extrasensory faculties and to use them for the sake of humanity;
and finally the development of further paranormal faculties
(Kalweit, 1987:60).These findings are supported by Bailey (1998). Eliade provides additional examples
and suggests that:
... all the ecstatic experiences that determine the future shaman’s
vocation involve the traditional scheme of an initiation ceremony:
suffering, death, resurrection. Viewed from this angle, any
“sickness vocation” fills the role of an initiation; for the suffering
that it brings on correspond to initiatory tortures, the psychic
isolation of “the elected” is the counterpart to the isolation and
ritual solitude of initiation ceremonies, and the imminence of death
felt by the sick man (pain, unconsciousness, etc.) recalls the
symbolic death represented in almost all initiation ceremonies
(Eliade, 1951:33-66).Eliade further believed that:
... initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition;
the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally
different being from that which he possessed before his initiation;
he has become another (Eliade, 1975:151).
All of the respondents to the research questionnaire, without exception,
stated that they felt different, set apart from the rest of their family or community.
Two of the respondents had experienced intense schizoid episodes which were not
dissimilar to SC in that they experienced a loss of the egoic self, indeed, a sense of
separation between the egoic self and the environment; they felt identification with
animals or external factors, sometimes with the planet as a whole. One described
what could be seen as a sense of participation mystique as he lay slipping into a
coma, alone in the bush, following a near-fatal snakebite. Abraham Maslow (1973)
describes such experiences as peak experiences, which can also include dreams and
initiatory sickness, as in the case of Colleen McCullough and Reader 2, Janet M, all
of which constitute experiences of unity, not unlike a state of participation mystique
(Kalweit, 1987:219).
A number of mythopoeic writers and readers display personality
characteristics or such idiosyncratic behaviour that closely resembles the
shamanistic profile. For example, schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder
has been linked to shamanism (Kalweit, 1992; 210-211, 240) and it is worth noting
that (in addition to the schizoid episodes revealed in my research questionnaire
regarding Shaman 1 and one of the readers) a number of mythopoeic writers and