SHAMANISM & THE DRUM · LESSON 8 OF 12 · 13 MIN
The Shaman's Sickness
How shamans were called — by illness, dreams, inheritance or election — from Siberian dismemberment visions to the Korean sinbyeong and the itako's buckets of ice water, and what it does and does not mean today.
In most of the traditions this track describes, nobody decided to become a shaman. They were chosen — by the spirits, by a dead ancestor, by a sickness that would not lift until they accepted the call. Anthropologists call this the shamanistic initiatory crisis, and it is one of the few features found almost everywhere. This lesson looks at how different peoples described it, and ends with a plain word about what it does and does not mean for a reader in the twenty-first century.