CHARISMA AND EVIL Charles Lindholm Department of Anthropology Boston University So far as I can determine, charisma is the only technical sociological term that has entered into the general vocabulary. In contemporary English usage, politicians, athletes, movie stars, and others who are notably appealing and successful are routinely described as ‘charismatic.’ The entrance of charisma onto ordinary public discourse perhaps indicates a need for a word that can seem to explain individual success in a system where status in achieved, not ascribed, but where the reasons for achievement are opaque. Charisma in this sense is a shorthand expression telling us why one politician is beloved, another is not; why one athlete is sought out to endorse products while another, equally talented, remains obscure; why one actor is a star, another a journeyman, why one person lights up a room, another dims it. By definition, personal charisma is not to be acquired by training and effort - the usual methods for achieving success in our competitive and rationalized society. True, it can sometimes be inherited – the popular appeal of the Kennedy family is an example. But this is very much a secondary and even institutional form of charisma. Likewise, charisma can be attached to high office, but this too is a secondary form. The crown does not make the man who wears it charismatic – it only makes him powerful (Greenfeld 1985). To be captivating, high office or a great name must be undergirded by a compelling personality. However, even though the term charisma is used in a positive fashion to describe the otherwise inexplicable appeal of certain persons, it also refers to individuals who arouse fear and horror. Sinister cult leaders, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones, who apparently have an uncanny capacity to influence others, even to point of inspiring their followers to commit murder or suicide, are always called ‘charismatic’. The mystifying power of such leaders is ‘explained’ as a malevolent manifestation of extreme personal magnetism, which overwhelms and eventually corrupts and destroys those whom it attracts. This negative usage is puzzling, since charisma, as originally introduced to social theory by Rudolf Sohm, was a Christian religious term with wholly positive connotations – it explained why Jesus’ disciples gave up their wives, families, and occupations to dedicate themselves completely to him. The reason was simple. They intuitively recognized him as the Messiah because of his God given gift of grace - his charisma - which revealed to those with the eyes to see that he was indeed sent to redeem humanity. For those who follow Sohm’s definition, charisma is inextricably attached to Christian theology and the Jesus cult. By definition, evil persons cannot be charismatic (Friedrich 1961). Weber on Charisma How did this positive term come to be attached to the diabolic? This transformation makes sense when we to consider how Max Weber developed the concept of charisma in his historical sociology, from whence it diffused into ordinary discourse. Following his value neutral approach to social science, Weber appropriated the concept from Sohm but resisted its Christian moral implications. Instead, he wished to define the gift of grace in a way that would permit comparative research. To begin, he distinguished between three types of authority 1.) rational-legal - the organized codification of values 2.) traditional - an unthinking adherence to custom 3.) charismatic - loyalty to a specific person. These correspond to the three basic motivations for action: cognitive, habitual, and emotional (Weber 1978: 215-6). Weber’s theoretical orientation, centered on the implications of consciously held meaning systems, led him to focus almost completely on the permutations of the means-ends calculations and scenarios for action occurring in various forms of rational-legal authority, but he recognized that in “prerationalistic periods, tradition and charisma between them have almost exhausted the whole of the orientation of action" (1978: 245). In other words, most of human history was dominated by opposing action orientations that are outside the realm of reason, until their age-old antagonism was subdued by the triumph of capitalism’s instrumental rationality. For Weber, charisma has a special affinity for times of crisis, when the familiar framework of tradition has failed. To escape chaos, people take refuge in "their belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person" (Weber 1972: 295). Under these conditions, whatever the leader commands is accepted simply because of his charisma, not because the order makes sense or fits within any preset meaning system. As Jesus says: “It is written, but I say unto you.” In Weber's historical sociology, charisma erases a moribund worldview, replacing it with a new one enunciated by the Prophet. Although Weber was primarily concerned with typologizing and contextualizing the novel ethical meaning systems provoked by the Prophet's revelations, he was also well aware that for the masses, and especially for the excluded and impoverished, commitment to the movement was based not on the Prophet’s ideas or values, but to his person and his magical promise of immediate experiential salvation. He is the message, and those who believe in him feel themselves saved in the here and now (Weber 1978: 467, 487). In other words, for the followers, the Prophet’s miraculous presence is transformative, and so inspires loyalty and obedience. In a complex society, rationalization and institutionalization eventually supersede the immediate redemptive experience of the leader’s personal charisma, as the priest, the bureaucrat, and the teacher take over from the Prophet. However, in simpler societies charisma is a regular part of social life. According to Weber, the charismatic relationship in such societies occurs in two contrasting types: the religious charisma of the shaman-prophet, and the political charisma of the berserker-warrior. The berserker inspired awe among his comrades, arousing them to greater heights of daring, but his frenzy did not have a future, since he embraced his own death, from which he could never return except in legend. He was a hero, but not a viable commander in chief. Actual war leaders in small-scale societies tend to be pragmatic figures combining skill in fighting with discipline and calculation, and so attract a following willing to submit to orders. The frenzy of the berserker is primarily a tribute to the chief’s institutional patriarchal power. Socially significant charisma was located instead in the shamanic religious figures whose spiritual support legitimated the warrior's conquests and the chief’s traditional authority. Some warrior chiefs do have charismatic spiritual capacities themselves. The type case is the Prophet Mohammed, who was not only God’s Messenger, but also a practical general. Like the berserkers, they too gained charismatic status by embracing death – but unlike berserkers, they returned alive from their death-like trances, carrying messages from the beyond and providing succor for their people. They attracted a devoted following not simply because of their services, but because their highly theatrical entrance into trance contagiously excited and revitalized onlookers, making the shaman the center of a magical healing cult (Weber 1978: 242, 400-3, 535-6, 554, 1112, 1115. 1972: 279, 287). Weber was especially fascinated by the relationship between the shaman’s ecstasy, his capacity to cure, and epilepsy, with its chaotic eruption and subsequent collapse. As he writes, "ecstasy was… produced by the provocation of hysterical or epileptoid seizures among those with predispositions toward such paroxysms, which in turn produced orgiastic states in others" (Weber 1978: 535). The shaman’s ecstatic transformation, preceded by convulsions, was understood and experienced as “a journey into the world of dead” where the hidden spirits could be forced or cajoled into revealing their empowering secrets (Ginzburg 1991: 24). The conjunction between epilepsy, trance and charisma seems odd given our modern medical conception of grand-mal and petit-mal epileptic seizures as electrical storms in the brain that eliminate consciousness while causing gross motor spasms. But Weber's model (one common to his era) broadly imagined epileptic - or, more properly, epileptoid - seizures as closely akin to hypnotic states and to hysterical fits. Winkelman (1986), among others, has argued for a parallel between shamanic trance, temporal lobe epilepsy, and other forms of what Sacks (1985) has called mental superabundances, or disorders of excess, wherein sensations of energy and vitality become morbid, illness presents itself as euphoria, and heightened spiritual communion occurs along with the experience of self-loss. It is indeed the case that cross-cultural studies of shamanism show strong incidence of overtly epileptoid manifestations such as trembling and convulsions, especially in the early stages of shamanic initiation. Evidently there may be both a predisposition and an element of imitation and training at work in achieving shamanic trance, and the trance itself may have a considerable overlap with some mild forms of disturbance of the temporal lobe. The shaman’s ability to achieve the desired state of ecstatic transformation was amplified by various learned techniques such as rhythmic dancing and singing, mortification and self-mutilation, intoxicating drugs, isolation, sleeplessness, repetitive chanting and oratory, among others. Seizures were followed by the journey to and from the other world. Having confronted the spirits, the shaman awakened from his trance, no worse for the wear. Inspired by the shaman's performance, onlookers could also attain a lesser subjective sense of heightened emotion, self-dissolution and spiritual revitalization. In so doing, they momentarily escaped from the ordinary miseries of isolation, pain, and the fear of death. Shamans thus had the power to enliven, amaze, and cure – they were the first actors, the first magicians, and the first doctors. While entranced, they journeyed into the realm of the spirits, communicated with the dead, struggled against demons, and became the vehicles of the gods. From this perspective, the imagery is of this original charismatic figure is one spiritual empowerment, not of evil. Yet there was a dark side implicit in the shaman’s ecstatic transformation. Shamanism and the Practice of Ecstasy In his portrait of the shaman, Weber drew upon what was already an extensive and well-known scientific and popular literature on the topic. The very word, ‘shaman,’ used by the Siberian Tungus, derived from the Sanskrit sramana, had already become a generic term for indigenous ecstatic healers well before the end of the eighteenth century, mainly due to German and Russian accounts from the arctic and elsewhere in the ‘primitive’ world. See Shirokogorroff, 1935 (reprint 1980), Flaherty 1992. The nouns der schaman, die Schamanka, and das schamanentum were in wide use in eighteenth century Germany As Flaherty (1992) has extensively documented, these early explorers’ and commentators’ responses to shamanic performances ranged from sympathy to repulsion. Many thought the shamans were mere charlatans, manipulating the dim-witted and superstitious locals for their own ends. Others, more historically oriented, believed that they were witnessing the remnants of ancient Greco-Roman mystery religions. Artists and writers as varied as Diderot and Goethe took the shaman as the prototype of artistic genius, capable of creatively surmounting ordinary reality and transporting the audience to a higher level, “where they themselves could experience the profound mysteries of birth, life, death, and regeneration” (Flaherty 1992: 14). In contrast, devout Christian observers described shamans as benighted ‘devil worshippers,‘ an attitude that led many shamans to either go underground or to refute their beliefs in deference to the power of their conquerors. If attitudes toward shamans varied, so did the ways they were defined, since their practices and beliefs varied considerably from place to place, region to region, and even from practitioner to practitioner. The larger scholarly question was whether all those who enter possession trance (common in Africa and African diaspora religions) should be classified as shamans, or should the designation properly belong only to those who undertake spiritual journeys to the underworld while entranced (characteristic of Asia, Europe, and the Americas)? See Ginzburg 1991 for the most thorough of recent arguments for this interpretation. This important historical debate still rages, but need not detain us here. Rather, for the sake of this paper, let me provisionally include in the broad category of shaman all those religious figures who share one crucial characteristic: an ability to enter transformative ecstatic states of communion with superhuman powers. As Weston LaBarre noted: "the real difference between shaman and priest is who and where the god is, inside or out" (LaBarre 1970: 108). Where priests beseech the gods, shamans embody them, albeit temporarily. The capacity to become one with the gods is metaphorically revealed in the way shamans were conceptualized by the people with whom they lived and worked. For instance, the shaman's ability to overcome the boundaries of the self and enter the domain of the spirits was typically symbolized by an ability to read minds, change shape, see at a distance, use x-ray vision, predict the future, and travel out of the body. While in trance, the shaman was also regularly believed to unify with a spirit familiar in the animal world. Significantly, this animal was often a man killer, such as a lion or wolf, indicating the shaman's great power. At the same time, this identification symbolically marked out shamans’ ambiguity as a mediator between society and the untamed forces of the wilderness, and their status as both protectors and potential attackers. Simply put, those who could cure by embodying the spirits could also kill by the same means. The process of becoming a shaman also illustrates the moral ambiguity of the role. The ferocity of the initiatory phase varies individually and cross-culturally, but very often the spirits are said to rend the initiate, tearing the flesh from his bones, dipping him in boiling oil, eviscerating him and breaking him into bits - all vivid symbolic representations of the decomposing of the self that is the precursor to charismatic immersion. An account from Nepal gives the flavor of one shaman's initiatory visions: I did not know what was happening. I began to shake violently and was unable to sit still even for a minute.... I ran off into the forest, naked, for three days. My grandfather and the other spirits...fed me earthworms and I had to eat them or die....I saw many evil spirits, some with long crooked fangs, others with no heads and with eyes in the middle of their chests, still others carrying decaying corpses. They attacked me and, before I knew it, they were all over me devouring my body (quoted in Peters 1982: 23). During this stage, under the influence of visions of disintegration, initiates typically manifest symptomatic behavior such as withdrawal, extreme depression, hallucinations, hysterical seizures, depersonalization and so on, to the extent that they often appear to be "insane", or at least seriously mentally disturbed. Nonetheless, in every culture where shamanism occurs, the people themselves clearly distinguish between the authentic shaman's mental state and the truly insane, whom the Siberian Tungus say are afflicted with a "shadowed heart." This distinction is made even though the actions of both may be similar, and in spite of the fact that "insanity" (often culturally defined as spirit possession) is the precursor of the shamanic gift in an initiate. But the differences between a shaman and someone who is driven insane by spirit possession are crucial. Those unfortunates who have been possessed by a spirit and who, in their frenzy, speak forbidden words, run naked into the forest, and who exhibit great strength and stamina in their convulsions, are simply acting out the whims of the deities who inhabit them. In contrast, the shaman, even though he begins his career in the same way as a possessed lunatic, and may show the same signs of insanity, gains control over the possessing demons, and can therefore enter a dissociated state when desired and leave it more or less at will (Noll 1983). In acquiring this ability, the shaman tames the possessing spirits and is cured of being under their thrall. Entering the role of shaman is a movement from an initiatory phase of identity disintegration through painful self-reconstruction, and on to rebirth as a transformed practitioner able to control and reveal the potent spirits that fragment other, weaker, souls. "His ultimate triumph is over the chaotic experience of raw power which threatened to drag him under. Out of the agony of affliction and the dark night of the soul comes literally the ecstasy of spiritual victory" (Lewis 1971: 188). Like the initiation process, the typical shaman's performance has a recognizable sequence, moving from imitation of trance to a real, but controlled, frenzy, to a death-like collapse and the entrance into the netherworld, and then a triumphant return to daily life. This drama of death and rebirth is a repetition of the shaman's personal conquest over the supernatural forces that threatened to engulf the fragmented self during initiation. This drama of death and rebirth speaks not only to the disease of the patient, but also to the existential dilemma of every person. As the audience members witness and participate in the shaman's convulsions, fragmentation, collapse, and reintegration, they too achieve an escape from their own mortality, if only vicariously and for the moment. It is because of this extraordinary capacity to induce a vitalizing collective experience that the shaman is perceived as "one who commands an extraordinary share of what is most desirable... the impersonal vital force that makes powerful people powerful" (Salomon 1983: 425). To recapitulate, the shaman is classically portrayed by Western explorers and commentators as a person possessed by supernatural forces, who enters and leaves ecstatic trance states, displays powerful emotions, travels to and from the spirit world, and reenacts a psychic struggle with the hidden forces of chaos, which are eventually controlled and used both for collective healing and for the destruction of enemies. As noted, an intimate association with the fearsome world of the dark necessarily makes the shaman an ambivalent figure: both a force of good, and a potential source of destruction, since whoever controls the power of chaos can also unleash it. If this is the case, what are the conditions in which the shaman portrayed as a hero and healer or, contrarily, as a malevolent force? Ecstasy and Evil: Three Paradigms The anthropologist Lawrence Krader (1978) has argued persuasively that the degree to which shamans in the Arctic are perceived as good or evil is a result of two interrelated causes. One is the social level at which the shaman acts, the second is the disruptive and anxiety producing influence of colonialism, in this case, Russian colonialism. In Krader's formulation, the shaman traditionally performed both at the public level as a representative of the whole group in relations with the external world, and at the more intimate local private level as a magical personal healer. His status under these circumstances was very high. According to Krader, colonial intrusion and dominance inevitably relegated the shaman to the private sphere, where he no longer had any relation to the regulation of impersonal large group concerns such as herding, control of the seasons, location of good hunting grounds, protecting war parties, and so on. His former status was delegitimized just as the mystical laws of the universe, which he formerly enunciated while entranced, were subordinated to the rational laws of the colonial administration enforced by police. Instead of being the spiritual leader of his people, he became merely a magician, paid to heal the sick. And, as the shaman was stripped of his power in the world, the society itself was stripped of its mythical charter, and made aware of its inferiority to and dependence on the colonial administration. The contempt Christian colonists and converts expressed at the shaman’s antics accelerated this downward trajectory. For the Christians, the shaman became a figure to be scorned, rather than a source of awe. Krader argues that in the course of the process of disenchantment and rationalization the Arctic shaman lost his highly esteemed capacity to mediate for his group with the personalized natural forces of the external world. He was reduced to curing and divination among his close neighbors. Having lost his prestigious position and public role, the now impotent shaman was tempted to try to regain power by manipulating and controlling the internal affairs of the small local group, just as he formerly was credited with manipulating the animals and elements. But where control over the dangerous external world was greatly valued, the attempt to magically control neighbors in the local tent group was met with fear and hatred. Individuals felt themselves threatened by the shaman's illegitimate use of supernatural power for his own ends and he soon became reviled as a `black' figure. Krader's portrayal of the different levels of the shaman's activity, and the evaluation placed upon that activity in the post-colonial period, shows the shaman as an individual always potentially double, positively viewed in his use of ecstatic spiritual power for the public interest, negatively viewed when that power was used to gain the practitioner's private desires and increase his personal status. This dichotomy is akin to Durkheim's distinction between religion, which is collective and moral, and magic, which is personal and immoral (Durkheim 1965). This double character is validated in multiple ethnographic contexts. When the positively valued public role no longer is available, the shaman's `white' aspect is nearly obliterated, and he loses his position as a respected group leader and is instead feared and hated by those around him. A similar point is made in a more abstract fashion in Mary Douglas's famous analysis of the relationship between classification systems, social complexity, pressure to conform, and a propensity to ecstatic states . Comparing the Nuer and the Dinka, two Sudanic peoples who are prone to trance, Douglas begins with the premise that "the human body is always treated as an image of society and that there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension" (1970: 93). The shaman’s trance and convulsive ecstasy are, of course, bodily processes of the most intense, vivid sort, permitting a blurring of boundaries between self and other, a loss of personal identity and a deepened expression of emotion. Douglas attempts to correlate social attitudes toward these experiences with structural variables, particularly focusing on cultural ideas about the necessity for maintenance of boundaries and social control. She argues that societies with more complex and inclusive public systems of classification and a high degree of social conformity and boundary maintenance demanded of individuals will, correspondingly, have a negative attitude toward possession trance and other ecstatic states, since these states involve a loss of conscious control of the body, and an escape from structure in the effusive formlessness of the paroxysm. In other words, ecstatic trance offers a challenge that highly structured societies meet with derision and disgust, if not with outright persecution. Conversely, "the weaker the social constraints, the more bodily dissociation is approved and treated as a central ritual" (1970:130). Thus the ecstatic state of the shaman is portrayed as repulsive and is socially denigrated within any rigid and relatively complex local social structure that finds the shaman's trance to be a challenge and a threat to its stability. Her analysis is borne out ethnographically in Siberia, the heartland of shamanism, where the simplest egalitarian societies, such as the Chukchee, do not have professional shamans. Rather, almost everyone has some capacity for trance, which is entered into quite easily (Bogoras 1909). In contrast, in more complex social formations, such as the Tungus - which has relatively complex, well developed clan structures, differentiated ascriptive roles, and complicated cosmologies - the shamanistic spiritual practitioner is set apart as a priest-like professional role requiring elaborate, expensive and weighty paraphernalia. Becoming a shaman among the Tungus also requires a considerable degree of arduous training, a great deal of pain and the risk of social opprobrium (Shirokogoroff 1935). In even more complex and hierarchical social formations, according to Douglas's model, charismatic ecstatic is likely to be increasingly stigmatized as insane and evil in complex, internally hierarchical societies where bodily dissociation is denigrated. Under these circumstances, the shaman’s performance will attract only those whom society judges to be inferior, deranged, malevolent, and destructive. The socially generated distaste for the shamanic figure and fear and hatred for the ecstatic experience he offers has been analyzed as well by I.M. Lewis, who has undertaken an extensive anthropological survey of the relationship between ecstatic states and social organization. Lewis's sociology of ecstasy aims at revealing the structural factors and social processes that correlate with and explain the delegitimization of charisma. Lewis agrees with Krader and Douglas (and Weber) that the enthusiasm of ecstasy is less and less welcomed as society becomes more complex and more reliant on systematic rationality and an organized priesthood. Such a world must denigrate the immediate experience of ecstatic possession in favor of institutionalized authority relations. The shaman, formerly revered as the possessed incarnation of the gods becomes instead a demeaned status, whose personal capacity for ecstasy is negatively valued in a rationalized structure where positions are achieved by training, not by spiritual election. Nor is the shaman favored in traditional societies that feature highly developed ascriptive social statuses, since in such settings all roles are parceled out according to rank, heredity, etc., without regard to the intrinsic ability of the individual. The shaman's ecstatic capacity, being purely personal, is necessarily devalued. Employing a variety of comparative materials, Lewis argues that in a society with structural complexity and ascribed positions of authority it is primarily the weak and downtrodden who are susceptible to charismatic experience, using the bodily sensation of ecstatic possession as a means for asserting transcendence over the oppressive force of the dominant system. This form of possession provides the oppressed a way of offsetting their subordination. “We may be weak and despised in this world of appearance, but we rule in the world of the gods.” This is one of the reasons that shamans in more complex, more rationalized and more populous societies are likely to be female, while in small-scale social formations they are almost always male. As Ohnuki-Tierney comments: "When a society is small, shamanism often receives high cultural valuation and shamans are not confined to certain personality types, certain statuses in the society, or one biological sex. In a larger society, shamanism is culturally insignificant and consequently is an arena for the socially marginal, including women" (Ohnuki-Tierney 1980: 225). Because shamans are usually male, I have used the male pronoun throughout. For the marginalized and impoverished, possession trance also provides a personal ecstatic experience of inner expansion and empowerment valued in and for itself as a bodily pleasure. In Victor Turner's apt phrase, ecstatic states are subjective revelations of the power of the weak. In their formlessness and emotional intensity, they provide moments of `anti-structure' and ‘communitas,’ obliquely opposing a rigid and uncharitable world that deprives many persons of any sense of power and influence, offering instead the vitalization that is the radiant core of trance (Turner 1982). These trances are induced by shamanic figures who act as curers and organizers of group rituals among the weak and disenfranchised. Ordinarily, such charismatic shamans are ignored by the privileged, except when they are used as spiritual physicians. The curers who have their roots in the ecstatic experiences of the disenfranchised are attractive as healers because, in Lewis's model, the elite have an uneasy conscience over their dominant position. Their malaise leaves them psychologically prone to spiritual afflictions thought to emanate from anti-social malevolent spirits and from witchcraft directed at them by those they oppress. The shaman, as representative of the spiritual powers of the weak, is believed to have the power to control these hostile forces. But as we have seen the power to cure, derived from the experience of ecstasy, can also be envisioned as a power to harm by those who benefit from the rationalization of society, and the curer is liable to be denounced as a witch. The shaman's ability to become a witch has great social ramifications, because along with an ability to threaten the existing order is the parallel capacity to become the Prophet of an alternative worldview. The witches reviled by the privileged for their imputed personal supernatural power can be the hope of the alienated, for the same reason. In this instance, the shaman’s spiritual influence stands against the institutionalized authority of the ruling order. He has the potential to tame and embody the spirits feared by the establishment, to reject the world as it is, and to offer the disaffected an ecstatic communion through immediate and vivid contact with an infectious personal extraordinary power. It is in elucidating the potentially revolutionary quality of the ecstatic's relationship with the social that Lewis makes his primary contribution, for if Krader shows how shamanism is double-sided, and may easily become witchcraft, and if Douglas reveals the larger structural principles at work in the attribution of evil to charismatics, Lewis shows the reverse movement. He reveals how witches can become revolutionaries. Two Examples The !Kung San Bushmen of Africa's Kalahari Desert are highly mobile hunters and gatherers with a very simple technology. The !Kung speak a language in which tongue clicks are phonemes. (!) is a click with the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, (/) is a click with the middle of the tongue. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bogoras, Waldemar 1909: The Chukchee. Memoirs of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 11. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Cohn, Norman 1970: The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. (Revised Edition). New York: Oxford University Press. Douglas, Mary 1970: Natural Symbols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Durkheim, Emile 1965: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Flaherty, Gloria 1992: Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Friedrich C. 1961: Political Leadership and the Problem of Charismatic Power. Journal of Politics 23: 3-24. Ginzburg, Carlo 1991 Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witch’s Sabbath. New York: Pantheon. Greenfeld, Liah 1985: Reflections on the Two Charismas. British Journal of Sociology 36: 117-32. Guenther, Mathias 1975: The Trance Dance as an Agent of Social Change among the Farm Bushmen of the Ghanzi District. Botswana Notes and Records, 7: 161-6. Katz, Richard 1982: Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Krader, L. 1978: Shamanism: Theory and History in Buryat Society. In V. Dioszegi and M. Hoppal (eds.), Shamanism in Siberia. Budapest: Adademiai Kiado. La Barre, Weston 1970: The Ghost Dance . New York: Doubleday. Lewis, I. M. 1971: Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lindholm, Charles 1990: Charisma. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. -- 1992: Charisma, Crowd Psychology and Altered States of Consciousness. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 16:287-310. -- 2003: Culture, Charisma and Consciousness: The Case of the Rajneeshee. Ethos 30: 1-19. Noll, Richard 1983: Shamanism and Schizophrenia: A State Specific Approach to the "Schizophrenia Metaphor" of Shamanic States. American Ethnologist, 10: 443-59. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko 1980: Shamans and Imu Among Two Ainu Groups. Ethos 8: 204-28. Peters, Larry 1982: Trance, Initiation and Psychotherapy in Tamang Shamanism. American Ethnologist 9: 21-46. Sacks, Oliver 1985: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Harper and Row. Salomon, Frank 1983: Shamanism and Politics in Late-Colonial Ecuador. American Ethnologist 10: 413-28. Shirokogoroff, S. 1935: Psychomental Complex of the Tungus. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. Turner, Victor 1982: The Ritual Process. New York: Aldine. Weber, Max 1972: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. ---1978: Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winkelman, Michael 1986: Trance States: A Theoretical Model and Cross-Cultural Analysis. Ethos, 14: 174-203. Among the !Kung, there is only one specialized role, that of the shamanic curer who has learned to master the inner vital energy the !Kung San call n/um. The healer uses this energy for curing the people of the community during an ecstatic state called !kia, brought on by all-night parties of dancing and singing. But even though the healer is a specialist, he or she is hardly an unusual person. In the past, fully half the men and ten percent of the women become healers, and all of the !Kung take part in the healing ceremonies, which occur as often as once a week, and even more, since experiencing !kia is considered to be an absolute good in itself, both revitalizing and joyous. The dance that stimulates the rising of the vital energy of n/um begins when the women gather around a fire that has been lit in the central area of the camp in the late afternoon. Once the women are gathered, the dancers then begin to circle them. The women sing and clap rhythmically and, as the evening wears on, the singing, clapping, and dancing intensify, the mood is heightened, and the dancers are bathed in sweat. Some now begin to go into trance; a process that can occur gradually, marked by epileptoid trembling, staggering and eventual collapse, or suddenly, as the performer shrieks and somersaults out of the dancer's circle or even into the fire. Whether gradual or rapid, the sensation of entering !kia is painful, but the result is empowering. As one shaman says: “In your backbone you feel a pointed something and it works its way up. The base of your spine is tingling, tingling, tingling, tingling, tingling. Then n/um makes your thoughts nothing in your head.... Your heart stops. You're dead. Your thoughts are nothing. You breathe with difficulty. You see things, n/um things; you see spirits killing people. You smell burning, rotten flesh. Then you heal, you pull sickness out. You heal, heal, heal. Then you live. Your eyeballs clear and you see people clearly” (quoted in Katz 1982: 42, 45). Like people in other shamanic cultures, The !Kung do not regard the sequence of death and rebirth they experience in trance as a metaphor. Instead, they say that "It is the death that kills us all.... (but) healers may come alive again" (Katz 1982: 116). As is true elsewhere, those initiates who cross the boundary of the self show signs of derangement. They become hysterically violent, falling into epileptoid fits, rolling in fire, hitting people, throwing coals, running wildly into the bush, and acting in anti-social ways. The unrestrained chaotic behavior of the novice shows that he is in touch with vital powers, but his paroxysm is dangerous; it undermines the social world, and must be brought under control. Among the !Kung, this is achieved as those more experienced in trance press themselves to novices, shake in rhythm with them, rub them with sweat or perhaps cool them with water, teaching them to restrain and channel their n/um and to control !kia, so it can be used for healing. The result is a development of the initiate's capacity to re-enact in public his own psychic death and rebirth. Once a person has become an expert at achieving this ecstatic liminal state, he can then go quickly into trance, sharing n/um with the collective by rubbing them with healing sweat, pulling disease from them by the laying on of hands. There is a definite, though sometimes disputed, hierarchy of healers: some can slip easily into !kia and are more efficacious at curing than others. However, these distinctions are meaningless in ordinary life, since even the greatest experts have no influence outside the realm of the dance. Their expertise is regarded simply as an innate personal capacity - like good eyesight - that can be used to benefit the community. They are not thought sacred themselves, and must work and live just like everyone else. But when the Bushmen come under the sway of the hierarchical and complex Bantu society a transformation occurs almost immediately. Under these circumstances, some expert male !kia dancers become full-time specialists at evoking n/um, touring with their own travelling troops of musicians, healing the sick, both Bantu and Bushmen, before excited and adulatory audiences. Such a person is no longer "first among equals.” Instead, he has a new, permanent status as the living symbol of Bushman pride who has “the potential role of the charismatic political leader with far-ranging authority" (Guenther 1975: 165). Thus, the determinedly egalitarian Bushman collectivity, under external domination, has given rise to a quasi-deified leader who can heal, but also can destroy, and who is both adulated and feared by the Bantu and by his own people. Norman Cohn's portrait of Medieval Europe provides another example of the manner in which a shaman-witch's appeal can become more insistent, more polarizing, and more rebellious when the social order is complex, rigidly hierarchical, and alienating to a large number of marginalized and oppressed people (Cohn 1970). As Cohn shows, under these circumstances, Medieval visionaries attracted followings by offering the excluded, weak, and destitute a sense of supernatural power through their practice of healing while in ecstatic states of spiritual communion. As we have seen, in simpler societies, where shamanizing is commonplace, such experiences are an expected part of ordinary life. But in Medieval Europe the Catholic feudal order totally repudiated any form of immediate ecstatic experience as a threat to church and state. As a result, the charismatic necessarily stood athwart the entire accepted social universe and was reviled as a witch and devil-worshipper, to be burned at the stake (see Ginzburg 1991 for more). In response to repression, the temptation was for the healer to conceive himself as a Messiah, come to "decree for his followers a communal mission of vast dimensions and world-shaking importance.... a mission which was intended to culminate in a total transformation of society" (Cohn 1970: 60). This millennial belief, substantiated by the followers' experiences of the miraculous powers of the leader and validated by a Christian eschatology of salvation and damnation, stimulated the devotees to selfless acts of heroism. They fought to the death for their beliefs and were able to withstand torture and extraordinary suffering, all for the sake of the transcendent new world their leader promised them. This same promise also favored, as Cohn makes clear, utter ruthlessness and cruelty, since the follower's "every deed, though it were robbery or rape or massacre, not only was guiltless, but was a holy act" (1970: 85). In fact, medieval Christian charismatic movements, in pure form, had no potential for compromise. Sharing an apocalyptic vision and inner conviction of infallibility, derived from the actual experience of revitalizing transfiguration, the followers sought to destroy all who did not accept the revelation. As one Medieval rhyme put it, "the Children of God, that we are, poisonous worms, that you are" (Cohn 1970: 87). These polarizing Messianic movements were either totally annihilated by the armies of the state, or else gradually fizzled out through a process of rationalization. Conclusion Charismatic shamans who enter into ecstatic trance and commune with spirits attain their power because of their emergent public capacity to enter the ecstatic dissolution of trance, commune with spirits, and thereby express and conquer the most fearsome human reality: the disintegration of the self in insanity and death. Where society is small, closely knit, personalistic, and egalitarian, these shamanic figures are revered as healers and spiritual leaders. But even under these circumstances, they are also always viewed with a degree of fear, since those who can cure can also kill. The balance shifts from positive to negative when charismatic figures and movements occur within highly rationalized social configurations that are structurally hostile to immersion in immediate communal transcendent experience. It is not charisma itself, but the cultural, institutional, and ideological context in which it occurs, that determines the way it will be experienced, expressed, and evaluated (Lindholm 1990, 1992, 2003). In more complex societies, the shaman is a demon to those in the mainstream, but beloved by the alienated disciples who wish to obliterate the old order. It is no surprise that today, in our complex society, the popular notion of charisma, as introduced by Weber, is used to explain the allure of monsters. ENDNOTES PAGE 1