anthropology and comparative religions, Mircea Eliade, wrote fiction ‘on the side’,
for example, Maitreyi (Bengal Nights, 193 3) and Noaptea de Sanviene (The
Forbidden Forest, 1954) written after the war and in 1978 he was even seriously
considered for the Nobel Prize in literature. I t has even been suggested that the
psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud was, in essence, fictional and that Freud was
a storyteller (Hillman, 1983:3-5). Eliade does caution against using the term
shaman too broadly and especially synonymously with magician, sorcerer or cult
priestess or priest, although the shaman may also be a magician, sorcerer, priest or
priestess. The quality that marks the shaman for Eliade, however, is that the
shaman is the great master of ecstasy, of the religious experience par excellence
(Eliade, 1951:4). I ndeed, Eliade also believes that SC may be present in many
conventional religions, delineating the mysticism of the particular religion for the
possessor of such consciousness is the great specialist in the human soul; who
alone sees it and knows its form and its destiny (Eliade, 1951:8). I n its simplest
form, the world view of shamanic peoples is that of a universe with three levels or
layers; our middle-world of ordinary day to day reality in addition to an upper-world
and an under-world of divinities and spirits. This structure is best perceived through
the fictive power of the imagination, which Marie-Louise von Franz suggests that
today we call the unconscious (von Franz, 1975:99), the same world of spirits,
guides and powers that the shaman knows and utilizes. I f we are, however, to truly
equate shamanovelists and mythopoeic writers with shamanism, and indeed, their
readers and the shamans who responded to the research questionnaires, then we
must look for the hallmarks of the shaman’s vocation beginning with that of
initiation.
6.4 Neo-shamanic I nitiation
Kalweit identifies a threefold universal, transpersonal pattern, a pattern that
is still far from being explained, of illness, spontaneous self-healing, and the
development of healing powers as an indicator of shamanic vocation:
... serious suffering over a period of years; no improvement or
help from conventional medicine, but help from an indefinable
nonhuman source; an astounding cure that no one expects; an
attempt to free oneself from a superhuman or unconscious force
in order to follow a particular lifestyle, followed by capitulation to
an unyielding demand; acceptance of one’s fate; the beginning of
a new life along with a willingness to acknowledge latent