mythic narratives. Eliade persued such thinking in his seminal work in 1964 and
was followed by Rugley, (1993); Ryan, (1999); Pearson, (2002) and Hancock
(2005). These researchers define shamanism not so much as a geographically and
historically particular cultural expression, but rather as a widespread cultural genre
concerning religious leaders, teachers and healers that mediate with the
supernatural under altered states of consciousness. Shamanism now has to be
examined to determine its relationship to mythic consciousness.
2.4 Shamanism and Shamanic Consciousness
Figure 8. The famous pictograph of the therianthrope shaman from the cave of Lascaux (www.nodulu.org/ec/2005/img/n037).A universal theme in most mythologies is that of a time when the Earth and
Sky were linked by a rope, tree or mountain. Humankind and God(s) were joined
[ read participation mystique] and then came the separation, the Great Transition.
Hence future contact was severed, the sky god distanced himself from immediate
concern with humankind and only in death did humans return to a divine milieu.
However, certain gifted individuals retained the power to ascend to heaven at will;
they included kings and holy men, but above all, the shamans who by means of
ecstatic trance detached themselves from the world of conscious mortality and
made the now perilous ascent to heaven (Tolstoy, 1985:230).
Count Nikolai Tolstoy, son of the writer Leo Tolstoy, and himself a writer and
historian, suggests that shamanism is a practice of extraordinary antiquity and may
go back to the emergence of Homo sapiens (Tolstoy, 1985:229). This is a view
supported by Clottes and Lewis-Williams (1998:12) from their studies of the
pictograph of the so-called ‘Sorcerer’ or shaman (Figure 8) in the Upper-Palaeolithic