have been negatively impacted by globalization (2003:403).

While they highlight the important fact of the negative effects of globalization, they (almost

laughably) adhere to the idea of the noble savage. The model they present—“the dislocation of

most indigenous peoples from their lands through colonisation has contributed to the effects of

newly introduced diseases on their health”—is problematic in that it is simply misleading. Yes,

countless so-called indigenous groups have been impoverished and alienated through the spread

of colonialism, industrialization, and urbanization, and nowhere is this more evident than in the

field of health. However, following this model, one could make the argument that Appalachia

represents an indigenous culture or cultures, or any of the economically-wrecked old Soviet bloc

countries like Ukraine, Estonia, and Belarus. How about populations in post-colonial Lebanon,

Syria, Iraq, Turkey? Cunningham and Stanley unfortunately present a solution to the indigenous

questions which silences numerous other world cultures affected by the same problems.

165

As indigenous identity is a heated political issue, and given the fact that the United

Nations still cannot agree on a viable definition of the term in their discourse, Jan Hoffman

French (2011) examines the case of indigenous identity in Brazilian law. The main dilemma in

Brazil is whether or not the indigenous category should include groups which claim to have once

been “forest-dwellers,” but through domination by the Catholic Church left their original

lifeways. The politics of the narrative parallel the issue of the Mashpee group in Massachusetts

who have been trying to gain federal recognition as Native Americans for decades. French also

notes the problem of identifying diasporic groups as indigenous. Under the UN understanding of

the term, many African culture groups are excluded, especially those in diaspora. “Diaspora”

implies that certain groups have been geographically transplanted due to socio-economic and

political forces beyond their control. If this is the case, many immigrant groups in the United

States could potentially fall under the category of indigenous. Do we include, for example,

people of Irish and Scotch-Irish descent in the category of indigenous diaspora? Their histories

are similar to other culture groups dispersed throughout the world as a result of colonialism and

globalization. Or do their historical oppressions, which preceded the oppressions of modern

indigenous groups, not carry the same meaning as post-colonial groups in the twenty-first

century? As you can see, the topic of indigenous is entrenched in the politics of culture.

Nevertheless, it should rather be considered in light of how groups are treated as other.

Today, the barbarian-other slot has been made global. Shamanism is certainly not the

cause of the imperialisms of the past centuries, but it has recently effected a global understanding

or consciousness of other-space typified by the category of indigenous peoples. With the way

things are lining up in terms of environmental, socio-economic, and geo-political tensions in a

global age, shamanism might play a role in the next great power and paradigm shift. Indigenous

166

spirituality has already been inspiring political activism among American aboriginal groups, such

as the Anishinabe (Willow 2011). Shamanism as a unified concept of indigenous religion holds

immense political potential to unite indigenous groups worldwide, to rally native groups from

every marginal space under the common identity of otherness in the wake of globalization.

Otherness as alienation has the potential energy to invigorate resistance or reaction to that

alienation. For example, Anders Strindberg and Mats Wärn (2011) note that radical Islam often

gains its momentum through the pent-up frustration and feelings of socio-economic alienation as

other that many Muslims experience in post-colonial countries and as immigrants. The authors

call this theory the “Fanonian Impulse,” that is, “the psychological impact of insurgence and

resistance on the native Self, and the translation of that impact into political currency, tactics, and

strategy” (2011:56). As a world religion, Islam has the ideological clout to unite followers whose

post-colonial experiences are similar, not necessarily through any inherent design in the ideology

itself, but through the macro-context of marginalization and resistance to marginalization which

inspired individuals or groups realize in local, micro-contexts or through corporate, globalist-

sponsored organizations like Al-Qa’ida and ISIL.

Indigenous groups have experienced similar phases of resistance in smaller contexts.

During the multiple Soviet attempts to silence and disempower the indigenous traditions of the

numerous Siberian groups in their country, groups such as the Khanty, for example, rallied

behind individual shaman-figures whose legacies elevated them to hero-status (Leete 2005).

Their reaction to high-handed Soviet policies towards their religions involved unprecedented

mass-sacrifice of animals and captured Bolsheviks. Despite the eventual victory and

establishment of Soviet hegemony over the indigenous populations, shamanism survived among

the Siberian groups and revitalized indigenous populations towards the end of the USSR. After

167

the collapse of the Soviet Union, various Turkic groups of Central Eurasia even successfully

created their own political space in the form of nation-states, and shamanic traditions gave these

groups much of their rallying momentum (although, mineral excavation, especially oil and

natural gas, has also been a significant boon to nations such as Kazakhstan).

In the United States, the issue of indigenous rights gained little ground over the past

century, and groups like the Lakota Sioux have suffered plagues of drug and alcohol addiction

and suicides as they have been brushed off to the fringes of American society. That is not to say

they do not want a voice or are content with their situation. Although the American Indian

Movement (AIM) failed to meet its goals a few decades ago, the cultural pride and longing for

nationhood is alive and well “on the rez” to anyone who has visited (My own visit to Pine Ridge

in 2014 coincided with a waicipi festival which focused on environmental issues and Lakota

identity). The Lakota are but one tiny example of the marginalization of the indigenous other

globally. To illustrate their current dilemma beyond depression, substance abuse, and suicide,

water rights are historically bound up with the politics of culture and attempts of reservation self-

determination.

In 2012, the US department of Agriculture issued a report on the state of a diminishing

aquifer, one of the largest and most important to the agricultural industry. According to this

report, the High Plains Aquifer, which extends into Lakota Sioux territory including Pine Ridge

and Rosebud Reservations, continues to decrease in overall volume due to overdraw for

agricultural irrigation (McGuire et al. 2012). However, the study also shows that in spite of

overdraw, specific parts of the aquifer show an increase in volume. These areas of increase,

small though they are, stand in Lakota territories throughout Bennett, Gregory, Jackson,

Shannon, Todd, and Tripp counties, South Dakota. The authors of this report fail to mention the

168

crucial fact that this is native land. It is true that some of these counties, namely Bennett,

Mellette, Tripp, and Gregory, have technically been disputed territories since 1910. Nevertheless,

the authors of this report have not disclosed exactly where their test wells were located. What we

can glean from their findings, however, is the fact that although the overall volume of the High

Plains Aquifer is diminishing, certain parts of it which fall on Sioux territory are not, and in fact

those parts are actually increasing in volume. That the authors write for a number of government

agencies concerned with the availability of natural resources should say something about their

motives, especially since those agencies, such as the Department of Agriculture, are concerned

first and foremost with the maintenance of the corporate agricultural system. Therefore, I do not

think it is too far-reaching to suggest that the corporate agricultural system will use, or perhaps

already have begun to use, the evidence provided in this report with the intent of utilizing wells

of increasing-volume for irrigation in a world of otherwise diminishing aqua-resources.

Collins (1986:51) shows that Federal policies towards reservation water rights were

constructed out of the narrow prediction that reservations would utilize their watersheds for

agricultural irrigation. This becomes problematic in two ways. First, as Collins points out, the

federal allocation of water rights only takes agricultural irrigation into their calculations and does

not take into account increased water use for economic development for reservations (e.g.,

mining, industry, recreation). Secondly, the federal plan did not take ground water into account

in the legal definitions of reservation water rights. Thus a new battle began to develop with the

tapping of the Oglalla Water Table, which puts further pressure on reservation natural resource

disputes in an already arid region in which “there are politically powerful interests competing

with those of the Indians” (Collins 1986:51). Walker and Williams (1991) and McCool (1993)

demonstrate that American tribes do have the ability to negotiate water rights in the judicial

169

arena when state, federal, and tribal governments are willing to cooperate. If they are not

cooperative, or if the corporate agro-industry manages to gain judicial favor over the rights of the

indigenous, the courts may decide the Ogalla Water Table falls outside the definitions of tribal

water rights.

Furthermore, I predict that this will bring the corporate-state agricultural complex into

conflict with the Lakota Sioux. The Lakota are in danger of falling victim to corporate and state

subterfuge and imperialism as they have historically since their first encounters with Western

expansion. Simply put, the Lakota have been in a marginalized socio-economic position as the

exploited indigenous other. They are victims of the system, both historically and currently. Not

only does the globalist system encroach upon the sacred natural resources the Lakota believe the

Creator gave to them and are, therefore, wakan; the New Age movement encroaches on their

traditions for their own consumption. The globalists monetize the natural world both for agro-

economic and ideo-economic consumption. In this system, the Lakota are typified as the

indigenous other whose resources the hegemon claims. If we are to take anything away from

Strindberg and Warn (2012), especially concerning the role of the Fanonian Impulse theory in

violence as a reaction to marginalization for radical Islamists, we should not rule out the

possibility of a reemergence of armed Lakota resistance to the globalist system, especially given

the history of the Sioux as a warrior-culture. If you throw a pan-indigenous level of organization

like the American Indian Movement into the equation, the localized conflict could find support

with the involvement of other tribes (i.e., AIM) and sympathizers on a national and even global

scale. Could shamanism and the rise in global self-awareness of indigenous peoples provide a

unifying paradigm for indigenous peoples globally? If so, what would spark such unification?

Could the issue of Lakota Sioux water rights do so?

170

Finally, I will add a comment about the politics of academia in light of this issue. The

scientists behind the McGuire report present their findings in a manner which appears objective

in its tone yet knowing quite well the impact this would have on the current discussion of

diminishing resources, especially potable water. Corporate agricultural conglomerates like

Monsanto can read the McGuire report and know that they will have the backing of

governmental policies against the Indians. This current system threatens the Lakota, and the

indigenous category in general, in two ways. First, the system ideologically has advanced the

idea of indigenous peoples as noble savages and exotic others. Whether deliberately or

unintentionally, this ideology has turned the traditions, especially traditions of thought and

religion, into a cultural resource for the First World consumers with little to no attention paid to

the suffering of indigenous peoples. In a way, New Age ideology has opiated the masses to the

second prong of the attack in which the policies of governments in various parts of the world

(including the US) and hegemonic corporate entities economically exploit indigenous groups for

their resources. In some circumstances the indigenous groups are pushed to the farthest

peripheral zones of the world economy, whereas other indigenous groups have been incorporated

into the semi-periphery as laborers of the lowest class in the emerging industrial quarters of the

world system.

In light of the recent events of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline which began in

the spring of 2016, indigenous groups of North America have begun to band together in cultural

resistance to yet another example of consumer-industrialism exploitation of indigenous

resources. The pipeline, proposed to bisect a tract of the headwaters of the Missouri watershed at

Lake Oahe in North Dakota, risks damaging traditional Lakota Sioux burial grounds as well as

the wakan, or sacred, water of the Missouri River. In light of the discussion of Native Water

171

Rights above, the predictions I made concerning indigenous reactions to the fight over water

have the potential to come true. The protests at Standing Rock have drawn together diverse tribes

in indigenous unity as well as a few New Age supporters. As of yet, little violence has occurred

in the faceoff between protestors and “the Man.” If it does, will there be an “Indigenous Spring”

worldwide? As anthropologists, we should also pay very close attention to the rhetoric of both

sides of the debate and what sort of political narratives emerge. Will the Rousseau/Hobbes

debate manifest in this historical occurrence? Will shamanism feature in the discussion? If

Standing Rock amounts to nothing else, which it has not as of the writing of this thesis, it at least

contributes to indigenous self-awareness on a global stage. There will likely be another Standing

Rock elsewhere on this planet eventually. (As of the completion of this thesis, the Standing Rock

protests ended with a few arrests, no major opposition, and little more than media hype and

convenient “hashtags” for college students. The Dakota Access Pipeline is fully operational)

Conclusion

All of anthropology is the study of human history, including history up to the present. We

should tread carefully, however, as we contribute to the discussion of our distant past, so that we

do not perpetuate the ideology of the barbarian other in our discourse, that we do not project the

problems of the present into the past. I agree with David Lowenthal’s assertion that the “past is

the foreign country,” that the politics of the present affect, and at times outright concoct, the

narrative of the past (Lowenthal 1985). Rather than produce any substantial theory on prehistoric

human cultures, scholarship which recapitulates the Rousseau/Hobbes dialectic does an injustice

to both the past and the present. Anthropology may never know what the religious traditions of

172

truly primitive man were. Nonetheless, some scholarship on indigenous religions today, as

discussed in this thesis, have opened a Pandora’s box in that it has projected Enlightenment

views about the “savage,” born out of colonialism ancient and modern, into the discussion of the

past and in turn used those interpretations to further discuss the present.

There may very well have been elements of past cultures which resembled aspects of

Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s envisioned human pasts, but this does not mean that prehistoric

humans were either essentially noble or brutish. Likewise, prehistoric religions, in all their

unknown variations, may have contained elements which Mircea Eliade or R. G. Wasson would

consider shamanic, but the elements of non-shamanic world religions may have been there as

well. We simply cannot know for sure based upon archaeology, ethnology, or history. The point

is, rather, that such scholars use present cultures as static others to explain human history and

then use human history to explain those present cultures. This circular reasoning is a major part

of the problem inherent in the categories of shamanism and indigenous. They are inescapably

other in the present understanding of them.

So where do we go from here? Can academia come to any sort of consensus on what

shamanism is? On what it means to be indigenous? Or have we let the proverbial horse out of the

barn with neo-shamanic movements like the New Age? Can anthropology climb out of the

trenches of the politics of culture which the Keesing-Trask debate illustrates so well? Things

remain to be seen, but I think we should continue paying close attention to the forces at play in

the construction of otherness on a global scale. Serious scholars of the so-called shamanic

traditions, in an effort to attain deeper emic contexts may find themselves lost in the semiotic and

esoteric details of rather dark realms. The line between research and praxis will inevitably

become blurred if it has not already. Are we to become Pythagoras of the New Age?

173

If we should learn anything from the relationship between the barbarian and Hellenic

mystery religion, I would offer a definition of shamanism similar to my description of the

mystery religions. Shamanism (i.e., the Western construct) is really just a modern, urban delight

in imagined aspects of barbarian-indigenous-other cultures which people popularly believe are

virtuous and necessary to celebrate as part of their post-globalized worldview. Like the

mysteries, shamanism is invented based upon the urban perspective of the primitive other.

However, we should also pay close attention to how those other-communities receive this new

colonialist mystery as globalization finishes its course. The end might not be pretty for the

colonialists.

174

Appendix A – Maps (List of Figures)

Figure 1: Northern Pontic

Figure 2: Herodotus’s geography (reconstruction)

175

Figure 3: Scythian world and associated funerary sites

Figure 4: Ethnological map of modern Siberian cultures

176

Figure 5: Hellenic sacred sites and cult centers

Note on Appendix A: All maps with the exception of Figure 4 obtained from public domain,

Wikimedia Commons. Figure 4 comes from M. A. Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia: a Study in

Social Anthropology. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1914). Accessed online at

(https://archive.org/details/aboriginalsiberi00czap).

177

Appendix B – Glossary

Archaic Greece: Between the eighth and fifth centuries BC, Greek culture expanded in maritime

exploration, trade, and colonization, as well as urban planning and literary and artistic

achievements. Due to increased interconnection with the Near East and other parts of the ancient

world, Greek culture went through what some scholars have called a Greek Renaissance due to

the influx of foreign influences. This period comes to a close with Xerxes’s invasion of Greece

in 480

Chthonic: From the Greek khthonios, which refers to the netherworld beneath the surface world.

It is connected with primordial chaos and the Near Eastern mythological concept of the abzu,

rendered in Greek as abyss.

Classical Greece: The period following the Persian Wars of the early fifth century and before

the rise of Alexander the Great at the end of the fourth century BC, a brief epoch of Greek

history but well remembered for the growth in power of the Greek city states, namely Athens and

Sparta, but also for the scholarship, artwork, and plays this period produced.

Cult: A specific type of religious institution which is layered in rigid hierarchies through which

members are initiated through varying degrees of power and obscured knowledge. Cults can take

many forms in different societies which range from official state religions dedicated to a patron

deity, as in Ancient Mesopotamia, to secret societies dedicated to hidden purposes, such as the

Assassins of the Medieval Islamic world. In popular vernacular, “cult” often connotes counter-

culture, strangeness, and controversial charismatic personalities, when in fact most religious

traditions have some aspects of cult-ness.

Cultural Evolution: An anthropological paradigm of human history in which cultures are

supposed to have gone through various stages of development. The standard of measure is

usually the cumulative achievements of the observer’s group, and all other culture groups are

contrasted with that standard. Consequently, the observer supposes that other societies which fall

short of the established standard are living fossils of evolutionary stages which the observer’s

groups already passed through.

Dark Age Greece: A transitional period of Greek history from Bronze Age to Iron Age

technology between the thirteenth and late ninth centuries BC. This period is typified by the

collapse of Mycenaean civilization alongside numerous Near Eastern civilizations, massive

human migrations, and the slow rise of urban centers and reestablishment of maritime trade

networks towards the tenth and ninth centuries.

Enlightenment: a philosophic epistemological theory of the pinnacle of knowledge, Plato’s

ascension out of the Cave. In the period of European history between the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries AD, the Enlightenment refers to the culmination of humanist philosophies

which viewed rationality as the pinnacle of civilization.

178

Entheogen: R. G. Wasson, Carl A. P. Ruck, and others coined this term as a collaborative effort

in the study of mind-altering substances and altered states of consciousness in religious traditions

worldwide and throughout history. It is derived from the Greek phrases, ἔνθεος éntheos, and

γενέσθαι, genésthai, and could be translated to a concept along the lines of “the god coming into

being within,” with clear reference to the religious context for ritual intoxication.

Epistemology: A field of philosophy which seeks to establish a theory of knowledge, that is,

how we know what we know, the process of learning.

Esoteric: Obscured, arcane, or otherwise secret symbolism, the meaning of which can only be

accessed through initiation or revealed knowledge. The esoteric symbols, often hidden in plain

sight, are obscured to the uninitiated public through exoteric symbolism.

Ethnobotany: The study of the folklore and cultural uses of local plants including classification,

what is good and not good to eat, what is medicine and what is poison, other utilitarian uses for

different plants, and stories and songs about certain plants.

Ethnomycology: An anthropological field of study similar to ethnobotany but which focuses on

fungi instead of plants.

Exoteric: The converse of esoteric symbolism where the immediate meaning is available to the

uninitiated public. When multiple layers of meaning are involved, the exoteric masks the

esoteric.

Grave Goods: A technical archaeological term that refers to material culture interred in a

funerary context with the dead. These kinds of artifacts can tell archaeologists much about a

given culture from economic and social systems to mortuary myth-religious beliefs.

Historiography: A technical historian’s term that refers to the method and process of delineating

the genealogy of discussion and theories about a specific historical topic or question in order to

explain how the scholarship has arrived at its current state on said issue, what the strengths and

weaknesses are of the various arguments and paradigms, and the direction the investigator hopes

his or her study will take in the field.

Ionia: The area of the Ancient Greek world in Western Anatolia which was often thought of as

semi-Orientalized due to its close ties to the various Near Eastern cultures, which began the first

major phase of colonization in Greek history, and which produced a wealth of art and scholarship

to rival that of Athens.

Khan, khanate: A Turkic word which referred to the concept of ruling power among various

nomadic kingdoms of the Eurasian Steppe, most famously the Mongols. Although the term itself

is Turkic in origin, this type of ruling power was typical among most of the equestrian nomadic

groups of this vast region well before the ethnogenesis of the Turks, and the Royal Scythians

likely had their own colloquial word to describe the same phenomenon. Khanate refers to the

realm which the Khan rules over.

179

Marxism: A widely variant paradigm or group of loosely associated paradigms which theorize

human history as driven not by ideology but by the modes of production and social structure of a

given society. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels later borrowed much of their presuppositions

about history and civilization from the cultural evolution school of thought and the work of

Lewis Henry Morgan.

Mycenaean Greece: The period of Greek history from roughly the seventeenth to the thirteenth

centuries BC in which Indo-European Greek-speakers from the north settled in Greece. Given

that the later Archaic poets and artists Romanticized the Mycenaean period and used it as the

setting for the epics, some have referred to this as Hesiod’s Heroic Age.

Mystery religion: A specific type of cultic religious tradition typified by a rigid hierarchy and

access to power and hidden knowledge. Mysteries themselves were dedicated to specific cultural

functions in a given society, such as agricultural or pastoral fertility, motherhood, divine oracles,

rites of passage, or the balance of order between civilized and uncivilized. Given the levels of

initiation coupled with their role in public ritual, mystery religions monopolized the allocation of

esoteric and exoteric meanings in ritually prescribed myths and ceremonies. Mysticism, although

given the popular definition of direct spiritual experiences with the divine, refers to the

mysteries, as the initiate receives the spiritual revelation of what was hidden.

Mythology and myth: A specific type of story which is entirely enmeshed with the cultural

dimension in that it provides the rational framework for one or more parts of a cultural structure,

schema such as geography, cosmology, kinship and marriage systems, economy, and so forth,

and explains their origin. Myths also occur (or occurred) in conjunction with culturally specific

traditions of ceremony, magic, and ritual, to which they give meaning within the rationale.

Mythopoeic: Descriptive of cultures whose dominant ontology is provided through the

generation of traditions of myth, as described above.

Ontology: Philosophic concept which refers to the human understanding of what exists.

Although this propensity of the human mind is universal, the world-which-exists assumes

culturally-specific shapes, often radically different from tradition to tradition.

Orientalism: A particular flavor of Romanticism which forms a narrow, essentialist view of the

vaguely-defined “Orient” or “East” in which the ancient civilizations are glorified and the

modern inhabitants cast as living artifacts or fossils of the once great cultures.

Other: The binary opposite of Self. In the field of anthropology, the Other is typically the

inhabitant of any kind of marginal space (geographic, social, or otherwise), and is phenomenally

constructed as such from the perspective of the “civilized” Self. Consequently, the Other is often

the subject of ethnographic investigation where the anthropologist is Self.

Pontic-Caspian: A geographic region of the Eurasian Steppe and outlying woodland, coastal,

and mountain zones between the Black and Caspian Seas to the south and the Ural Mountains to

the North which roughly covers modern Ukraine, parts of Southern Russia, and Western

Kazakhstan.

180

Prelapsarian: A romantic term which refers to “before the fall,” the supposed era of grace

before the rise of civilization, often coupled with the concept of the noble savage.

Primitivism: A Romantic school of thought which places the utmost value on the noble savage

as the primordial state of humankind.

Religion: A general cultural phenomenon which encompasses the belief in the spiritual and the

specific tradition(s) a particular group attaches to a shared spiritual experience.

Romanticism: A nineteenth century reactionary school of thought which emphasized the

essence of something, such as national identity, as in its origin with the emphasis of any inquiry

or meditation placed in the deepest of antiquity, real or imagined.

181

Appendix C: List of Classical Literary References with Associated Abbreviations

Archilochus

Fragments (Arch. Fr.).

Aristophanes

Acharnians (Aristoph. Ach.).

Birds (Aristoph. Birds).

Ecclesiazusae (Aristoph. Eccl.).

Knights (Aristoph. Kn.).

Thesmophoriazusae (Aristoph. Thes.).

Aristotle

Politics (Aristot. Pol.).

Athenaeus

(Ath.).

Callimachus

Hymn 3 to Artemis (Call. H. 3).

Diogenes Laertius

Lives of Eminent Philosophers (D. L.).

Euripides

Baccahai (Eur. Ba.).

Herodotus

Histories (Hdt.).

Hesiod

Catalogues of Women (Hes. CW.).

Works and Days (Hes. WD.).

Homer.

Homeric Hymn 7 to Dionysos (HH 7).

Illiad (Hom. Il.).

Odyssey (Hom. Od.).

Inscriptiones Gracae I3 421, col. I (Inscr. Gr. I3 421.1).

Mnaseas

Fragment 24 (Mn. Fr.)

Ovid

Metamorphoses (Ov. Met.).

Pausanias

Description of Greece (Paus.).

Philostratus

Imagines (Philostr. Maj. Im.).

Pindar

Olympian Ode (Pind. O.).

182

Pythian Ode (Pind. P.).

Plato

Charmides (Plat. Charm.).

Cratylus (Plat. Crat.).

Laws (Plat. Laws).

Phaedo (Plat. Phaedo).

Republic (Plat. Rep.).

Plutarch

De Defectu Oraculorum (Plut. De Defect.).

Life of Alexander (Plut. Alex.).

Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debeat (Plut. Adolescens).

Pseudo-Apollodorus

Bibliotheca (Apollod.).

Strabo

Geography (Strab.).

Suidas

(Suidas)

Tacitus

Acricola (Tac. Ag.)

Germania (Tac. Ger.).

183

References

Allan, Sarah

1981 Sons of Suns: Myth and Totemism in Early China. Bulletin of the School of

Oriental and African Studies, University of London 44(2):290-326.

Amitai-Preiss, Reuven

1999 Sufis and Shamans: Some Remarks on the Islamization of the Mongols in the

Ilkhanate. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42(1):27-46.

Anthony, David W.

2007 The Horse the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian

Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Atkinson, Jane Monnig

1992 Shamanisms Today. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:307-330.

Axtell, James and William C. Sturtevant

1980 The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping. The William and Mary Quarterly

37(3):451-472.

Bäbler, Balbina

2005 Bobbies or Boobies? The Scythian Police Force in Classical. In Scythians and

Greeks: Cultural Interaction in Scythia, Athens and the Early Roman Empire (Sixth

Century BC - First Century AD). David Braund, ed. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Bachoffen, J. J.

1863 Der Bär in den Religionen des Altertums. Basel, Switzerland: Meyri.

Bailyn, Bernard

2012 The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of

Civilizations, 1600-1675. New York: Random House, Inc.

184

Barsh, Russell Lawrence

1988 Contemporary Marxist Theory and Native American Reality. American Indian

Quarterly 12(3):187-211.

Bartold, Vasily

1958 Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion. London: Lowe & Brydone Ltd.

(Original: 1900).

Benedict, Ruth

1923 The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America. Memoirs of American

Anthropological Association 29:1-97.

Bevan, Elinor

1987 The Goddess Artemis, and the Dedication of Bears in Sanctuaries. The Annual of

the British School at Athens 82:17-21.

Binford, Lewis R.

1962 Archaeology as Anthropology. American Antiquity 28(2):217-225.

Bira, Sh.

2004 Mongolian Tenggerism and Modern Globalism. A Retrospective Outlook on

Globalisation. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Third Series 14(1):3-12.

Bird-David, Nurit

1999 “Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.

Current Anthropology 40:67-91.

Blok, J. H.

1995 The Early Amazons: Modern and Ancient Perspectives on a Persistent Myth.

Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill.

Bloomer, W. Martin

1993 The Superlative ‘Nomoi’ of Herodotus’ ‘Histories.’ Classical Antiquity 12(1):30-

50.

Blundell, Sue

185

1995 Women in Ancient Greece. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Boas, Franz

1989 The Aims of Ethnology. In A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American

Anthropology, 1883-1911. George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. Pp. 67-72. Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press.

Boekhoven, Jeroen W.

2011 Genealogies of Shamanism: Struggles for Power, Charisma and Authority.

Groningen, Netherlands: Barkhuis.

Bøgh, Birgitte

2007 The Phrygian Background of Kybele. Numen 54(3):304-339.

Bolton, J. D. P.

1962 Aristeas of Proconnesus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Braund, David, ed.

2005 Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interaction in Scythia, Athens and the Early

Roman Empire (Sixth Century BC - First Century AD). Exeter: University of Exeter

Press.

Braund, David

2006 In Search of the Creator of Athens' Scythian Archer-Police: Speusis and the

“Eurymedon Vase.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 156:109-113.

Braund, David and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds.

2007 Classical Olbia and the Scythian World: From the Sixth Century BC to the

Second Century AD. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bremmer, Jan M.

1983 The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bridgman, Timothy P.

2005 Hyperboreans: Myth and History in Celtic-Hellenic Contacts. New York:

Routledge.

186

Brown, A. S.

1998 From the Golden Age to the Isles of the Blest. Mnemosyne 51(4):385-410.

Brown, Christopher G.

2011 To the Ends of the Earth: Sappho on Tithonis. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und

Epigraphik 178:21-25.

Brown, James A.

1997 The Archaeology of Ancient Religion in the Eastern Woodlands. Annual Review

of Anthropology 26:465-85.

Bruyako, Igor V. and Anatolii S. Ostroverkhov

2004 New Finds from the Pre-Scythian Period on the Shores of the Dniester Liman

(North-West Pontic Region). Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia: An

International Journal of Comparative Studies in History and Archaeology 10(3-4):185-

197.

Burridge, K. O. L.

2013 Levi-Strauss and Myth. In The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism. Edmund

Leach, ed. London: Routledge. (Original: 1967).

Carpenter, Rhys

1946 Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Carozzi, Maria Julia

2004 Ready to Move Along: The Sacralization of Disembedding in the New Age

Movement and the Alternative Circuit in Buenos Aires. Civilisations 51(1/2):139-154.

Carreño, Guillermo Salas

2014 The Glacier, the Rock, the Image: Emotional Experience and Semiotic Diversity

at the Quyllurit’i Pilgrimage (Cuzco, Peru). Signs and Society 2(1):188-214.

Casson, Stanley

1920 The Hyperboreans. The Classical Review 34(1/2):1-3.

187

Chagnon, Napoleon A.

2013 Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the

Anthropologists. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Chamberlain, David

2001 ‘We the Others’: Interpretive Community and Plural Voice in Herodotus.

Classical Antiquity 20(1):5-34.

Childe, V. Gordon

1970 The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins. New York: Knopf. (Original:

1926).

Clinton, Kevin

1974 The Sacred Officials of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Transactions of the American

Philosophical Society 64(3):1-143.

2004 Epiphany in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Illinois Classical Studies 29:85-109.

Cole, Susan Guettel

1984 The Social Function of Rituals of Maturation: The Koureion and the Arkteia.

Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 55:233-44.

Collins, Richard B.

1986 Indian Reservation Water Rights. Journal (American Water Works Association)

78(10):48-54.

Colson, Alicia J. M.

2007 What Do These Symbols Mean? A Critical Review of the Images Found on the

Rocks of the Canadian Shield With Specific Reference to the Pictographs of the Lake of

the Woods. Revista de Arqueología Americana 25:101-85.

Cook, Robert A.

2012 Dogs of War: Potential Social Institutions of Conflict, Healing, and Death in a

Fort Ancient Village. American Antiquity 77(3):498-523.

Cunningham, Chris and Fiona Stanley

188

2003 Indigenous By Definition, Experience, Or World View: Links Between People,

Their Land, And Culture Need To Be Acknowledged. BMJ: British Medical Journal

327(7412):403-404.

De Boer, J. Z., J. R. Hale, and J. Chanton

2001 New Evidence for the Geological Origins of the Ancient Delphic Oracle (Greece).

Geology 29(8):707-710.

Deloria, Jr., Vine

1988 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan.

(Original: 1969).

Demand, Nancy

2006 A History of Ancient Greece in its Mediterranean Context. 2nd ed. Cornwall-on-

Hudson, NY: Sloan Publishing.

Dickie, Matthew W.

2003 Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World. New York: Routledge.

Di Cosmo, Nicola

1994 Ancient Inner Asian Nomads: Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in

Chinese History. Journal of Asian Studies 53(4):1092-1126.

Dilke, O. A. W.

1984 Geographical Perceptions of the North in Pomponius Mela and Ptolemy. Arctic

37(4):347-351.

Dillery, John

1998 Hecataeus of Abdera: Hyperboreans, Egypt, and the “interpretatio Graeca.”

Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 47(3):255-275.

2005 Greek Sacred History. The American Journal of Philology 126(4):505-526.

Dimitrova, Nora M.

2008 Theoroi and Initiates in Samothrace. Hesperia Supplements 37:III-XVI, 1-7, 9-49,

51-75, 77-249, 251-255, 257-267, 269-280.

Dodds, E. R.

189

1951 The Greeks and the Irrational. London: University of California Press, Ltd.

Dole, Arthur A.

1993 Some Conceptions of the New Age. Journal of Religion and Health 32(4):261-

276.

Drews, Robert

1988 The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near

East. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

DuBois, Page

1991 Centaurs & Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being.

Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

DuBois, Thomas A.

2009 An Introduction to Shamanism. Cambridge University Press.

Edmonds III, Radcliffe G.

2006 To Sit in Solemn Silence? “Thronosis” in Ritual, Myth, and Iconography. The

American Journal of Philology 127(3):347-366.

Eliade, Mircea

1959 The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition. Daedalus 88(2):255-67.

1972 Zalmoxis, the Vanishing God: Comparative Studies in the Religion and Folklore

of Dacia and Eastern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

2004 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University

Press. (Original: 1964).

Elkin, A. P.

1945 Aboriginal Men of High Degree. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Ellis, Larry.

1993 Trickster Shaman of the Liminal. Studies in American Indian Literature 5(4):55-

68.

190

Englund, Harri

2002 Ethnography after Globalism: Migration and Emplacement in Malawi. American

Ethnologist 29(2):261-286.

Emerson, Thomas E.

2003 Materializing Cahokia Shamans. Southeastern Archaeology 22(2):135-154.

Evans, Nancy A.

2002 Sanctuaries, Sacrifices, and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Numen 49(3):227-254.

2006 Diotima and Demeter as Mystagogues in Plato's Symposium. Hypatia 21(2):1-27.

Farkas, Ann E.

1981 Style and Subject Matter in Native Thracian Art. Metropolitan Museum Journal

16:33-48.

Farnell, Lewis Richard

1907 The Cults of the Greek City States, Vol. 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Feest, Christian F.

2007 Europe’s Indians. In The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Governmental

Policies. Edited by James A. Clifton. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction

Publishers. Pp. 313-332.

Feinberg, Richard

1994 Contested Worlds: The Politics of Culture and the Politics of Anthropology.

Anthropology and Humanism 19(1):20-35.

1995 Introduction: Politics of Culture in the Pacific Islands. Ethnology 34(2):91–98.

Fenton, William Nelson

1998 The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois

Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Flaherty, Gloria

1992 Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

191

Fol, Alexander, and Ivan Marazov.

1977 Thrace & The Thracians. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Fontenrose, Joseph

1959 Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

1978 The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Fotiou, Evgenia

2016 The Globalization of Ayahuasca Shamanism and the Erasure of Indigenous

Shamanism. Anthropology of Consciousness 27(2):151-179.

Fowler, Robert L.

1995 Greek Magic, Greek Religion. Illinois Classical Studies 20:1-22.

Fox, Robin

1967 Kinship and Marriage. Baltimore: Penguin Books.

Frachetti, Michael D.

2012 Multiregional Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism and Nonuniform Institutional

Complexity Across Eurasia. Current Anthropology 53(1):2-38.

French, Jan Hoffman

2011 The Power of Definition: Brazil's Contribution to Universal Concepts of

Indigeneity. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18(1): 241-261.

Gavrilyuk, N. A.

2007 Social and Economic Issues in the Development of Steppe Scythia. In Classical

Olbia and the Scythian World: From the Sixth Century BC to the Second Century AD.

Braund, David and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Geoffroy, Éric

2010 Introduction to Sufism: The Inner Path of Islam. Translated by Roger Gaetani.

Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, Inc.

192

Germonpré, Mietje and Riku Hämäläinen

1997 Fossil Bear Bones in the Belgian Upper Paleolithic: The Possibility of a Proto

Bear Ceremonialism. Arctic Anthropology 44(2):1-30.

Gershoni, Israel, Amy Singer, and Y . Hakan Erdem, eds.

2006 Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century. Seattle:

University of Washington Press.

Gimbutas, Marija

1974 The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 7000-3500: Myths, Legends, Cult

Images. London: Thames and Hudson.

Graf, F.

1984 Women, War, and Warlike Divinities. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

55:245-254.

Granholm, Kennet

2011 “Sons of Northern Darkness”: Heathen Influences in Black Metal and Neofolk

Music. Numen 58(4):514-544.

Granzberg, Gary

1989 From Ritual to Theatre in a Northern Manitoba Cree Community. Anthropologica

31(1):103-119.

Hallowell, A. I.

1926 Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere. American Anthropologist

28(1):1-175.

Hämäläinen, Pekka

2003 The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures. The Journal of American

History 90(3):833-862.

Handler, Richard and Jocelyn Linnekin

1984 Tradition, Genuine or Spurious. Journal of American Folklore 97(385):273-290.

Harjo, Suzan Shown

193

2004 American Indian Religious Freedom Act after Twenty-Five Years: An

Introduction. Wicazo Sa Review 19(2):129-136.

Harner, Michael

1962 Jívaro Souls. American Anthropologist 64(2):258-272.

1980 The Way of the Shaman: a Guide to Power and Healing. New York: Harper

Collins Publishers.

1996 Concluding Discussion: The Anthropologist as Healer. Anthropological Quarterly

69(3) Healing and the Body Politic: Dilemmas of Doctoring in Ethnographic

Fieldwork:162-164.

Hartog, François

1988 The Mirror of Herodotus: the Representation of the Other in the Writing of

History. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2001 Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet

Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harrison, Thomas, ed.

2002 Greeks and Barbarians. New York: Routledge.

Haywood, John

2007 Dark Age Naval Power: A Re-Assessment of Frankish and Anglo-Saxon

Seafaring Activity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hedden, Mark

2002 Contact Period Petroglyphs in Machias Bay, Maine. Archaeology of Eastern

North America 30:1-20.

Heidegger, Martin

1964 Being and Time. translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New

York: SCM Press Ltd. (Original: 1927).

Heissig, Walther

1980 The Religions of Mongolia. Translated by Geoffrey Samuel. Berkley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press.

194

1990 New Material on East Mongolian Shamanism. Asian Folklore Studies 49(2):223-

33.

Herdt, Gilbert H.

1977 The Shaman’s “Calling” among the Sambia of New Guinea. Journal de la Société

des Océaniste 33(56):153-167.

Hobsbawm, E. J.

1983 Introduction: Inventing Traditions. In The Invention of Tradition. E. J.

Hobsbawm, & Terence Ranger, eds. Pp.1-14. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hoffmann, Herbert

1989 The Iconography of Death/Rebirth in Three Cups by the Sotades Painter. RES:

Anthropology and Aesthetics 17/18:68-88.

Holland, Leicester B.

1933 The Manic Mechanism at Delphi. American Journal of Archaeology 37:201-214.

Howey, Meghan C. L. and John M. O’Shea

2006 Bear’s Journey and the Study of Ritual in Archaeology. American Antiquity

71(2):261-282.

Hunt, Peter

1998 Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Hussman, Geraldine Celine

1976 Nomadic and Early Chinese Art: Correlations. Master’s Thesis. California State

University, Northridge.

Ivakhiv, Adrian

2005 In Search of Deeper Identities Neopaganism and “Native Faith” in Contemporary

Ukraine. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 8(3):7-38.

Janiger, Oscar and Marlene Dobkin de Rios

1976 Nicotiana an Hallucinogen? Economic Botany 30(3):295-297.

195

Jila, Namu

2006 Myths and Traditional Beliefs about the Wolf and the Crow in Central Asia:

Examples from the Turkic Wu-Sun and the Mongols. Asian Folklore Studies 65(2):161-

177.

Johnson, Frederick

1943 Notes on Micmac Shamanism. Primitive Man 16(3/4):53-80.

Jolly, Pieter

2005 On the Definition of Shamanism. Current Anthropology 46(1):127-128.

Jonaitis, Aldona

1983 Liminality and Incorporation in the Art of the Tlingit Shaman. American Indian

Quarterly 7(3):41-68.

Katz, Richard

1982 Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari !Kung. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press.

Khazanov, Anatoly

1984 Nomads and the Outside World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Keesing, Roger M.

1982 Kwaio Religion: The Living and the Dead in a Solomon Island Society. New

York: Columbia University Press.

1989 Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific. The

Contemporary Pacific 1(1/2):19-42.

1991 Reply to Trask. The Contemporary Pacific 3:168-171.

Kehoe, Alice

1996 Eliade and Hultkrantz: The European Primitivism Tradition. American Indian

Quarterly 20(3/4):377-92.

2000 Shamans and Religion. Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc.

196

2007 Primal Gaia: Primitivists and Plastic Medicine Men. In The Invented Indian:

Cultural Fictions and Governmental Policies. Edited by James A. Clifton. New

Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.

Kradin, Nikolay N.

2002 Nomads, Evolution and World-Systems: Pastoral Societies in Theories of

Historical Development. Journal of World Systems Research 8(3):368-388.

2006 Cultural Complexity of Pastoral Nomads. World Cultures 15(2):171-189.

La Barre, Weston

1970a Old and New World Narcotics: A Statistical Question and an Ethnological Reply.

Economic Botany 24(1):73-80.

1970b The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion. New York: Delta.

Lateiner, Donald

1981 Flowers in the Blood: the Story of Opium. New York: Franklin Watts.

1990 Deceptions and Delusions in Herodotus. Classical Antiquity 9(2):230-246.

Latimer, Dean, and Jeff Goldberg.

Lattimore, Owen

1979 Herders, Farmers, Urban Culture. L’Equipe écologie et anthropologie des

sociétés, ed., Pastoral Production and Society, Proceedings of the International Meeting

on Nomadic Pastoralism, Paris 1-3. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Laufer, Bertold

1917 Origin of the Word Shaman. American Anthropologist 19:361-371.

Layard, J. W.

1930 Shamanism: an Analysis Based on Comparison with the Flying Tricksters of

Malakula. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 60:525-550.

Leete, Art

2005 Religious Revival as Reaction to the Hegemonization of Power in Siberia in the

1920s to 1940s. Asian Folklore Studies 64(2):233-245.

Lenik, Edward J.

197

2010 Mythic Creatures: Serpents, Dragons, and Sea Monsters in Northeastern Rock

Art. Archaeology of Eastern North America 38:17-37.

Leypunskaya, N. A.

2007 Olbian-Scythian Trade: Exchange Issues in the Sixth to fourth Centuries BC. In

Classical Olbia and the Scythian World: From the Sixth Century BC to the Second

Century AD. Braund, David and S. D. Kryzhitskiy, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, David Rich

1995 Native Americans and the Environment: A Survey of Twentieth-Century Issues.

American Indian Quarterly 19(3):423-450.

Lewis-Williams, J. David

2001 Southern African Shamanistic Rock-Art in its Social and Cognitive Contexts. In

The Archaeology of Shamanism. Ed. Neil Price. New York and London: Routledge. Pp.

17-42.

Leventi, Iphigeneia

2007 The Mondragone Relief Revisited: Eleusinian Cult Iconography in Campania.

Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 76(1):107-

141.

Levin, Harry

1969 The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance. Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude

1950 Race and History. Paris: UNESCO.

1963 Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.

1966 The Savage Mind. Translated by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

1967 The Story of Asdiwal. In The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism.

Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable Ltd. Pp. 1-47.

Liberty, Margot P.

198

1970 Priest and Shaman on the Plains: A False Dichotomy? Plains Anthropologist

15(48):73-9.

Lindebaum, Shirley

2013 Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinean Highlands. Second

Edition. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.

Linebaugh, Troy M.

2013 Gods, Beasts, and the Polis: the Element of Pastoral Nomadism in the Ancient

Greek Concept of the Barbarian. M.A. Thesis, Department of History, Slippery Rock

University, Pennsylvania.

Littleton, Scott C.

1986 The Pneuma Enthusiastikon: On the Possibility of Hallucinogenic “Vapors” at

Delphi and Dodona. Ethos 14(1):76-91.

Liu, Xinru

2001 Migration and Settlement of the Yuezhi-Kushan: Interaction and Interdependence

of Nomadic and Sedentary Societies. Journal of World History 12(2):261-292.

Loehr, Max

1955 The Stag Image in Scythia and the Far East. Archives of the Chinese Art Society

of America 9:63-76.

Loomis, William T.

1995 Eleusinian Inscriptions: Three Emendations. Hesperia: The Journal of the

American School of Classical Studies at Athens 64(1):131-134.

Lowenthal, David

1985 The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lowy, Richard F.

1998 Development Theory, Globalism, and the New World Order: The Need for a

Postmodern, Antiracist, and Multicultural Critique. Journal of Black Studies 28(5):594-

615.

Lovejoy, Arthur O., and George Boas

199

1965 Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. New York: Octagon Books.

Lymer, Kenneth

2004 Rags and Rock Art: The Landscapes of Holy Site Pilgrimage in the Republic of

Kazakhstan. World Archaeology 36(1):158-172.

Macurdy, Grace Harriet

1916 The Hyperboreans. The Classical Review 30(7):180-183.

1920 The Hyperboreans Again, Abaris and Helixoia. The Classical Review

34(7/8):137-141.

Malashev, Vladimir Yu. And Leonid T. Yablonsky

2004 Early Nomads in the Southern Foothills of the Urals Based on Materials from the

Pokrovka Burial-Ground. Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia: An International

Journal of Comparative Studies in History and Archaeology 10(3-4):259-291.

Malinowski, Bronislaw

1931 The Role of Magic and Religion. In Culture. Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.

Seligman and Johnson, eds. Macmillan Publishing Co. Pp. 37-46.

Mallory, J. P. and Victor H. Mair

2000 The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples

from the West. London: Thames & Hudson.

Marrett, R. R.

1909 The Threshold of Religion. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd.

Marx, Karl

1969 Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy. In Nineteenth-Century

Philosophy. Readings in the History of Philosophy Series. London: Collier Macmillan

Publishers. Gardiner, Patrick, ed. Pp. 263-272. (Original: 1844).

1969 Ideology in General, German Ideology in Particular. Nineteenth-Century

Philosophy. Readings in the History of Philosophy Series. London: Collier Macmillan

Publishers. Gardiner, Patrick, ed. Pp. 284-288. (Original: 1846).

McClenon, James

200

1997 Shamanic Healing, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion. Journal for the

Scientific Study of Religion 36(3):345-54.

McCool, Daniel

1993 Intergovernmental Conflict and Indian Water Rights: An Assessment of

Negotiated Settlements. Publius 23(1):85-101.

McGuire, Virginia L.; Kris D. Lund; Brenda K. Densmore

2012 Saturated Thickness and Water in Storage in the High Plains Aquifer, 2009, and

Water-Level Changes and Changes in Water in Storage in the High Plains Aquifer, 1980

to 1995, 1995 to 2000, 2000 to 2005, and 2005 to 2009. Scientific Investigations Report,

U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Geological Survey, Prepared in cooperation

with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm Service Agency, pp. 1-28.

Mears, Daniel P., and Christopher G. Ellison

2000 Who Buys New Age Materials? Exploring Sociodemographic, Religious,

Network, and Contextual Correlates of New Age Consumption. Sociology of Religion

61(3):289-313.

Merlin, M. D.

2003 Archaeological Evidence for the Tradition of Psychoactive Plant Use in the Old

World. Economic Botany 57(3):295-323.

Meuli, Karl.

1935 Scythica. Hermes 70:121-176.

Minns, E. H.

1911 Scythians and Greeks: A Survey of Ancient History and Archaeology on the

North Coast of the Euxine from the Danube to the Caucasus. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Morgan, Lewis Henry

1881 Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines. Washington: Government

Printing Office.

1907 Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery

through Barbarism to Civilization. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Mundkur, Balaji

201

1984 The Bicephalous “Animal Style” in Northern Eurasian Religious Art and Its

Western Hemispheric Analogues [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology

25(4):451-482.

Mylonas, George E.

1947 Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Classical Journal 43(3):130-146.

Noll, Richard

1985 Mental Imagery Cultivation as a Cultural Phenomenon: The Role of Visions in

Shamanism. Current Anthropology 26(4):443-461.

Pavesic, Max G.

2000 Prehistoric Pipes from the Olds Ferry Dunes Site (10-WN-557), Western Idaho.

Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 22(2):321-331.

Pedersen, Morten A.

2001 Totemism, Animism and North Asian Indigenous Ontologies. Journal of the

Royal Anthropological Institute 7(3):411-427.

Piccardi, Luigi, Cassandra Monti, Orlando Vaselli, Franco Tassi, and Kalliopi Gaki-

Papanastassiou

2008 Scent of a Myth: Tectonics, Geochemistry and Geomythology at Delphi (Greece).

Journal of the Geological Society 165:5-18.

Pinney, Gloria F.

1984 For the Heroes Are at Hand. Journal of Hellenic Studies 104:81-183.

Pochettino, M. L., A. R. Cortella and M. Ruiz

1999 Hallucinogenic Snuff from Northwestern Argentina: Microscopical Identification

of Anadenanthera colubrina var. cebil (Fabaceae) in Powdered Archaeological Material.

Economic Botany 53(2):127-132.

Porterfield, Amanda

1987 Shamanism: A Psychosocial Definition. Journal of the American Academy of

Religion 55(4):721-39.

Price, Neil, ed.

202

2001 The Archaeology of Shamanism. London and New York: Routledge.

Prince, Ruth, and David Riches

1999 Back to the Future: the New Age Movement and Hunter-Gatherers. Anthropos

94(1/3):107-120.

Psarras, Sophia-Karin

2003 Han and Xiongnu: A Reexamination of Cultural and Political Relations.

Monumenta Serica 51:55-236.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.

1926 The Rainbow-Serpent Myth of Australia. The Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 56:19-25.

1929 Notes on Totemism in Eastern Australia. The Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 59:399-415.

Raeck, Wulf

1981 Zum Barbarenbild in der Kunst Athens im 6 und 5. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Bonn,

Germany: R. Habelt.

Redfield, James

2002 Herodotus the Tourist. Thomas Harrison, ed. In Greeks and Barbarians. New

York: Routledge. Pp. 24-49.

Renfrew, Jane M.

1973 Paleoethnobotany: The Prehistoric Food Plants of the Near East and Europe. New

York: Columbia University Press.

Rice, Tamara Talbot

1961 The Scythians. London: Thames & Hudson.

Rigoglioso, Marguerite

2005 Persephone’s Sacred Lake and the Ancient Female Mystery Religion in the

Womb of Sicily. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21(2):5-29.

Ring, Merrill.

203

1987 Beginning With the Pre-Socratics. California: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Robbins, Emmet

1982 Heracles, the Hyperboreans, and the Hind: Pindar, “OL.” 3. Phoenix 36(4):295-

305.

Roller, Lynn E.

1983 The Legend of Midas. Classical Antiquity 2(2):299-313.

Romm, James S.

1992 The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rosaldo, Renato

1980 Ilongot Headhunting: 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History. Stanford:

Stanford University Press.

Rountree, Kathryn

2007 Archaeologists and Goddess Feminists at Çatalhöyük: An Experiment in

Multivocality. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 23(2):7-26.

Russo, Ethan B., Hong-En Jiang, Xiao Li, Alan Sutton, Andrea Carboni, Francesca del Bianco,

Giuseppe Mandolino, David J Potter, You-Xing Zhao, Bera Subir, Yong-Bing Zhang, En-Guo

Lü, David K. Ferguson, Francis Hueber, Liang-Cheng Zhao, Chang-Jiang Liu, Yu-Fei Wang,

and Cheng-Sen Li.

2008 Phytochemical and Genetic Analyses of Ancient Cannabis from Central Asia.

Oxford Journal of Experimental Botany 59(15):4171-4182.

Sahlins, Marshall

1976 Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Said, Edward

1978 Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Saunders, J. J.

204

1971 The History of the Mongol Conquests. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press.

Schauenburg, Konrad

1975 Eὐρυμέδον εἶμι. Mitteilungen des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, Athenische

Abteilung 90:97-121.

Schnurbein, Stefanie V.

2003 Shamanism in the Old Norse Tradition: A Theory between Ideological Camps.

History of Religions 43(2):116-38.

Seeman, Mark F.

2007 Predatory War and Hopewell Trophies. In The Taking and Displaying of Human

Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians, R. Chacon and D. Dye, eds., pp. 167-189.

Springer Science, New York.

Shakhnovich, MaryAnn M.

1993 The Study of Religion in the Soviet Union. Numen 40(1):67-81.

Shaw, Brent D.

1982-83 ‘Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk:’ The Ancient Mediterranean Ideology of the

Pastoral Nomad. Ancient Society 13/14:5-31.

Shore, Bradd

1989 Totem as Practically Reason: Food for Thought. Dialectical Anthropology

14(3):177-195.

Sidky, H.

1990 “Malang,” Sufis, and Mystics: An Ethnographic and Historical Study of

Shamanism in Afghanistan. Asian Folklore Studies 49(2):275-301.

2010 Ethnographic Perspectives on Differentiating Shamans From Other Ritual

Intercessors. Asian Ethnology 69(2):213-40.

Siebert, Jr., F. T.

1937 Mammoth or “Stiff-Legged Bear.” American Anthropologist 39(4):721-725.

Sitler, Robert K.

205

2006 The 2012 Phenomenon New Age Appropriation of an Ancient Mayan Calendar.

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 9(3):24-38.

Skaff, Jonathan Karam

2004 Survival in the Frontier Zone: Comparative Perspectives on Identity and Political

Allegiance in China’s Inner Asian Borderlands during the Sui-Tang Dynastic Transition

(617-630). Journal of World History 15(2): 117-153.

Skinner, Joseph E.

2012 The Invention of Greek Ethnography: From Homer to Herodotus. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Smith, Amy C.

1999 Eurymedon and the Evolution of Political Personifications in the Early Classical

Period. The Journal of Hellenic Studies 119:128-141.

Smith, Tyler Jo.

2003 Black-Figure Vases in the Collection of the British School at Athens. The Annual

of the British School at Athens 98:347-368.

Spencer, Robert F., Charles E. Dibble, Jesse D. Jennings, Elden Johnson, Arden R. King,

Theodore Stern, Kenneth M. Stewart, Omer C. Stewart, and William J. Wallace

1965 The Native Americans. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Stefanis, C., C. Ballas, and D. Madianou

1975 Sociocultural and Epidemiological Aspects of Hashish Use in Greece. In

Cannabis and Culture. Vera Rubin, editor. Pp. 303-326. The Hague: Mouton.

Stiebing Jr., William H.

2009 Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture. Second Edition. New York: Pearson

Longman.

Stothers, David M. and Abel, Timothy J.

1993 Archaeological Reflections of the Late Archaic and Early Woodland Time

Periods in the Western Lake Erie Region. Archaeology of Eastern North America 21:25-

109.

206

Stover, Dale

2001 Postcolonial Sun Dancing at Wakpamni Lake. Journal of the American Academy

of Religion 69(4):817-836.

Strindberg, Anders and Mats Wärn

2011 Islamism: Religion, Radicalization, and Resistance. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stewart, Omer C.

1980 Peyotism and Mescalism. Plains Anthropologist 25(90):297-309.

Strmiska, Michael

2000 Ásatrú in Iceland: The Rebirth of Nordic Paganism?. Nova Religio: The Journal

of Alternative and Emergent Religions 4(1):106-132.

Stringer, Martin D.

1999 Rethinking Animism: Thoughts from the Infancy of Our Discipline. The Journal

of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5(4):541-555.

Stuurman, Siep

2008 Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient

Greece and Han China. Journal of World History 19(1):1-40.

Tarbell, Frank B.

1920 Centauromachy and Amazonomachy in Greek Art: the Reasons for their

Popularity. American Journal of Archaeology 24(3):226-231.

Thomas, Rosalind

2000 Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science, and the Art of Persuasion.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Þorr, Martin and Hannah Rachel Bell

2012 ‘Rock-art,’ ‘Animism’ and Two-way Thinking: Towards a Complementary

Epistemology in the Understanding of Material Culture and ‘Rock-art’ of Hunting and

Gathering People. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 19(1):161-205.

Tokarev, S. A.

207

1966 The Problem of Totemism As Seen by Soviet Scholars. Current Anthropology

7(2):185-188.

Trask, Haunani-Kay

1991 Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle. The Contemporary Pacific 3

(1):159–167.

Treister, Mikhail Yu.

2004 Polychrome Necklaces from the Late Hellenistic Period (On the Question of the

of the Origin of Necklaces with Butterfly-shaped Pendants). Ancient Civilizations from

Scythia to Siberia: An International Journal of Comparative Studies in History and

Archaeology 10(3-4):199-257.

Trenk, Marin

2001 Religious Uses of Alcohol among the Woodland Indians of North America.

Anthropos 96(1):73-86.

Trigger, Bruce G.

2006 A History of Archaeological Thought. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Trimingham, J. Spencer

1971 The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trope, Jack F.

1991 Protecting Native American Sacred Sites and Religious Freedom. Wicazo Sa

Review 7(2):53-55.

Tsetskhladze, Gocha R., ed.

1999 Ancient Greeks East & West. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Tsetskhladze, Gocha R. and Anthony. M. Snodgrass, eds.

2002 Greek Settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Oxford:

Archaeopress.

Tupper, Kenneth W.

208

2002 Entheogens and Existential Intelligence: The Use of Plant Teachers as Cognitive

Tools. Canadian Journal of Education 27(4): pp. 499-516.

Tylor, E. B.

1871 Primitive Culture. 2 vol. London: John Murray.

Underhill, Ruth

1957 Religion Among American Indians. Annals of the American Academy of Political

and Social Science 311:127-136.

Ustinova, Yulia

2005 Snake-Limbed and Tendril-Limbed Goddesses in the Art and Mythology of the

Mediterranean and Black Sea. In Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interaction in Scythia,

Athens and the Early Roman Empire (Sixth Century BC - First Century AD). David

Braund, ed. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

2009 Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for

Ultimate Truth. New York: Oxford University Press.

VanPool, Christine S.

2009 The Signs of the Sacred: Identifying Shamans Using Archaeological Evidence.

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28:177-190.

Viveiros de Castro, E.

1998 Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute 5:541-555.

Walker, Jana L., and Susan M. Williams

1991 Indian Reserved Water Rights. Natural Resources & Environment 5(4):6-9, 49-

52.

Wallis, Robert J.

2002 The Bwili or “Flying Tricksters” of Malakula: A Critical Discussion of Recent

Debates Rock Art, Ethnography, and Shamanisms. Journal of the Royal Anthropological

Institute 6(4):735-60.

Wasson, R. Gordon, Stella Kramrisch, Jonathan Ott, Ruck, and A. P. Carl

209

1986 Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origin of Religion. New Haven: Yale

University Press.

West, Martin L.

1982 The Orphics of Olbia. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 45:17-29.

1998 The Orphic Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

2013 λυκάβας, λυκηγενής, ἀμφιλύκη. Glotta 89:253-264.

Whelan, Jr., James Patrick

1983 Context and Association in Canadian Shield Rock Art Systematics. Canadian

Journal of Archaeology 7(1):77-84.

Whisker, Dan

2013 The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations.

History and Anthropology 24(3): pp. 344-362.

Whiteford, Andrew Hunter

1991 Mystic and Decorative Art of the Anishinabe (Chippewa/Ojibwa). Arctic

Anthropology 28(1):74-83.

Willerslev, Rane

2007 Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian

Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2013 Taking Animism Seriously, but Perhaps Not Too Seriously. Religion and Society:

Advances in Research 4:41-57.

Willow, Anna J.

2011 Conceiving Kakipitatapitmok: The Political Landscape of Anishinaabe

Anticlearcutting Activism. American Anthropologist 113(2):262-76.

Wright, David C.

1998 Peoples of the Steppe: Historical Sources on the Pastoral Nomads of Eurasia.

Needham, Massachusetts: Simon & Schuster Publishing.

York, Michael

210

1999 Invented Culture/Invented Religion: The Fictional Origins of Contemporary

Paganism. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 3(1):135-

146.

Zedeño, María Nieves

2008 Bundled Worlds: The Roles and Interactions of Complex Objects from the North

American Plains. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15(4):362-378.

Zhmud, Leonid.

2012 Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans. Translated by Kevin Windle & Rosh

Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Znamenski, Andrei A.

2007 The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.