Shamanism Theory and The Early Chinese W

Shamanism Theory and the
Early Chinese Wu
Thomas Michael*
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This article undertakes a reexamination of shamanism in early China, an
issue that centers on a religious title (wu) that is consistently mentioned
in virtually every major text from the period. For roughly the last fifty
years, sinologists have vigorously argued the appropriateness of identify-
ing these wu as shamans. In an effort to bring a deeper degree of clarity
to this issue, Parts 1 and 2 of the article explore certain findings from the
field of modern shaman studies that can open up new ways of thinking
about the wu. Part 3 examines the ways in which sinologists have
approached the wu and attempts to show how modern shaman theory
can allow us to better situate our thinking on this issue. Part 4 offers a
brief case study of one early Chinese text and considers how modern
shaman theory can shed new light on our interpretation of the wu.
APPROACHES TO THE SHAMAN, SHAMANISM,

AND THE WU
WU 巫 IS A TITLE THAT REFERS TO A VERY UNUSUAL TYPE
OF PERSON found throughout Chinese history and represents one of the
earliest envisioned religious figures present from the very beginnings of
Chinese civilization. The term is first found on Shang dynasty (1554–
1046 BCE) oracle bone inscriptions dating from before the first millenni-
um BCE, centuries before the earliest textual histories describing them
*Thomas Michael, Department of Religion, Boston University, 145 Bay State Road, Boston, MA
02215, USA. E-mail: maike966@gmail.com.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2015, Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 649–696
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfv034
Advance Access publication on July 5, 2015
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
650 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
came into existence.1 Following a period of relative silence concerning the

wu in the Western Zhou (1046–722 BCE), the Spring and Autumn
period (722–481 BCE) marks the beginning of early Chinese writings in
which we encounter the first historical depictions of the wu and their ac-
tivities, primarily in the Zuo Zhuan and the Chun Qiu. The Warring
States period (480–221 BCE) witnessed an explosion of writings in which
the wu are depicted in a baffling variety of ways; in most of these writings,
including the Shijing, the Yijing, the Shujing, the Guoyu, the Mozi, the
Lunyu, the Mengzi, the Xunzi, the Zhuangzi, the Lüshi Chunqiu, the
Hanfeizi, and the Guanzi, the wu are mentioned almost haphazardly and
in passing, but their brief textual appearances still provide tantalizing bits

of information on their position and activities. Other writings include
substantial sections in which the wu are given center stage, including the
“Chuyu, xia” from the Guoyu, the “Chunguan” from the Zhouli, and the
“Jiu Ge” from the Chuci. Indeed, these three writings have provided by
far the most substantial information about the wu in the Warring States
period, and they have all been subjects of in-depth study by modern
scholars who have explored the role of the wu in early China. Writings
that discuss the wu continued throughout the entire course of Chinese
history, from the Qin (221–206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–220 CE) dynas-
ties to contemporary times, and people bearing the title of wu are still
legion in contemporary China.2
In this study, I primarily focus on the literary representations of the
wu in early China (roughly the fifth to third centuries BCE), with re-
course from time to time to representations (and scholarly interpretations
of those representations) of the wu from earlier periods. In these writings,
wu are at times shown to have vital positions in the royal courts next
to the supreme rulers, charged with responsibilities vital to the well-being
of the court and the country. These include, for example, the proper
control of the rains by way of their ritual dancing and communication
with the natural spirits and the spirits of the ancestors through flight or
possession. Other depictions of the wu describe them as living on mythical
1
For discussions of the earliest forms of the graph wu, see Chen (1936: 536–538), Chang (1994:
11–12), Allan (1991: 77), McCurley (2005: 136), and Li (2001: 44–46). Keightley (1998: 765),
however, writes, “Because I do not believe that oracle-bone graph , which is often read as wu 巫,
referred to ‘shaman’ or ‘spirit medium,’ I do not consider the Shang use of the term relevant to the
present enquiry.” Boileau (2002: 354–355) provides a precise summary of the meaning of this graph,
namely as a spirit, a sacrifice, a form of divinization, and a living human being.
2
Mathieu writes, “However, shamanism pursued an autonomous existence in the countryside up to
contemporary times, as one sees in the studies by de Groot [1910: 1187–1341] and Doré [1911–
1938]” (1987: 23). For more on the political fortunes of the wu in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing
(1644–1911), see Sutton (2000); for the wu in Communist China, see MacInnis (1989); for the wu in
contemporary China, see Anagnost (1987).
Michael: Shamanism Theory and the Early Chinese Wu 651
mountains, collecting magical medicinal herbs to treat illness and confer

longevity, and also journeying throughout all corners of heaven and earth
in their physical body. Should the wu be identified as shamans?
Gilles Boileau writes, “The relationship between shamanism and
archaic Chinese religion has been the subject of debate for some time.
The origin of the controversy is to be found in the article written by Chen
Mengjia in 1936 . . . (who), even if he did not use the term ‘shaman,’ has
established the basic framework for later scholarship on Shang shaman-
ism. . . . Hopkins and Schafer were the first to translate wu by ‘Shaman,’
but they gave no anthropological reference as to the definition of this
term” (2002: 351). There is, however, more to say about the origins of this

debate; in fact, there are two separate origins (one Chinese and the other
Western) that have given rise to two separate approaches to the question
of translating wu as “shaman” (and these two approaches exactly line up
with two separate traditions of early Chinese shamanism that I later call
bureaucratic shamanism and independent shamanism).
Although J. J. M. De Groot (1910) appears to be the first modern
scholar to have isolated the wu as an object of scholarly attention, studies
of the early Chinese wu began in earnest with three studies in China in
the 1930s.3 Although the terms “shaman” and “shamanism” were not at
that time part of the modern Chinese vocabulary, a handful of scholars
began to turn their attention to the wu, and their writings all shared one
central idea that would come to play a dominant role in later studies that
were framed by cross-cultural conceptions of shamans and shamanism.
This is the idea that the wu were the earliest religious figures and leaders
of archaic Chinese religion who, when social organization transformed
from matriarchy to patriarchy,4 became tribal chiefs and, later, the earliest
kings. The wu, therefore, were a central component of royal authority, so
much so that the kings themselves were identified with the wu; Chen
Mengjia succinctly writes, “The ancient kings were wu” (1936: 535).5
Kwang-Chih Chang cites Chen (1936), the 1954 study of Li Tsung-t’ung,
and the 1962 study of Yang Hsiang-k’uei when he writes, “in fact,
3
Qu Kezhi (1930), Li Anzhai (1931), and Chen Mengjia (1936), cited in Tong (1995: 180–181).
Notice that the studies by Qu and Li predate by some five years Chen’s study, who has received the
lion’s share of recognition by Western scholars.
4
Chen writes, “The ancient Chinese religious leaders were also the political leaders; when primitive
society changed from matriarchy to patriarchy, the males [namely the male wu] took charge of
political and military authority” (1936: 533).
5
Li writes that the wu “developed from private wu to official wu. After they had been given official
posts, they developed into the leaders of the community. Along with the increase in their authority,
they became chiefs, and finally, kings—this is the origin of chiefs and kings” (1931: 42). Chen
continues this line of thinking: “The chiefs of the wu evolved into kings as political leaders” (1936:
535).
scholars of ancient China agree that the king himself was actually head
shaman” (1983: 45), but Chang himself was the first Chinese scholar to
apply the terms “shaman” and “shamanism” to the wu after the publication
of Mircea Eliade’s study that appeared in English in 1964.6 More recently,
two studies by Tong Enzheng (1995, 2002) have presented the most com-
prehensive articulation of this approach to the wu as shaman-kings.
In the Western academy, the first attempt to identify the wu as
shamans was put forth by L. C. Hopkins (1945). Being an early pioneer
in this endeavor to identify the wu with shamans (some six years before
the French publication of Eliade’s work; he also appears not to be familiar
with the Chinese scholarship discussed above), he just did not have a
lot to work with.7 Edward Schafer’s (1951) study was next in the line of

Western scholarship to translate wu as “shaman,” but coming in the same
year as the French publication of Eliade’s work, he was only incipiently
aware of what was at stake in that translation.8 He was, however, very fa-
miliar with Chen’s (1936) study of the wu and he consistently cited it, but
his translation of wu as “shaman” was, apparently, only for the purpose
of giving an English language term (if indeed “shaman” can be called
that) for the foreign Chinese term, most likely to avoid alienating his
English readership; he nowhere problematizes what is at stake in that
translation.
Whereas all of the studies of the early Chinese wu discussed to this
point approach the topic first of all from the standpoint of ancient
Chinese (primarily Shang Dynasty) religion and politics with special at-
tention to the etymology of the character wu, the 1951 publication of
Eliade’s work, and even more so the English translation of it in 1964,
marked the emergence of an entirely different approach.9 This approach
attends to a Chinese tradition of folk shamanism that only tangentially
relates the wu to official positions of rulership and bureaucratic
6
Puett writes, “Chang did not indicate which scholarly definition of shamanism he had in mind in
making these arguments, but he did occasionally refer to Eliade. Moreover . . . Chang’s
interpretation of a shamanistic cosmology is identical to Eliade’s” (2002: 34).
7
Hopkins writes, “The Shaman or Wizard of the proto-historic Orient, his vocation, his reputation,
his strange psychosis, and his place in the community, are not all those written in the chronicles of
the Works of de Groot and Shirokogoroff?” (1945: 3). Nowhere in this work does he explore the idea
of the shaman or shamanism or explain why he makes this identification.
8
As Boileau points out (2002: 351), Schafer made one cross-cultural comparison: “After the Chou
dynasty, the female shaman . . . was forced into sub rosa channels for the practicing of her magic
arts, analogously to the witch of medieval Europe” (1951: 134).
9
Actually, Bodde (1961) could be claimed to be the first scholar to have seriously, albeit very
briefly, applied Eliade’s theoretical apparatus to the early Chinese wu, but as it seems that his ideas
only become relevant in another context of this debate, I reserve comments on him for a later section
of this study.
institution. Eschewing etymological analyses of the ancient origins of the

term “wu,” this approach focuses on the very different kinds of activities
associated with the wu of the southernmost early Chinese state of Chu, a
tradition that some modern scholars see vividly represented in an anthol-
ogy of literary poems or songs called the Chuci, in which the wu are seen
to go on ecstatic flights to heaven and the underworld. The parts of this
collection most readily associated with shamanism are the “Jiu Ge,”
which Arthur Waley translated into English in 1956. He made a passing
reference to Eliade about his choice to translate wu as “shaman,” but he
also never problematized this; for him, it was simply a matter of “conve-
nience.”10 David Hawkes (1985), in his complete translation of the Chuci,
also translates the term wu as “shaman,” and he in fact does make an

effort to problematize this, but he never once mentions Eliade.
Furthermore, his stated reasons for this translation do more to obfuscate
the possible identity of the wu with shamans than it does to clarify it
because he uses the term to mean nothing in particular, and he himself
concedes this: “The now common practice I have followed in using the
word ‘shaman’ as a substitute for the Chinese word wu . . . is, I believe,
fully justified; but it can occasionally become a source of confusion”
(Hawkes 1985: 43).11
Because so many of these modern scholars who attended to the early
Chinese wu were, in essence, translating the term wu as the term
“shaman” with apparent abandon and without critical awareness of what
was at stake, it took a single sinologist engaging with modern shamanism
theory to put the brakes on this. Three seminal works by David Keightley
(1983, 1989, 1998) demonstrate his informed criticisms of the early
Chinese shaman hypothesis, but it was in the last of these that he brought
to bear his most cutting insights: “Shamanism, indeed, is much in the eye
of the beholder; determining its presence or absence in purely formal
terms, accordingly, can become a sterile and circular exercise” (1998:
767).
10
Citing Eliade’s work, he writes, “Indeed the functions of Chinese wu were so like those of
Siberian and Tunguz shamans that it is convenient (as has indeed been done by Far Eastern and
European writers) to use shaman as a translation of wu” (Waley 1956: 3).
11
And he does nothing to dispel this “source of confusion”: “‘Shamanism’ is a word invented by
nineteenth-century anthropologists from the Tungusic word shaman. Modern anthropologists have
exercised their proprietal right to define it in various ways, generally rather narrowly, but in popular
usage it has come to apply to a rather wide range of religious beliefs and practices for which old-
fashioned terms like ‘animism’ and ‘sorcery’ are felt to be inadequate or unsuitably patronizing”
(Hawkes 1985: 43). One is here reminded of Geertz’s famous statement on the “insipid” nature of the
category “shamanism” (1973: 122).
Despite a formidable and still growing body of scholarship on the ap-

propriateness of calling the early Chinese wu shamans, the issue of sha-
manism in early China remains as a highly controversial subject for both
sinology and religion studies more generally, pertaining as it does to
cross-cultural issues of the relation between shamanism, local cultures,
and state religion; the development of institutionalized religion; and reli-
gious and cultural practice and representation more generally. It is my ar-
gument that a comprehensive study of the textual representations of the
early Chinese wu shows that their traditions lie at the very heart of any in-
formed understanding of shamanism in this period. I demonstrate that
shamanism was a vital element at both the state and popular levels of the

religious and political landscape of early China. I limit myself to discuss-
ing certain literary representations of the wu that I argue are most coher-
ently interpreted through the application of the category of shamanism.
In order to do this, I first attempt to bring a further measure of conceptu-
al clarity to the categories of the shaman and shamanism, and also to the
ways that scholars have deployed them in previous studies of early China.
The present work examines a selection of literary texts representing
several distinct discursive traditions of early China that scholars have
used to base their claims for the existence or absence of shamanism for
the period. One problem with previous studies on this issue involves the
absence of a clear distinction between the shaman, which is primarily an
ethnographic category, and shamanism, which is primarily a geographical
and theoretical category, and scholars typically seek to establish or deny
one by proving or disproving the other; this is particularly the case in
modern sinological studies of the wu. This has resulted in a clear lack of
consensus among writers on this topic concerning whether or not
shamans and shamanism existed in early China: some scholars claim that
because there is no definitive evidence for shamans in early China, early
Chinese shamanism too is either minimal or nonexistent; these are the
positions held most notably by Keightley (1998), Boileau (2002), and
Michael Puett (2002). Others scholars claim that since there is an over-
whelming body of evidence of shamanism in early China, shamans must
have existed; this is the position held most notably by Waley (1956),
Chang (1983), Hawkes (1985), and Tong (1995, 2002).12 More specifi-
cally, all of these scholars use the category of shamanism to refer to what
shamans do ( primarily the séance), which is quite different from using
shamanism as an interpretative tool for the analysis of more general
12
Chen (1936) should head this list, but since neither the term “shaman” nor “shamanism” was
available to him at the time of his writing, he of course did not make the connection.
representations of direct contact (possession) or face-to-face communica-

tion (spirit journeys) between humans and bodiless beings in a séance
event for the benefit of the community. A strict understanding of sha-
manism has little or nothing to do with actual shamans and their séances;
in fact, there exist no historical records of any actual early Chinese séance,
and the descriptions of the séances of the Chuci remain a work of literary
genius, not an ethnography.13
Claims about shamans are of an altogether different order from
claims about shamanism, a distinction already clearly noted by Arnold
van Gennep over a century ago: “The word sorcerer is too evocative of
modern or medieval Europe; for the semi-civilized, it is better to use the

word shaman. But when it comes to the word shamanism, which does
not apply to anything definitive, one would do better, it seems, to leave it
out” (1903, quoted in Narby and Huxley 2001: 52). More recently, Åke
Hultkrantz provides a clear articulation of the difference between the eth-
nographic shaman and theoretical shamanism; he writes that the shaman
is “a social functionary who, with the help of guardian spirits, attains
ecstasy in order to create a rapport with the supernatural world on behalf
of his group members” (1973: 34). He continues: “Shamanism, of course,
is the complex of beliefs, rites and traditions clustered around the shaman
and his activities” (1973: 36). As for this “complex of beliefs” designated
by Hultkrantz, Mihály Hoppál writes, “Shamanism is a complex system
of beliefs which includes the knowledge of and belief in the names of
helping spirits in the shamanic pantheon, the memory of certain texts
(sermons, shaman-songs, legends, myths, etc.), the rules for activities
(rituals, sacrifices, the technique of ecstasy, etc.), and the objects, tools,
and paraphernalia used by shamans (drum, stick, bow, mirror, costumes,
etc.)” (1987: 95).
I propose that the category of the shaman should be understood to
refer to persons who actively perform ethnographically distinct séances,
and the category of shamanism should be used as a theoretical construct
applied to the interpretation of anomalous records expressing direct rela-
tionships between certain humans and non-bodily beings. Problems in
the study of shamanism arise when these two usages become mixed, and
this is especially so in the debates concerning shamanism in early China.
13
On this note, Humphrey writes, “We should try to discover what shamans do and what powers
they are thought to have, rather than crystallize out a context-free model derived from images they
may or may not use” (1996: 192). Although Humphrey was discussing the living shamans available to
her at the time of her fieldwork, I am less interested in locating specific shamans than I am in
investigating the primary characteristics of the textual representations of the early Chinese wu. But
the idea of eschewing any of those essential qualities of the shaman and shamanism that cannot be
identified with actual evidence, literary or ethnographic, as the case may be, still holds.
All too often writers who deny the existence of shamanism in China do
so on the grounds that the shaman is nowhere to be found; Keightley
writes that the character of the wu in the “Chuyu, xia” “does not seem
markedly shamanistic. . . . On the contrary, these religious practitioners
are described in terms suited to a perspicacious and reverential sage”
(1983: 8).
About the socio-historical existence of shamans in early China, all
that we have at our disposal are the records, literary or otherwise, of
something that we may or may not construe as shamanism.14 Still, one
expects that if shamanism existed in early China, it would closely resem-
ble recognized forms of Siberian or Central Asian shamanism known
from eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century fieldwork,15 al-

though it seems reasonable to date shamanism in Siberia to the sixteenth
century at the latest.16 But those are already very late and highly devel-
oped forms of shamanism, and for early Chinese shamanism to resemble
them, it too must be a highly developed form.17 The texts that I examine
from early China, however, provide us with the earliest written records of
14
It is this absolute absence of ethnographic possibility that allows the study of early Chinese
shamanism to be the object of such extremely divergent conclusions. Atkinson writes, “Most items by
anthropologists are ethnographic and focused on single cultural traditions. . . . Such scholarship has
had insufficient impact on the wider field of shamanic studies, which features general theorizing,
model-building, and self-actualization. . . . Without an ethnographic counterweight this literature
slips quickly into unwarranted reductionism and romantic exoticizing of a homogeneous non-
Western Other” (1992: 308–309).
15
Boileau brings this point home: “Arthur Waley also translates ‘wu’ as ‘shaman,’ referring directly
to Siberian shamanism. He was followed by numerous scholars who used comparatism to
demonstrate that a form of religion present primarily in Siberia and still observed today is a reliable
explanatory tool for Shang and Zhou civilization” (2002: 351).
16
Hutton provides a lengthy excerpt of what appears to be the earliest eyewitness account, written
by one Richard Johnson, of a Siberian shamanic séance that is dated to 1557 (2001: 30–32).
17
This notion that the Siberian shaman demonstrates the pure shamanism against which all other
shamanisms are to be gauged is, arguably, the most important legacy bequeathed by Eliade. “In the
dim, ‘confusionistic’ mass of the religious life of archaic societies considered as a whole, shamanism—
taken in its strict and exact sense—already shows a structure of its own and implies a ‘history’ that
there is every reason to clarify. Shamanism in the strict sense is pre-eminently a religious
phenomenon of Siberia and Central Asia. . . . [Shamanism] has had its most complete manifestation
in North and Central Asia, [and] we shall take the shaman of these regions as our typical example. . . .
But this Central Asian and Siberian shamanism has the advantage of presenting a structure in which
elements that exist independently elsewhere in the world . . . are here already found integrated with a
particular ideology and validating specific techniques” (1964: 4–6). Note here that Eliade has
presented and connected two separate ideas about Siberian shamanism that has had a lasting impact
on the history of shaman studies, including those by sinologists: first, of all shamanisms found in the
world today, only Siberian shamanism demonstrates a pure shamanism; second, Siberian shamanism
most closely approximates archaic shamanism and represents the shamanic “substratum” of archaic
religion (1964: 6). For a theoretical critique of these notions of Eliade’s Siberian shaman, see Kehoe
(1996, 2000). For a corrective study of Siberian shamanism that gives a historical critique of these
notions, see Hutton (2001).
shamanism anywhere to be found.18 The question is not how closely

these records demonstrate a resemblance to highly developed and very
modern forms of shamanism, but why shamanism appears in the archae-
ological records for the first time in the second millennium BCE and
then regularly appears in the classical texts from roughly the middle of
the first millennium BCE onward.
The modern categories of the shaman and shamanism are, for the
most part, constructed rather than native and have been used in different
ways to explain many things, leaving us with a great deal of confusion re-
garding what writers mean when they use these categories.19 Those who
have actively participated in the historical construction of the categories

of the shaman and shamanisms include missionaries, philosophers, theo-
logians, archaeologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, bota-
nists and other scientists, fiction writers, new age practitioners, and
Hollywood screenwriters.20 Some scholars, treating the categories as
natural pieces of discourse able to designate autonomous and indepen-
dent regions of experience really existing “out there,” have reacted to this
by attempting to curtail the ambiguous nature of these categories through
theoretical precision, ethnographic description, or both.21 The continued
ambiguity of the categories, however, has not gone away through simple
cataloging.
In large part encouraged by the very title of Eliade’s work,
“Shamanism [is] Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,” many scholars argue
for the universal presence of shamans in archaic cultures, representatives
18
As mentioned in the previous note, the earliest records of Siberian shamanism can be solidly
dated to only the sixteenth century, a far cry from the Stone Age. There are, as far as I know, only two
other contenders for the honor of being the earliest records of shamanism: prehistoric rock art
exemplified in the cave-paintings of Lascaux and Trois Frères, and ancient Greece. First, prehistoric
rock art is not written and, further, there is anything but consensus that the paintings are shamanistic
(see, for example, Bahn 2001; Diaz-Andreu 2001; Francfort 2001; Klein et al. 2002; Guthrie 2006).
Second, shamanism as a potent force in ancient Greece was presented most enthusiastically in Dodds
(1973 [1951]: 135–156), but this shamanic hypothesis has had very little traction; Hadot wants to
define shamanism as “a certain ritual conduct linked to concrete situations. It is obvious that, in the
Greek philosophical tradition, one can find no trace of this shamanic ritual conduct” (2001: 399).
Puett (2002: 83–94) also challenges the hypothesis of Greek shamanism.
19
As Keightley also rightfully points out, “There may well be ‘many kinds of shamanism’ . . . and,
if so, that makes it all the more important to specify in each case precisely what definition one is
using. Whether these different ‘shamanisms’ can then be related to one another in any meaningful
way always needs to be demonstrated. And the unexamined use of the term should always be a
warning flag, alerting us to the dangers of lapsing into an academic trance as we make our own
attempt to communicate with ‘other,’ unseen realms” (2002: 409).
20
Four works stand out for their comprehensive treatment of the historical construction of these
two terms: Flaherty (1992); Narby and Huxley (2001); Znamenski (2007); and Tomášková (2013).
21
By far the best resource for such scholarly work is Shaman: Journal of the International Society
for Shamanistic Research, launched in 1993.
of a certain type of religiosity that have exerted a profound influence on

the religious expressions of later humans; dead shamans of archaic world,
however, exist only as virtual ghosts in any historical records. In the effort
to come to an acceptable understanding of pre-modern shamans, one
could first of all start with modern shamans and trace their history back-
ward all the way even to the Stone Age, taking for granted a linear devel-
opmental history based on any static and essentialized definition of the
shaman, and Eliade (1964) has provided the model. If, however, any es-
sentialized definition of the shaman that one finds at hand does not
exactly fit one’s own material, one is also free to modify that definition
in the creation of a new essentialized definition so that it will fit the
material.22

In the end, all of this continues to assume the shaman to be a unitary
and unchanging category throughout all societies in archaic times (even
if the various essentialized definitions do not exactly line up with each
other), which is to say hunter-gatherer societies and, to an extent, agricul-
tural societies. If one assumes the universal presence of shamans in
archaic societies, then the next step in the developmental path posits the
emergence of other religious functionaries directly derived from the
shaman, namely shaman → shaman-healer → healer (such as medicine
men and doctors).23 There is also a more insidious version of this devel-
opmental line: shaman → shaman-priest → priest, or even shaman →
shaman-king → king.24 The problem with this is that before one can even
discuss the various religious and political functionaries that emerged
from the archaic shaman, one has to know that archaic shaman as a uni-
versally present figure; if we cannot find him, then there is no significance
22
This indeed is Eliade’s method whereby he designates what he finds to be the essential traits of
the shaman and shamanism (calling, initiation, soul-flight, axis mundi, etc.) and then attempts to
locate them in the archaic mind of homo religiosus. Remarking on “Pre-Columbianists’ willingness to
create new criteria for shamans whenever Eliade’s model fails to work for them” (2001: 218), Klein
et al. write, “Despite Furst’s attempt to redefine shamanism so that it could be found in the Americas,
the new criteria he produced are as unreliable as Eliade’s” (2001: 213).
23
Winkelman is a major spokesperson for this view: “It is argued that shamanism is found
throughout the world because it derives from an ecological adaptation of hunting and gathering
societies to biologically based altered-state-of-consciousness potentials. Agriculture and political
integration are shown to cause the transformation of the shaman into other types of magico-religious
healing practitioners, labeled in this study as shaman-healers, healers, and possession-trance
mediums” (1990: 308).
24
Although Klein et al. do not specifically mention this, I would argue that the most radical
element of these redefinitions of Eliade’s shaman found in the scholarly literature is the association or
even identification of shamans with kings; Eliade himself never made this identification. This seems
to me to lie at the heart of what Klein et al. (2001) call “shamanitis” in relation to the pre-
Columbianists that she takes to task, and this is also what I find to be the weakest, even the fatal,
element of Chang’s ideas about ancient Chinese shamanism.
to any of these developmental lines. Coming to an understanding of the

archaic shaman, it is first of all necessary to grapple with the contours
and limits of who can qualify for inclusion in the category.
Given this, arguments for the socio-historical reality of the archaic
shaman, whether or not the early Chinese wu can be included in it, face
formidable obstacles. These include the question of what might count as
valid evidence for them, the question of language involving local terms
used by alien cultures to refer to potential candidates of this category,
and, maybe most formidable, the question of the applicability of the
various essentialized definitions of the archaic shaman that are common-
ly used to identify true shamans (but rarely used to weed out imposters).

The question of definition, however, does not simply concern the shaman
as such, but any specific definition, if it is to be workable, also has to dif-
ferentiate the shaman from all other religious and political functionaries;
any definition that does not attend to this will inevitably be so open-
ended that it will lose all tractability. Cecelia Klein et al. write, “The
problem with all of this is that if there is no single, universal definition of
‘shaman,’ it is often impossible, when one is mentioned, to know exactly
what that person did or does. Moreover, we cannot accurately relate this
individual to persons similarly identified in other societies. One scholar’s
shaman, in other words, is not necessarily another’s” (2001: 219).25
I find it heuristically reasonable to mark off four historical moments
in which the term shaman transformed from a referent appropriate to a
particular and local time and place to a universal referent applied almost
randomly in the current world. The figure of the shaman first of all
comes to us from an existing language, Tungus, used by an existing
Siberian community to refer to a privileged social participant in their
society, and it made the shaman available as an object of study starting in
the late seventeenth century.26 In other words, in a limited sense, this
25
Klein et al. continue: “Most importantly, what do these imprecise words really signify today, and
why is that meaning so important to so many of us? We suggest that the best way to answer this
question is to ask what words and concepts the words ‘shaman’ and ‘shamanism’ allow the scholar to
avoid. If we perceive certain individuals as primarily religious practitioners, for example, the label
‘shaman’ allows us to avoid referring to them as priests. Most academics have a general notion of
what the distinction between a shaman and a priest theoretically entails” (2001: 219). They relate the
same separation to the shaman and the magician, the doctor, and the king. What they are trying to
get at is, first, the question, not of what a shaman is, but rather who is not a shaman, and, second, is it
possible for a shaman to no longer be a shaman; this latter question is quite central for any position,
for or against, that sees other religious and political functionaries as emerging from the archaic
shaman. This again is a central consideration for any discussion of shamanism in early China.
26
In fact, the first published appearance of the term shaman appears to be found in the
autobiography, first published in 1672, of one Avvakum Petrovich, in which he writes of his
experiences in exile in Siberia (as pointed out in Hamayon 1993: 4; Pascal 1938 has translated the
autobiography into modern French, part of which is excerpted in Narby and Huxley 2001: 18–20).
usage has a concrete ethnographical reality which, however, should not in

any way exclude it from the de-essentializing effects of history. Next, the
usage of the term shaman was quickly extended throughout other hinter-
land Siberian societies that came more and more under the gaze of
Christian Russian missionaries and intellectuals (who were often ban-
ished to those regions) and was used as a general category marker for
various of these societies speaking different languages, many of which did
not possess the Tungus term shaman in their vocabulary, to refer to a
slightly different type of social participant who shared in direct commu-
nications with bodiless beings.27 The late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, in tandem with the spread of Western colonialism and the

birth of anthropology, subsequently witnessed a further extension of this
referential field of the shaman to refer to other figures which were seen to
participate in strikingly similar performances of direct communication
with bodiless beings, but in vastly different societies throughout virtually
all parts of the globe (Narby and Huxley 2001: 39–73). Finally, hand in
hand with the production of general theories of shamanism, the notion of
the shaman was further extended to refer to vastly different types of social
actors locatable in virtually all times and places.28 This lack of conceptual
Hutton singles out the 1692 account of a Siberian shaman written by Nicholas Witsen “that
popularized the term ‘shaman’ among Europeans” (2001: 32). For the further account of the
European adoption of the term in the eighteenth century, see Flaherty (1992); Znamenski (2007);
and Tomášková (2013).
27
Winkelman points this out: “Terms that are etymologically similar to the Tungusic saman (e.g.,
csaman, sama, shaman, khaman, śam, csam, kam, xam, xamma-, and xamsa) are widely dispersed in
the languages of Siberia, as well as in Asia and even in ancient Indo-European languages (e.g., śaman,
śramana, samâne, saga, and wissago)” (2013: 47). For more on the slightly different types of social
participants in these Tungus-related societies, see Shirokogoroff (1935), Dioszegi and Hoppál (1978),
and Hutton (2001). Over and beyond the Tungus-related societies, Hutton writes: “[Shaman] was not
the word which would have been used of such figures by the great majority of native Siberians:
among the Turkic-speaking peoples the equivalent term was kam, among the Samoyed-speakers
tadibei, among the Sakha oyun, among the Buryats bö, among the Koryaks enelan, and so forth”
(2001: 47). See also Eliade (1964: 4).
28
To better grasp the range of inclusions in this last phase, I find it helpful to speak of indigenous
traditional shamans, indigenous neo-shamans, and non-indigenous neo-shamans. By “indigenous
neo-shamans,” I mean those people in foreign countries with a history of shamanism who cater to
Western tourists; by “non-indigenous neo-shamans,” I refer to those people in modern first-world
countries who seek to have shamanic visions through altered states of consciousness with the goal of
self-knowledge; Harner (1990) is the classic text for this. The birth of both forms of neo-shamanism
can be dated to May 15, 1957, which marks the publication by R. Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the
Magic Mushroom,” in Life magazine; the article documents his “journey” under the supervision of
the indigenous traditional shaman Maria Sabina (excerpted in Narby and Huxley 2001: 141–147).
Some twenty years later, Maria Sabina was recorded as saying, “It is true that Wasson and his friends
were the first foreigners who came to our village in search of the sacred children, and who did not
take them to heal from an illness. Their reason was that they wanted to find God. Before Wasson,
nobody took the mushrooms simply to find God. One had always taken them to heal the sick”
(excerpted in Narby and Huxley 2001: 167).
clarity has given rise to the very interesting debates in which the intellec-
tual authority to have the term shaman refer in any one of these four
ways is presently being argued.29
Many scholars today with a good awareness of geographical and eth-
nographical differences who strive for accurate cultural specificity use the
term shaman not to refer to an ideal figure, but to particular types of
social actors fulfilling socially recognizable roles (to be understood at
least partially in the theatrical sense); Laurel Kendall writes, “There is
irony in Western theater’s having sought its reflection in ethnography
before anthropology was prepared to confront the subjects of its own
musings in theater. . . . Walter Borgoras’s turn of the century account of

a Chukchi shaman’s séance, a masterpiece of ethnographic description, is
attuned to the beats of the drum, to how the shaman modifies his voice as
he chants, to the spectators’ shouts and then the cries and whispers of the
spirits as they enter the room. . . . The shaman as actor has been an un-
comfortable notion for a relativistic social science” (Kendall 1996: 19).30
Although worldwide societies outside of Siberia do not have shamans in
“the strict sense” (Eliade 1964: 4), some scholars show that some of these
societies have social actors who demonstrate the essential qualities and
activities of the shaman, in accord with whichever definition that the
author provides. Different societies from all parts of the globe in many
different ages have displayed some evidences of the shaman when some
of their members fulfill those strikingly similar roles, functions, and
29
Kehoe provides a similar understanding for the concept of shamanism: “‘Shamanism’ has come
to be used to refer to: (1) Its original reference, a religious complex in Siberia centering on the
Tungus-Evenki trained practitioner utilizing drum and chant to create an altered state of
consciousness believed to enable the practitioner to divine and to negotiate in the spirit world for
desired effects. . . . (2) Religious practice opposed to historical Western religions, featuring ecstatic
states (trance, possession) and emphasizing individuals’ subjective calling by spirits as contrasted to
the literate religions’ formal ordination of practitioners. . . . (3) A primordial or primeval religion, or
type of religious leader, supposed to have persisted since the Paleolithic among primitive hunter-
gatherer/nomadic peoples. . . . (4) Techniques of altering consciousness, in contemporary Western
societies no longer necessarily yoked to religious beliefs. . . . Contemporary ‘shamanism’ may be
used to heal or for self-expression” (1996: 377).
30
Hultkrantz was instrumental in directing scholars of shamanism coming after Eliade back into
the actual social history of shamans, because he was among the first (and the best) to approach the
shaman in terms of a social actor fulfilling a social role for the members of his or her society (1973,
1996). The works of two other scholars also stand out for their ability to demythologize the shaman,
Lewis (1989) and Hamayon (1990, 1996). Although somewhat dated, Atkinson discusses all of these
works up to 1992; she writes, “Much valuable ethnographic work on shamans is not billed as such
but is contained in monographs with titles that give no hint of a shamanic focus except perhaps to an
area specialist. . . . Newer ethnographic writings offer an important corrective by underscoring the
connections of shamanic practices to local, regional, national, and transnational contexts. They also
call attention to some of the culture-bound assumptions Euroamerican scholars and their audiences
have brought to the study of shamanic traditions” (1992: 308–309). See also Demanget (2001).
activities. In my opinion, the essential and defining feature of the shaman

is that he or she performs a séance event during which direct contact or
face-to-face communication between human beings and bodiless beings
is believed to occur.
In many ways, the shaman, firmly situated in the words and worlds of
ethnography, is more complex, more defiantly uncontainable, than the
theoretical category of shamanism. Theoretical categories, however, all
too often seduce scholars into imagining rational neatness and ideological
unity in the flow of temporal events that may be more chaotic than we
expect or desire. Shamanism as a general category is useful, allowing us to
place a general wall of significance around a messy collection of represen-

tations that may or may not be essentially the same, depending upon how
strict or flexible we allow our understanding of it to be. The stricter defi-
nitions work to exclude at times large pieces of the evidence from inclu-
sion in the category, while the more flexible definitions allow a much
wider range of inclusion. The least inclusive definitions of shamanism see
it as a very late manifestation of the impulses to cultural survival in the
face of aggressive foreign imperialism.31 In this way, the religious signifi-
cance of shamanism is placed second to its political genesis.32 The most
inclusive definitions, based most notably on Eliade’s conception of sha-
manism as the foremost of the archaic techniques of ecstasy, see it as the
manifestation of a certain universal biological potential commonly re-
ferred to as “altered states of consciousness” or ASC (which is a more
technical way to talk about notions of trance or ecstasy, but ASC is such a
wide-open idea that it also includes mediumship and possession).33 The
coming together of the idea of ASC with theories of shamanism in modern
writings has played a decisive role for many scholars who see in this the
answer to the very origins of human religiosity. Some of them have gone
on to produce general theories of the evolution and development of
31
In this vein, Taussig (1987) provides the most subtle yet devastating critique of shamanism to be
found in print, with Kehoe (2000) coming in at a close second. Both of these works seem to take
Geertz’s famous comment as their starting point: “the individuality of religious traditions has so often
been dissolved into such desiccated types as ‘animism,’ ‘animatism,’ ‘totemism,’ ‘shamanism,’
‘ancestor worship,’ and all the other insipid categories by means of which ethnographers of religion
devitalize their data” (1973: 122).
32
Lewis understands shamanism much along these same lines as “protest movements” (1989: 26,
107–113), but, since such protest movements are not exclusively tied to imperialism but arise from
numerous styles of protest from gender to class to ethnicity, he finds shamanism to be pervasive
throughout many different societies.
33
Atkinson writes, “ASC . . . has been the buzzword in interdisciplinary studies of shamanism
over the last decade. . . . Whereas earlier scholars of religion had defined shamanism in ways that
incorporated cultural understandings of shamans and their followers, behavioral scientists skeptical
about the ontological basis of spirit worlds have epistemological bedrock in the concept of altered
psychological states” (1992: 310). See Noll (1985, 1987).
human civilization in which notions of the decline or displacement of a

universal and archaic shamanism are put to work.34
Societies that are said or seen to possess shamanism are primarily
labeled as such because they have social actors who perform séance
events, and these social actors are known by many different titles specific
to each society. The burden of listing the dozens of titles for such actors
can be somewhat relieved by handling them in terms of their cultural
types in relation to general geographical regions (and by doing so we
begin to move from ethnographic shamans to theoretical shamanism). Of
these, the most important include the shaman from Siberia and Central
Asia (see Shirokogoroff 1935; Shi 1996), which may also include similar

types from North America (see Jones 2008); the paye from South
America (see Bacigalupo 2007); the angatkut from the Arctic regions (see
Blodgett 1979); and the wu from East Asia (one can, for example, still
argue the differences and similarities between the classical Chinese wu,
the more modern Cantonese tongji [Elliot 1964; Potter 1974], the Korean
mudan [Kendall 1985], and the Japanese yamabushi [Blacker 1975]. Can
the claim of a single cultural type of East Asian shamanism be sustained
for all of these figures?). The shamans in these regions among themselves
can be designated separately from the shamans of every other region
because they provide ethnographic types of local shamans that cohere
around recognizable cultural traits shared among them (to a greater or
lesser degree) within each area (granting that the specific labels for these
local shamans can and often do differ within each region, and this is the
case even in Siberia).35
Relying on a general category, in this case a geographical one, in order
to organize potentially similar kinds of representations of séance events,
34
Although Eliade did not make the move to see the emergence of separate religious and social
functionaries from an archaic shamanism, he often condemned what he found in modern
manifestations of shamanic activity and possession as “the decadence of shamans” (1964: 67 and
passim). La Barre is arguably the most well-known spokesperson of the shaman as the source of later
religious functionaries; he writes, “The world’s oldest profession is that of the shaman or first
professional, the shaman is ancestor not only to both the modern medicine man or doctor and the
religious priest or divine, but also ancestor in direct lineage to a host of other professional types. It
would seem odd that both the doctor, the most secular-minded, and the divine, the most sacred-
minded of modern helpers of people, should derive from the same source. But we can readily
understand the seeming paradox when we recognize the basic nature and function of the primitive
medicine man of shaman” (1979: 7). This position was whole-heartedly embraced by Winkelman
(1990) and Harner (1990). Although the combination of the idea of ASC with that of shamanism is
pervasive in modern writings that see shamanism actively present throughout the world, McKenna
(1992) is arguably the leading spokesperson for this.
35
I am not implying that socially recognized shaman figures from other cultural areas not
separately designated here do not demonstrate performances of the séance event, or that they do not
have shamanism.
I suggest that there is no easy way out of using the term “shaman” to
comparatively label these culturally distinct shaman figures named above,
and the term “shamanism” as a geographical and theoretical category
that allows us to organize certain representations cohering around séance
events shared cross-culturally that indicate direct communication
between human beings and bodiless beings for the benefit of the commu-
nity. In a sense, since the application of the term shamanism has become
embedded in our way of speaking, it is probably too late to coin new
terms such as angatkutism, payeism, or wuism.36 Doing away with the
singular and essentialized notion of “the shaman” while recognizing
differences among even local shamans within each cultural area can allow

us a more reflective space in which to use a geographical conception of
the category of shamanism for both organizational and comparative
purposes.
Applying the category of shamanism in this geographical sense gives
interpretative significance to evidentiary demonstrations of séance events
with as much attention to cultural specificity and difference as possible.
Like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, these culture-specific
shamans who perform them are neither completely identical nor radically
distinguished. Applying the category of shamanism in a theoretical rather
than a geographical sense (and keeping at bay here the ethnographic
shaman in its ethnographical sense) marks off and isolates a wide range
of actions, beliefs, and representations that would otherwise be impossible
to interpret (at least comparatively), and the application of this theoretical
category allows us to have more or less precise criteria of evaluation with
which to do this.
Shamanism as a theoretical category allows for a delimitation of
the range of chaotic representations of direct communications between
humans and bodiless beings, while shamanism as a geographical category
reveals the pervasiveness of these representations with their own cultural
specificity. Confusion in using the category of shamanism arises in part
because of a lack of consensus on which features to include in it, and that
consensus can only be informed by adherence to culture-specific repre-
sentations that then can be utilized in wider, cross-cultural studies.
Debates over which features to include or exclude often fail to take into
account the fact that shamanism, whatever is included in it, is at best only
a trace and will never be found to exist in any pure demonstration any-
where at any time; there are only representations that we interpret as
36
The term wuism, nonetheless, was De Groot’s favored term (1910); scholars who have written on
the Chinese wu since then, however, have refrained from keeping it.
shamanism.37 It is an imaginary construct, but saying this is to take

nothing away from the immense interpretative value it provides.
Shamanism is a profoundly religious category that brings together
various features (ecstasy and trance, flight and possession, initiation and
dismemberment, song and dance, etc.) that in some way are seen to be
related to each other. The presence of shamanism in any society is recog-
nized by their representations of a séance event of direct contact (posses-
sion) or face-to-face communication (spirit journey) between human
beings and bodiless beings for the benefit of the community. A full ac-
counting of such representations will include histories, myths, folk-tales
and legends (Hultkrantz 1995; Kenin-Lopsang 1997a, 1997b), and epics

and novels (Tyler 2003); artistic expression ranging from cave paintings
(Hoppal 1995; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998) to designs on ethnic
clothes patterns (Eliade 1964; Hoppál 2001; Pavlinskaya 2001); poetry
(Balzer 1995; Sukhu 2012), songs and music (Berti 1995; Kenin-Lopsang
1997a, 1997b; Niemi 2001; Levin 2006); drama and dance (Dooley 1995;
McCurley 2005); concretely material artifacts, such as drums, bells, and
other ritual paraphernalia (Liu 1995; for ancient China, Chen 1936;
Chang 1994; Childs-Johnson 1995); and, finally, systems of belief involv-
ing the separability of the spirit, otherworldly geographies, and the meta-
physical availability of bodiless beings for human interaction (references
on these last points are legion, but certainly include Shirokogoroff [1935]
and Eliade [1964]). Shamanism is less dependent on the actual séance
event than it is on the diverse collection of cultural representations of it,
and they are found in an open range of mediums, material or otherwise.
The actual presence of the shaman, however imagined or identified, is
irrelevant to the understanding of shamanism.
Shamanism therefore is not culture specific, and it could never be the
exclusive possession of Tuvan society. Shamanism is never to be found in
the actions, words, or beliefs of any single shaman or any single séance,
because it transcends both. It does not exist as a natural piece of human
behavior demonstrating essential qualities to be discovered and cataloged,
as if the burden of interpretation dissipates of itself by simply calling
something shamanism. On the contrary, shamanism exists as a con-
ceptual space in which are placed collected representations of various
activities and beliefs expressing specific relationships between humans
and bodiless beings, and it is precisely these representations that demand
interpretation.
37
Certainly, the foremost voice on how and why scholars rely on “the imagination” in the
construction and management of religious categories is J. Z. Smith (1988).
Judgments as to the presence or absence, fullness or decadence, or

truth or falsity of any culture’s shamanism are misplaced when assessed
against any criteria of essential or authentic shamanism, despite the fact
that Siberian shamanism is typically presented as the gold standard for
shamanic purity. Essentialized definitions of shamanism selectively pick
and choose from available evidences, some of which, perhaps with a
history of previous shamanic interpretation by earlier writers, are accept-
ed as evidence of authentic shamanism while other evidence is denied
that status. Critical efforts to control the ways in which these evidences
are interpreted often take recourse to those essentialized definitions,
which are deployed as a litmus whereby the evidences will be seen to cate-

gorize or catalog themselves as if by magic.
The fundamental point of reference for any study of shamanism
should not be the mysterious, timeless shaman of either the archaic or
Siberian sort presented by Eliade, but rather the specific cultural repre-
sentations at hand in any specific tradition of shamanism.38 Scholars
often do not recognize cultural variations of shamanism with reference to
the angatkut, paye, and wu.39 Further, many important sinological at-
tempts to interpret the wu as either shamanic or non-shamanic rely on
such essentialized definitions, assuming that if shamanism existed in
China, it will be the same shamanism that is found in Siberia.40
38
As Klein et al. (2001: 388; 2002: 213) pointed out, some scholars do modify, even if subtly,
Eliade’s definition and characterization of the shaman in ways that allow them to fit their own
readings of their materials into the shamanism category; this would be less problematic if they did
not take constant recourse to Eliade’s Siberian shaman, but doing that would run the risk of
formulating ever new and ever more idiosyncratic definitions and characterizations of shamanism.
39
Kitagawa presented an early effort to differentiate traditions of shamanism, and he came up with
two: “While there is no unanimity among scholars regarding the definition of ‘shamanism,’ it usually
is used with reference to a characteristic religious phenomenon of Siberian and Ural-Altaic peoples.
According to the Siberian prototype, the shaman is believed to have the ability, by virtue of certain
techniques of ecstasy, to cure the sick and to escort souls of the dead to the other world. On the other
hand, in another tradition, that of Southeast Asia and Oceania, the shaman serves primarily as a
medium while possessed by gods or spirits” (1977: 360). Keightley made much of Kitagawa’s
distinction, but he is, as far as I know, the only other scholar to talk about shamanism in this way.
More commonly, scholars differentiate, to a lesser of fuller degree, shamanism as such from
possession.
40
Chang’s (1983, 1994) arguments remain the most influential for those affirming pervasive
shamanism in early China; Puett writes, “Chang did not indicate which scholarly definition of
shamanism he had in mind making these arguments, but he did occasionally refer to Eliade” (2002:
34), and Keightley adds, “Chang evidently had (Eliade’s) definition of shamanism in mind when he
referred to the shamans as ‘religious personnel equipped with the power to fly across the different
layers of the universe’” (1998: 678). Keightley, on the other hand, whose arguments themselves
remain the most influential for those denying pervasive shamanism in early China, also assesses its
presence in part by recourse to Eliade’s ideal Siberian shaman, and in part by recourse to Kitagawa’s
notion of Southeast Asian shamanism (1983: 4–5; 1998: 770–771). Boileau, following Keightley,
firmly denies shamanism in early China based on his assessment of the materials in relation to the
SHAMANIC AUTHORITY AND CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY

The problem with essentialized definitions of early Chinese shaman-
ism, both for those who affirm or deny it, is in part attributable to a prior
vision of a monolithic early Chinese state religion assumed by many of
the Confucian classics, including the Zhouli and the Liji. The Confucian
literati wholeheartedly embraced this vision, which was also inherited by
earlier generations of Western sinologists.41 Instead of that vision of a
monolithic early Chinese state religion embraced by the long tradition of
Confucian thought, recent scholars have exposed the religious environ-
ment of early China as a breeding ground for a vast repertoire of extreme-
ly divergent religious practices and traditions.42 In my study of the early

Chinese wu, I follow a small group of sinologists who attempt to take
account of local variations and ethnic identities, and for early China this
primarily concerns two broad cultural areas, the north and the south.
While the north is more easily identified as the heartland of that vision
of a monolithic Chinese state religion, the south can be recognized as
harboring a much more diverse collection of practices, traditions, and
ethnicities.43
Siberian shaman; he writes, “In order to understand whether Chinese wu possessed characteristics
akin to those of the Siberian shaman, Shang and Zhou texts will now be examined” (2002: 354).What
is missing in studies such as these is any notion of a shamanism with Chinese characteristics that
approaches it on its own terms without assessing it based on any essentialized ideal, Siberian or
otherwise. This does not, however, require that comparison should be dismissed, but it does suggest
that comparison should be value-neutral.
41
Cook attributes this to what she calls the Northern Bias: “The Northern Bias derives both from
the Chinese reverence for the written words of antiquity and from the fact that the most ancient of
surviving historical texts were written by court scholars with northern roots. As Confucianism was
established as state orthodoxy . . . these texts were adopted as classics and became the foundation for
Chinese historical consciousness. Since these texts framed the past in terms of three northern
dynasties—the Xia, the Shang, and the Zhou—southern contributions were ignored” (1999: 2).
42
Arguably the first modern sinologist to have attended to the religious differences of different
ethnicities was Eberhard (1968; original German edition 1943). Neither Chang nor Keightley can be
said to have left behind this monolithic vision in their studies of the religion of the Shang Dynasty,
but in their defense they relied on the limitations of what the archaeological record made available to
them at the time. Although some modern scholars have attended to the variety of early Chinese
religious practices and traditions (Harper 1995, 1999; Poo 1998), they tend to do so without
distinguishing local or cultural differences.
43
Hawkes was among the first Western sinologists to have taken the two-culture theory seriously,
specifically for introducing his translation of the Chuci, The Songs of the South; he writes, “‘Northern’
and ‘Southern’ are relative terms and therefore apt to be misleading. The people who produced the
songs of the Shi jing . . . certainly did not think of themselves as Northerners, though they lived in
what we should nowadays call North China: the North China Plain and the loess plateau to the west
of it. On the other hand, they would certainly have regarded the Chu noblemen who wrote the Chu ci
poems . . . as Southerners, though the kingdom of Chu occupied what to us is Central China: the
lakelands of the central valley of the Yangtze and the lands traversed by its tributaries, the Han and
the Xiang” (1985: 15–16).
Instead of the “Northern Bias” that Constance Cook (1999) finds in

much of modern sinology, I prefer to talk of a northern Zhou culture
(with its roots in the Shang dynasty) and a southern Chu culture (with its
likely roots in pre-Shang times). Beginning in the Zhou Dynasty, the
Zhou culture diligently worked to displace the Chu culture and replace it
with its own, primarily by a kind of politico-religious imperialism, and
this process was not completed until well into the Han dynasty (Sukhu
1999, 2012). Whereas the Zhou culture gives the powerful impression of
actually approximating that vision of a monolithic Chinese state religion,
Chu culture is entirely different; Barry Blakely writes, “From a very
meager base at the outset, Chu eventually absorbed over sixty states and a

number of tribal people. The result was a virtual empire, covering about
one-half of the Chinese world at the time. Within this empire were
various regional cultural traditions” (1999: 9). It is to this massive and
heterogeneous conglomeration which the term “Chu culture” applies,
and recognizing this southern Chu culture as something different from
that northern Zhou culture will allow a radical reconfiguration of how we
approach the question of the relationship between shamanism and the
early Chinese wu.44 Anna-Leena Siikala and Mihály Hoppál are cogent
on this point: “It must be remembered that beside the fixed religious
systems of the written cultures the religious systems of the ethnic religions
are heterogeneous; in place of one system we find multi-level, parallel and
overlapping traditions, parallel conceptual systems covering different
spheres of religion. On this basis we find an explanation for the attaching
of shamanism to religious systems differing in content” (1992: 18).
The danger, however, of taking these comments to an untenable
extreme is that shamanism can all too easily turn into a hodge-podge of
different shamanisms devoid of any core, making nonsense of compari-
son. Shamanism does have a core (direct contact or face-to-face commu-
nication between humans and non-bodily beings in a séance event for the
benefit of the community), but this also does not mean that it is a mono-
lithic entity unto itself; shamanism remains a plural rather than a singular
phenomenon. And yet how are we to account for the possibility of a uni-
versal archaic shamanism that has haunted scholars on the subject since
Eliade? Whether this universal archaic shamanism was a historically
actual reality that has filtered down through time, either by a process of
decadence (Eliade 1964) or transformation from which other religious
functionaries were born (Winkelman 1990), or contrarily if shamanism is
44
The massive study by Zhang (1994) is entirely cogent on this topic, and it paves the way for
future Western studies on shamanism in early China.
not a specifically archaic technique but rather the ongoing response of

various societies to constantly arising and specific circumstances (Lewis
1989; Taussig 1987) is very hard to decide. If, however, shamanism is all of
these things, then it is already very far from being a unitary phenomenon.
A fairly common distinction is that between the shamanism of
hunter-gathering societies and the shamanism of societies with animal
husbandry, political integration, or centralized authority. Roberte
Hamayon, based on her fieldwork undertaken in Siberia, writes, “A com-
parison of Siberian societies leads us to distinguish three types of sha-
manism, of which the first two correspond to shamanism in the full sense
of the term.” These are “hunting shamanism,” “pastoral shamanism,”
and “the third type [in which] shamanic phenomena are already peri-

pheralized” (1996: 78). Both hunting and pastoral shamanism are “only
present as an all-embracing system in archaic, tribal, or noncentralized
societies . . . Shamanistic phenomena [corresponding to her third type]
are also found in centralized societies. However, though shamanism is
primary in archaic societies, its manifestations in centralized societies are
not only fragmentary and altered but peripheral or even opposed to the
central authorities; this is a sign of the structural weakness of shamanism”
(Hamayon 1996: 76). Note that these types exist on a continuum from
earliest to latest.45 With these indications from Hamayon, I frame the
issue of early Chinese shamanism in terms of two competing types of au-
thority, shamanic and centralized.
The genetic functions of shamanism in non-centralized societies, en-
compassing both hunting and pastoral shamanism, are, generally speak-
ing, social subsistence and public health.46 The systems of authority
underlying the social structures of shamanism are local in nature and
devolve on the shamanic offices, where the authority of the shaman is ac-
cepted or rejected based on success in the séance; I. M. Lewis writes, “A
shaman’s position depends upon public recognition, and reputations can
be destroyed as easily as they can be built up” (1989: 136).47 Shamanic
45
Although Boileau, citing Hamayon (1990), writes, “The two models . . . do not correspond to
societies existing in two chronologically different stages: these different societies co-exist in the same
area at present” (2002: 352), Hamayon makes it clear that the first type predates that of the second.
Nonetheless, when Hamayon speaks of “the most archaic societies, those of the forest” (1990: 730 and
passim), her usage does not refer to the Stone Age. She also skirts the issue of whether or not this
shamanism of the “most archaic societies” is a universal feature of all archaic societies.
46
Next to being “a constitutive part of social organization” for non-centralized societies, Hamayon
writes that “the shamanic institution is in charge of the regular life-giving rituals, destined to ensure
the reproduction of society and of its natural resources” (1996: 77); by a small extension, I construe
this to cover both social subsistence and public health.
47
While not directly naming this as shamanic authority, Hamayon writes, “Usually a successful
practice is the condition for a shaman to be recognized as such. He may be deprived of his social role
authority is both sporadic and charismatic; further, punitive or retributive

violence in the bureaucratic and legal sense is foreign to the shamanic
office. The erosion or transformation of these forms and functions of sha-
manic authority are most clearly marked when non-centralized societies
come under the grip of centralized authority.
Centralized authority, for its part, is composed of three primary ele-
ments: ideologies of domination, sanctioned violence coercing allegiance,
and social and economic control demanding public submission and
service to it. Centralized authority finds its legitimacy in the success of its
ability to control and compel. Two primary elements of this success
involve making available adequate food and healthcare, both of which

serve the wider ends of maintaining allegiance and service. Centralized
authority negatively affects the exercise of shamanic authority by making
the shamanic office superfluous in relation to its genetic functions of
subsistence and health.
Shamanic authority, furthermore, has its basis in otherworldly sources
of power, and it is inimical to hegemonic forms of it exercised in state and
empire that compel submission in this world, resulting in the erosion of
shamanic authority together with the peripheralization, denigration, or
eradication of the shamanic offices.48 The exercise of shamanic authority
free from centralized authority has rarely been witnessed firsthand by
modern scholars, and when it has, shamanism “as a central symbolic
system” is always on the verge of turning into “shamanistic phenomenon”
(Hamayon’s third type).49
for lack of efficacy” (1993: 15). For her, acquiring shamanic authority is based on the shaman’s ability
to take up the shamanic role and perform it well, rather than on the efficacy of the shaman’s trance.
Lewis also understands shamanic authority to be based on public recognition of it, except he bases
success on the efficacy and depth of the shaman’s trance: “If, for example, a family head becomes
regularly subject to strikingly histrionic trances, which are interpreted as signs of divine possession,
and builds up a reputation for great divinatory powers . . . then he is likely to acquire renown at a
wider and lineage level” (1989: 136).
48
Here again I want to point out the misguided notion of the shaman-king that has played such an
important role in both Mesoamerican and Chinese studies of “archaic” shamanism, and reiterate
once again that Eliade never took the step of seeing the shaman as a wielder of political power. The
comments of Marcus are on the mark here: “When scholars call rulers ‘shaman-kings’ and discuss
their ‘mystical powers,’ they draw on a third inappropriate assumption: that the powers of kings is
based on contacting spirits and on mediating between the supernatural and human worlds.
Nonsense. . . . ‘Power’ is the ability to get people to do what they do not want to do, and it emanates
not from a trance but from the military, economic, judicial, and legal arms of the government” (2002:
409).
49
This is readily marked, in many cases, by writing; Hamayon notes, “Shamanic practice (is) an art
to exercise, as opposed to a liturgy to apply. . . . It appears as a deliberate refusal of dogmatism.
Shamanic societies, and shamans in non-shamanic societies, reject the use of writing for strictly
shamanic matters; this goes together with the absence of a church or clergy. On the whole,
shamanism seems to refuse its own codification” (1996: 88).
Caroline Humphrey provides deeper insight into the debate between

shamanic authority and centralized authority; she notes that “shamanism
has not always been in contradiction with the state: different manifesta-
tions of shamanic practice may support or undermine political authority
and may even emerge from the core of the state” (1996: 193). Humphrey,
in tandem with the likes of Hamayon and Lewis, does not speak of an es-
sentialized, universal, and singular shamanism, but rather of shamanisms
in the plural, and she does this without recourse to a value-based assess-
ment of the superiority or pureness of one against the other based on
essentialized notions of primordiality or sequence.50
Humphrey’s findings are not necessarily in contradiction to Hamayon’s

conception of the position of shamanism in non-centralized and centralized
societies, nor does it negate my conception of the tensions between sha-
manic authority and centralized authority, but it does add something impor-
tant to both considerations. Although shamanism is commonly found in
tribal or nomadic societies in which centralized authority is present but pe-
ripheral, it can also often be found in close proximity to the power-sustain-
ing mechanisms of centralized authority where it can even play important
roles in their continued activities. The claim that shamanism is inherently
inimical to central authority must be tempered somewhat.
Taking my cue from Humphrey’s remarks, I find two varieties of sha-
manism in the textual representations of the early Chinese wu. I call the
first independent shamanism, which demonstrates either an incipient
awareness, or an outright rejection, of centralized authority, and the wu are
presented as an independent religious functionary whose activities are not
subject to liturgical systematization under priests or rulers. I call the second
bureaucratic shamanism, which demonstrates its own submission to the
mechanisms of centralized authority, and the wu are presented as subordi-
nate to all other functionaries of the bureaucratic structures of state religion,
including priests, temple officers, sacrificers, diviners, and scribes. Both va-
rieties of shamanism give representations of direct contact or face-to-face
communication between humans and non-bodily beings in séance events.
Accounting for these two varieties of the early Chinese wu, I do not
necessarily take shamanism to represent the archaic techniques of ecstasy
of homo religiosus, because both varieties are imbued with a thoroughly
50
She describes two distinct varieties of shamanism that she locates in the regions of North Asia:
“(Patriarchal shamanism) concerned shamanic involvement in the symbolic reproduction of the
patrilineal lineage, clan, or polity. . . . This version focused on sky-spirits. . . . (Transformational
shamanism) operated by participation in all the forces thought to be immanent in the world. . . .
Rituals were performance-centered rather than liturgy-centered [as with the first variety]” (1996:
199–200).
historical character that is deeply implicated with the history of early

China. Early China was big but not that big, and it is reasonable to see
these two shamanisms as in some way related to each other. This then
points us back to a period of Chinese history before centralized authority
became manifest, in other words to the non-centralized and tribal socie-
ties predating the Shang Dynasty, many of which continued to exist until
they were eventually swallowed up, one by one, throughout the course of
the Shang, Zhou, and Han Dynasties. Is it appropriate to consider the
type of authority that was exercised in them?51
Hamayon asks, “Are shamanic societies unable to develop into state so-
cieties without having their shamanic practices and practitioners pushed
away into the fringes?” (1996: 77), and her answer is this: “So far as state

formation implies centralization, it cannot emerge from a shamanic society
unless shamanism has been led to fragment into a series of separate prac-
tices carried out by marginalized specialists” (1996: 88). When Chang
writes, “Shamans, therefore, were a crucial part of every state court . . . the
king himself was actually head shaman” (1983: 45), he shows himself as
one who has misread ancient shamanism by not recognizing the tension
between shamanic authority and centralized authority and falling into the
trap of identifying ancient shamans with early kings. Keightley is correct
not to attribute shamanic authority to the Shang court: “Whatever kind of
shamanism may still have been present at the late Shang court, it would, in
my view, have been relegated to a role of secondary importance as the
priest-kings devoted energies to, and placed their trust in, the regular medi-
ations upon which the strength of the dynasty depended” (1998: 828). The
findings of both scholars, however, beg the question of the position of sha-
manism and shamanic authority in pre-Shang times.52
51
Hamayon’s insight is that the free exercise of shamanic authority occurs only in non-centralized
societies and that this authority radically diminishes when such societies come into the orbit of
centralized authority. Lewis’s insight is that shamanism is also always available as a source of protest
or resistance to the exercise of authority against one’s in-group. This again raises the haunting
question: are these two forms of shamanism the same or different?
52
Which is not to say that they did not consider it, nor is it to say that other scholars have not
considered it, but there just is not a lot to work with in terms of the archaeological record; Keightley
seems to hit the right note where he mentions “shamanism’s diminishing role in the late Shang”
(1998: 827) that “had probably been taking place ever since the founding of the dynasty” during the
first formations of centralized authority, in which he mentions “older practices, exemplifying the link
between trance and social structure [that] may well have derived from shamanistic practices that had
flourished at an earlier, pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer stage of social development” (1998: 820). The
implication is that before the establishment of centralized authority, shamanic authority was the
norm. The question that is being begged here is the issue of archaic shamanism: Is it universal? Did
China have it? If so, did its ancient shamanic authority transform into centralized authority or are
they two entirely different forms of authority, radically inimical to each other with the former
displaced by the latter? I follow Hamayon.
The distinction between the bureaucratic and independent shaman-

isms of early China holds only until the end of the Han dynasty; already
by then the situation of the wu had undergone another radical transfor-
mation, in which they were systematically identified with the popular reli-
gion of the masses and became the targets of the active suppression by
the functionaries both of the Confucians and Daoists and, a bit later, the
Buddhists. The single element that runs throughout the entire history of
the textual representations of the Chinese wu both early and late is their
ability to initiate direct communication with spirits; they could not but
represent a more or less independent locus of authority. Texts like the
“Chunguan” demonstrate an early Chinese effort to harness shamanic

authority to centralized authority, but ultimately the state institutions of
Han and post-Han China could not easily co-exist with the wu in their
midst. The future of the wu lay with the masses, far away from the sup-
pressive urges of Chinese centralized authority.
The wu never went away. In later ages and even in Maoist China with
its anti-superstition regulations, the wu were persistently suppressed and
persecuted (Anagnost 1987; MacInnis 1989; Hutton 2001). At present,
one can once again find a hesitant reemergence of modern wu in China
(Fan 2006).
APPROACHES TO SHAMANISM IN EARLY CHINA

Obstacles in the study of shamanism in early China are in some ways
more poignant than in other cultural areas because our earliest knowledge
of ancient China shows it to be already saturated with myths of the
origins and development of centralized authority. These are the earliest
myths of Chinese civilization, and they describe the continuous line of
rulers and emperors that lead directly into the founding of the (semi-
mythical) Xia Dynasty (2070–1600 BCE), which in turn gave way to the
Shang, then the Zhou. These are not creation myths in the usual sense
because they do not speak of the origin of the world; they speak, rather, of
the origin and development of centralized authority and the Chinese
empire.53 Whether or not these myths reflect something real or imagined
(but certainly they partake of both), they seamlessly merge into actual
Chinese history soon after the founding of the Zhou. These myths begin
with the Three Augusts (variously listed as Fu Xi, Nu Wa, Sui Ren, Shen
53
Early Chinese myths of the creation of the world were eventually recorded, but not until the
Warring States, and the first textual indications of them are found in the Daodejing; see Michael
(2005, 2015). For more on the myths of the origins of Chinese civilization, see Lewis (2006, 2009);
Goldin (2008).
Nong, Zhu Rong, Gong Gong, or Huang Di) and the Five Emperors
(variously listed as Huangdi, Shao Hao, Zhuan Xu, Di Ku, Yao, Shun, or
Yu), and although the lists were fluid until the Han Dynasty, the template
of Three Augusts and Five Emperors was a defining feature of Chinese
mythology. The long lives of the Augusts and Emperors sequentially span
from the beginning of the third millennium to the founding of the Xia
Dynasty, at which point the line of the Three Augusts and Five Emperors
gives way to the dynastic lines of emperors (from Xia to Shang to Zhou).
These myths altogether account for every single year from 2852 BCE, the
date of first year of Fu Xi, to 1046 BCE, the first year of the Zhou (when
myth merges into history). These myths provide not only the traditional

Chinese conception of the origins and spread of centralized authority;
they are also of utmost importance for understanding the representations
of the early Chinese wu.
There are four positions that can be taken on the question of shaman-
ism in early China. The first affirms it as a pervasive and archaic feature
that was central in the formation of Chinese religion and politics.54 The
second affirms it as a non-systematic and eclectic tradition that was
outside of the formation of Chinese religion and politics that may or may
not have roots in an archaic shamanism.55 The third rejects the view that
it ever played a substantial role in Chinese religion and politics, even if it
may have existed in archaic times (a possibility that Keightley left
open).56 The fourth is a more agnostic position that neither fully affirms
54
This is Mathieu’s position: “The distribution of cults in ancient China allows us to imagine that
shamanism was not limited to a precise geographical region. Everything in fact leads us to suppose
that in spite of local variations, tied to the local flora and fauna, but also to the particularities of the
tribes, this practice covered the entirety of the Chinese territories in antiquity” (1987: 13).
55
This is Loewe’s position: “The shamans were not only concerned with invoking spirits and acting
as intermediaries between gods and men; they also possessed specialist powers as physicians who
could prevent or heal diseases. They could also stimulate fertility and assist in childbirth. They could
sometimes bring down spirits by means of impersonation; they performed ritual dances to promote
marriage, and by dance and music they invoked rain. They may have even have made themselves
invisible as part of the invocation, during which they would hold or brandish instruments or symbols
of jade” (1982: 104).
56
This is Mair’s position: “It has been customary for students of Chinese civilization to translate wu
as ‘shaman,’ but this is wrong on several counts. In the first place, the shaman was the leading
representative of a specific type of religious system practiced by Siberian and Ural-Altaic peoples
[citing Eliade]. Perhaps the most characteristic feature of this tradition was the shaman’s ecstatic
trance-flight to heaven during initiations and other rituals. The shaman also served the community as
a whole by retrieving the errant souls of sick people and escorting the spirits of the dead to the other
world. This is in contrast to the wu who were closely associated with the courts of various rulers and
who were primarily responsible for divination, astrology, prayer, and healing with medicines. Since all
that we know of the wu markedly distinguishes their role in Shang and Zhou society from that of
shamans in the communities where they were the most important spiritual leaders, it would seem
that we should seek a new translation of the term. I should like to propose that an exact equivalent of
wu is ‘magician’ or, better still, ‘mage’” ( 1990: 35).
nor denies shamanism in China.57 For this article, I focus on the first and
third positions, taking the first to represent full affirmation and the third
to represent full rejection.
Over and above the theoretical issues at stake in modern shamanism
studies, there remain a certain cluster of reasons specific to sinology that
can help explain the diversity of these positions on early Chinese shaman-
ism. These are what I call the Confucian Bias, the Eliadean Bias, and the
Text-choice Bias.
The majority of writings that have survived from early China, from in-
scriptions on bone and bronze to calligraphy on silk and slips, were over-
whelmingly produced by the literate members of the northern Zhou

culture who were deeply invested in witnessing a China unified under cen-
tralized authority. For the most part, these writings looked upward to what
could be, not downward to what actually was, and they display a strong dis-
interest in any serious engagement with the activities and beliefs of the
common people, including something that may or may not be construed
as shamanism. This bias was embraced both by latter-day Confucian litera-
ti as well as a good number of modern sinologists, Eastern and Western
alike.58
The Confucian Bias is the hesitation to recognize and thus validate re-
ligious phenomena that run counter to, or that go beyond, the bounds of
what can be deemed acceptable within the limits of centralized authority
and state sanctioned religious activities. These activities primarily concern
sacrifice and petitions directed to the ancestral spirits or the spirits of
nature. The Confucian tradition has two common adjectives to describe
other ritual events, namely xie, “unorthodox,” and yin, “lascivious,” and
the official application of either of these terms to any ritual event immedi-
ately opened it to state interference.
This bias against ritual events that go beyond the sanitized bounds of
one-way communication and sacrifice from humans to spirits was more
or less absorbed wholesale by the Jesuits beginning in the sixteenth
century. This was due in large part to their decision to direct their mis-
sionary efforts to the Confucian Mandarin culture closely associated with
57
This is Falkenhausen’s position: “One should emphasize, furthermore, that ‘shamanism’ is not a
particular kind of religion, but a religious technique that can be—and has been throughout history—
employed in the service of the most diverse theologies. . . . The subject of ‘shamanism’ in ancient
China remains deeply controversial. Although I remain unconvinced by overly enthusiastic
treatments . . . I also cannot help finding deep conceptual flaws in those assessments . . . that
downplay or completely deny its relevance to understanding ancient Chinese religious practices”
(2006: 47).
58
Harper (1995, 1999) and Poo (1998) provide studies of early Chinese records that prove the
exceptions to this rule.
the court, rather than to the popular masses (Mungello 1989; Jensen
1997). One can imagine that they had little appetite to contend with the
popular religions at the grass-root levels of Chinese society, infused as
these were with practices that smacked of European paganism. This
Confucian Bias was later to be absorbed by the nineteenth- and twenti-
eth-century Western missionaries and sinologists in China, who also hes-
itated to attend to Daoism and Buddhism in their popular forms, much
less the popular, local religions centering on the wu.59 With the advent of
Maoist China and the concomitant exodus of Western missionaries and
sinologists from China, the following generations of sinologists holding
academic positions in Europe and America also did not share a great in-
terest in studying Chinese popular religion.60

The Eliadean Bias provides sinologists with an acceptable standard on
which to base their claims about the presence or absence of shamanism
in early China, and since Eliade was familiar with some of the early
Chinese classics, primarily in their modern French translations, and also
the work of De Groot, he had a lot to say about it (1964: 447–461).
The Eliadean Bias has two separate parts, and the first part concerns
Eliade’s claim about shamanism as “a primary phenomenon”: “We have
termed the ecstatic experience a ‘primary phenomenon’ . . . we would
consider it fundamental in the human condition, and hence known to
the whole of archaic humanity” (1964: 504). If shamanism were universal
to archaic societies, then China will also have to be included; thus, he
mentions “the shamanic technique and ideology of protohistorical
China” (1964: 450). Scholars who affirm a pervasive shamanism in early
China often rely on this this part of the Eliadean Bias.
The second part of the Eliadean Bias concerns his strict distinction
between shamanism as a technique of ecstasy that was not the same as
possession: “Its structure is different from the ecstatic experience charac-
teristic of shamanism in the strict sense. And indeed, we can see how
‘possession’ could develop from an ecstatic experience: while the
shaman’s soul . . . was travelling in the upper or lower worlds, ‘spirits’
could take possession of his body. But it is difficult to imagine the oppo-
site process, for, once the spirits have taken ‘possession’ of the shaman,
his personal ecstasy . . . is halted” (1964: 507). Although Eliade discussed
many examples of ecstatic flight, vestiges of China’s archaic shamanism,
59
Girardot (2002) has given the story of one of these giants of nineteenth-century sinology, James
Legge. There were notable exceptions to the Confucian Bias during this period, including De Groot
(1910), Granet (1926), and several studies published in the 1920s by Maspero (1971).
60
Although there were notable exceptions here as well, and Welch (1967) is an outstanding
example.
he did not associate them with the wu: “Doubtless the wu was not exactly the
same as a shaman; but he incarnated the spirits. . . . It is with incarnating
ghosts that ‘possession’ proper begins” (1964: 454). By wu, he specifically re-
ferred to “the exorcists, mediums, and ‘possessed’ persons . . . [who] repre-
sent the aberrant shamanic tradition” (1964: 450). Shamanism was a heroic
venture, and possession was a decisive manifestation of its decadence.
Defining shamanism as a “technique of ecstasy” (1964: 4) whereby
the soul “is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky or descend to
the underworld” (1964: 5), then possession is not that, and sinologists
who deny pervasive shamanism in early China often base their claim on
this distinction. Separating shamanism from possession changes the very

terms of the debate, which is now about possession and not shamanism;
Boileau writes that “the Siberian shaman does not fall into this category [of
possession] because he is fully in control of the séance; therefore even if the
wu were a kind of possessed person during healing, it would be difficult to
say that his performance were akin to that of a Siberian shaman” (2002:
360). And with this, the wu are automatically disqualified from shamanism
and assigned to possession; Lothar von Falkenhausen writes that “shamans
[is] a term by now so loaded that I hesitate to use it. . . . The wu [is] a term
that may be rendered as ‘shaman’ or, perhaps, less controversially, as ‘spirit
medium’” (1995: 279–280).61
Now that shamanism has been left behind and possession is the issue,
the next move in the Eliadean Bias is to claim that early China did not
even have possession. Speaking of the wu in “Chuyu, xia,” Keightley
writes, “It is likely that, if we are in the presence of shamans at all, we may
be dealing with shamans . . . who are possessed rather than those who
voyage to another world” (1983: 8). He then goes on to discuss the
opening section of this text, where the wu call down spirits: “It should be
noted that . . . it was only because the xi and wu [here referring to male
and female wu] had such powers [namely, ‘a moral, probing intelligence’]
61
Falkenhausen is very careful about ascribing even possession to the wu: “While the Zhou li is,
thus, quite explicit about who the Spirit Mediums are and what they do, the text never indicates how
they interacted with supernatural powers” (1995: 294). He goes on to say that the reason that
traditional Chinese commentaries “failed to mention explicitly the fact that the Spirit Mediums go
into trance [and become possessed] was because they thought this obvious, and because their readers
would have had ample opportunity to observe mediumistic phenomena in the field” (1995: 395). In
another piece, he does say that “I find it quite conceivable that pre-reform sacrifices [referring to ‘the
Late Western Zhou ritual reform’] included communion with the spirits by a medium in a trance”
(2004: 476). Keightley gives his stamp of approval to this reading suggested by Falkenhausen, if and
only if there was no possession of the wu (1998: 818, 827). While neither definitively affirming nor
denying possession (yet remaining very open to the possibility of it), note that the question of
shamanism has now become the question of possession. For a similar treatment that rejects
shamanism but affirms possession in twelfth-century China, see Davis (2001).
that the spirits were said to have descended to them. . . . There is no talk
here of the kind of trance, possession, or fresh insight generally associated
with shamanism” (Keightley 1983: 8–9). Puett (2002: 80–121), finally,
denies shamanism to early China on more general grounds by affirming
that the belief systems of early China were committed to radical views of
spiritual transcendence in which there was no space for humans and
spirits to meet; the worldview of early China was not constructed of three
separate realms connected by an axis mundi, a staple of Eliade’s Siberian
shamanism, so neither shamanism nor possession could have existed in
early China.
Modern shamanism theory has not been content to maintain the

strict separation between shamanism and possession, although it has
continued to produce various definitions of shamanism built upon
various conceptions of ecstasy and trance that are not limited to soul
flight; possession is regularly seen as a typical element of the shamanic
séance. Hultkrantz was a leading voice in overcoming the strict separa-
tion between shamanism and possession: “Mircea Eliade . . . says that
any ecstatic cannot be considered a shaman, only an ecstatic whose soul
is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the un-
derworld can retain this reputation. I agree entirely. . . . However, the
morphology of the ecstasy cannot, as such, constitute the mark of sha-
manism. Eliade’s definition leaves out the many cases in Siberia and
North America where the shaman does not depart from his body, but
waits for the arrival of the spirits” (1973: 28–29). He says even more
directly, “Although some authors make a distinction between trance, or
ecstasy, and possession, there is no reason to do so” (1978: 19).62
Gilbert Rouget provides a groundbreaking approach for conceptualiz-
ing the relation between shamanism and possession, and ecstasy and
trance. He convincingly demonstrates that shamanism typically begins
with possession, in two senses. First, those individuals who are called by
62
Note that his definition of shamanism is still built on the notion of ecstasy and trance: “Ecstasy . . .
should be interpreted as a state of trance, a psychogenic, hysteroid mode of reaction that forms itself
according to the dictates of the mind and that evinces various depths in various situations. It thus
swings between frenzy and hilarious rapture on one hand, death-like comatose passivity on the other,
and a mild inspirational trance in between” (Hultkrantz 1973: 28). Notions of trance and ecstasy,
which have of late given way to notions of ASC, are such a central feature of definitions of shamanism
that it is useless to single them out. Hamayon has provided a radical critique of these terms: “Most
definitions and descriptions of shamanism contain terms such as ‘trance’ and ‘ecstasy,’ and place
shamanism in the same category of religious phenomena as spirit possession. . . . However, the
meaning of these terms is rarely specified, nor is their use usually justified, as though their
appropriateness had been established in advance once and for all” (1993: 3–4). Note her recognition
that modern shamanism theory has collapsed many of the differences injected by Eliade into the
space between shamanism and possession.
the spirits to become shamans initiate their career by being possessed by

them; the successful shaman goes on to master the possessing spirits by
making them his “auxiliary spirits.” Second, the shamanic séance also
typically begins with the shaman calling down the auxiliary spirits into
his or her body; having done so, the shaman then can begin the journey
to the spirit world in order to have direct communication with them.
Rouget writes, “Shamanic trance and possession trance . . . can thus
alternate in one and the same person. Or, if one prefers, one and the same
person can undergo in succession these two forms of trance” (1985: 23).
The Text-choice Bias is the final consideration to which can be attrib-
uted the diverse range of views about the issue of shamanism in early

China. Literary representations of the wu are numerous in the surviving
texts of early China, but three works stand out for the richness of their
depictions, namely the “Chuyu, xia,” the “Chunguan,” and the “Jiu Ge.”
Most sinologists who make claims about shamanism in early China,
whether affirming or denying, look first of all to the “Chuyu, xia,” but
they come away with different interpretations of the words jiang zhi.
Those who deny shamanism read it to mean that the spirits descended
but did not take possession of the wu, while those who affirm shamanism
read it to mean that the spirits descended and did take possession of
them. Those who deny shamanism (and possession) in the “Chuyu, xia”
then move on to discuss the “Chunguan,” in which the wu, represented as
a kind of proto-priest not necessarily being possessed, perform various
kinds of public exorcism within a bureaucratic structure of state religion.
On the other hand, those who affirm shamanism in the “Chuyu, xia”
then move on to discuss the “Jiu Ge,” in which the wu are shown per-
forming séance events during which they either ascend to the spirit world
to communicate with spirits or are possessed by them, far removed from
the structures of state religion.
The Text-choice Bias is recognizable in the fact that serious studies of
the early Chinese wu typically start with the “Chuyu, xia” (with their dif-
fering readings of it) and either move to the “Chunguan” (for scholars
who deny shamanism) or to the “Jiu Ge” (for those who affirm it). To
date as far as I am aware, there has been no sustained scholarly analysis in
a Western language of the early Chinese wu that accounts for each of
these three writings in relation to the others (much less a comprehensive
study of the wu as they appear in all early Chinese writings), either to
affirm or deny an early Chinese shamanism. My earlier distinction
between a bureaucratic shamanism incorporated in the structures of state
religion and an independent shamanism demonstrating a limited recog-
nition of centralized authority attempts to account precisely for the differ-
ent depictions of the wu in the “Chunguan” and the “Jiu Ge.” There are
possible arguments to be made claiming that either one or both varieties

derive from an archaic Chinese shamanism (echoed in the “Chuyu,
xia”?), or that either one or both do not, but such arguments have not as
of yet been put forth. This is the Text-choice Bias in full clarity.
If it is possible to argue that the activities of the wu in the “Chuyu,
xia” can be definitively identified as a form of shamanism, then we are
left with an important question: are these two varieties of early Chinese
shamanism, bureaucratic and independent, related to each other, derived
forms of an archaic Chinese shamanism, or do they in fact share nothing
in common, with the possibility that what I call bureaucratic shamanism,
best represented in the “Chunguan,” refers to nothing more than the

non-shamanic and non-possessive activities of certain people called wu
who were able to move spirits based on abilities other than those typically
ascribed to shamans and mediums, what Victor Mair would have us call
“mages” (1990: 35)? However this question will be answered, what then
does this say about the shamanic activities witnessed in the “Jiu Ge”? Are
these then to be related to an archaic Chinese shamanism, or are they
simply an aberration or flowering of later-day early Chinese religiosity?
Finally, how can these two seemingly separate varieties of wu collectively
be seen to have anything in common with the wu depicted in the
“Chuyu, xia”?
SHAMANISM IN THE “CHUYU, XIA”

In conclusion, I discuss the importance of these distinctions for the
study of early Chinese shamanism through a partial analysis of some of
the striking claims made about the wu in the first sections of the “Chuyu,
xia.”63 It is important to note that this text was written over two thousand
years ago, and it in turn discusses a time already more than two thousand
years in the past.
What is ironic is that Eliade’s final claim that the wu was not a
shaman was based on a mistaken translation of a single line of the
“Chuyu, xia,” qi zhi neng shang xia (bi yi . . . ), which Eliade read as
“[They] were able ‘to rise to higher spheres and descend into the lower’
(that is, ascend to heaven and descend to hell)” (1964: 452–453), and he
63
“In antiquity, humans and spirits did not intermingle. . . . [Humans] were concentrated, reverent,
loyal, and correct. Their knowledge could bring close what is appropriate above and below. . . . Because
they were thus, the luminous spirits were able to descend into them. The men into whom the spirits
descended were called xi, and the women were called wu. They established the sites and positions in
hierarchical order for the spirits, and also made for them appropriately colored vessels and seasonal
garments. After that, they ordered the descendants of the former sages . . . to be priests. They ordered
the descendants of the famous clans . . . to be temple officers” (Zuo 2005: 274–276).
finds in this solid textual evidence of the ecstatic flight of the archaic
shaman.64 As for the next line, “intelligent shen [spirits] descended into
them; if a shen thus settled in a male person, this was called a hih [xi],
and if it settled in one of the other sex, this was called a wu” (1964: 452),
Eliade makes a radical distinction between male xi and female wu, and he
identifies archaic shamanism with the former (and possession with the
latter)65; that was a heroic shamanism that “very soon gave way to many
parallel experiences that finally faded into the mass of ‘possessions’” (1964:
452). With this, we have all three of Eliade’s primary claims: a universal
and archaic shamanism that includes China, the distinction between sha-
manism and possession, and the denial of shamanism to the wu.

Derk Bodde also identified the shaman and the wu by, ironically,
basing his argument on Eliade’s general claims about archaic shamanism
while rejecting his specific claims about the wu. Bodde accepts the notion
of an archaic “fall” that separated heaven and earth that only shamans are
able to restore or overcome, and he reads the “Chuyu, xia” as attending
to exactly this point as articulated by Eliade; he writes, “It can hardly be
doubted that our two Chinese texts [the “Lü Xing” and the “Chuyu, xia”]
are reflections of these widespread concepts. For in them, too, the cutting
of communication between Heaven and Earth follows upon a ‘ritual
fault’” (1961: 382).66
Bodde set the stage for the two classic and opposed positions, namely
Chang’s affirmation (1983) and Keightley’s denial (1989). Oddly, Chang
64
Literally, “Their/ knowledge/ could/ above/ below/ (bring close/ appropriate).” As Bodde writes,
“In his Le chamanisme, pp. 396–97, Eliade has also discussed this second text [the “Chuyu, xia”],
basing himself, however, on an inexact translation which has led to certain misunderstandings on his
part” (1961: 393). He relied on De Groot’s translation (1910: 1190–1191), which put the last two
words, bi yi, as the first two words of the next sentence. The idea behind this misreading has
continued to lead scholars such as Chang (1983) and Tong (2002) into what Falkenhausen has called
“overly enthusiastic treatments” (2006: 47) of early Chinese shamanism in the “Chuyu, xia.” Note
that this misreading still survives in some contemporary translations; see, for example, Lin, who does
account for the last two words: “ . . . [they] knew how to ascend and descend and make
comparisons” (2009: 401).
65
“But if all this seems to confirm the existence of a ‘male’ shamanism in the protohistorical
period, it does not necessarily follow that shamanism of the wu type—which strongly encouraged
‘possession’—is not a magico-religious phenomenon dominated by women” (1964: 452).
66
For Eliade, “the fall” refers to a mythic time when heaven and earth were closely situated next to
each other and it was much easier for shamans, or even all people, to ascend to heaven, but due to
some ritual fault on the part of those early shamans, they separated and it was only the shamans who
could ascend to the heavens by way of ladders or rainbows or bridges or trees or mountains (the axis
mundi); Eliade writes, “Though indirectly, these myths refer to a time when communication between
heaven and earth was possible; in consequence of a certain event or ritual fault, the communication
was broken off; but [shamans] are nevertheless able to re-establish it. This myth of a paradisal period
brutally abolished by the ‘fall’ of man will engage our attention more than once in the course of our
study; it is in one way or another bound up with certain shamanic conceptions” (1964: 133).
used Bodde’s translation of the line qi zhi neng shang xia bi yi, “[They]
make meaningful collation of what lies above and below” (Bodde 1961:
392; Chang 1983: 44), rather than provide his own translation which in
all likelihood would have read it to refer to ecstatic flight. Where Chang
most significantly goes beyond Bodde is in his injection of the political
into his reading of the “Chuyu, xia”: “This myth is the most important
textual reference to shamanism in ancient China, and it provides the
crucial clue to understanding the central role of shamanism in ancient
Chinese politics” (1983: 45). Chang sees here an archaic shamanism that
he identifies with the wu (the same archaic shamanism that Eliade identi-
fied only with the xi), and because the wu as shamans enjoyed ecstatic
flight, they were uniquely qualified to become rulers: “Heaven is where all

the wisdom of human affairs lies. . . . Access to that wisdom was, of
course, requisite for political authority. . . . Since heaven had been severed
from earth, only those who controlled that access had the wisdom—hence
the authority—to rule. Shamans, therefore, were a crucial part of every state
court; in fact, scholars of ancient China agree that the king himself was
actually head shaman” (1983: 45).
Keightley denies any evidence of shamanism in the “Chuyu, xia.” He
reads it as describing the bureaucratic ordering of ritual functionaries for
the performance of state religion, in which the spirits silently descend to
the ritual arena to partake of the sacrifices and then silently leave; he
writes, “Guan’s words [the speaker] need not—and indeed, should not—
be taken as an account of general, unrestricted shamanistic communica-
tion between heaven and earth, available to all. He provides, rather, an
account of properly delimited religious procedures and the desirable
moral and technical characteristics of those specially endowed ritualists
who should perform them. Access to the spirits depended upon the
correct ordering of the rituals and invocations. There is nothing particu-
larly shamanistic about the quality of the religious experience described”
(1989: 10).
The positions taken by contemporary sinologists on the question of
shamanism in early China for the most part directly emerge from the con-
clusions drawn by Chang’s and Keightley’s reading of the “Chuyu, xia.”
Those who affirm a pervasive shamanism in early China and who identify
that with the wu often rely on two elements highlighted by Chang, namely
that the wu undertook ecstatic journeys to the heavens, and that they were
closely identified with rulers.67 Those who deny a pervasive shamanism
67
This is the view held by Childs-Johnson and Tong. Childs-Johnson writes, “The evidence for the
king’s role as shaman priest in invocation rites, in particular, and his singular power of spirit
communication with Shang Di and godlike royal ancestors strongly supports the interpretation that
in early China often rely on the two elements highlighted by Keightley,

namely that the wu did not undergo possession, and that they are a kind
of non-shamanic ritual specialist.68 I find neither of the elements high-
lighted by Chang actually present in the text, and I also claim that
Keightley misreads the text by his denial of possession in it.69 In the end,
I argue that there is something else altogether going on in the “Chuyu,
xia” that does not concern ecstatic journeys (contra Chang) but that does
concern shamanism and possession (contra Keightley).
The “Chuyu, xia” opens by describing the superior qualities of those
earliest people who would later become wu: they were remarkable for
their concentration (qi), reverence (su), loyalty (zhong), and correctness

(zheng). Note the deeply religious nature of these qualities: concentrated
in their efforts to communicate with the spirits, reverent in their dealings
with them, loyal to the spirits rather than to any other authority, and ritu-
ally correct in their séance performances. Being suitable mouthpieces for
the spirits, it can be argued that they were personally selected by them.70
The text then has the phrase ming shen jiang zhi. How we read this
phrase is decisive for understanding the text as a whole, because it pro-
vides the only internal representation of the actual mechanics of the
Shang art and religion were based on an earlier tradition of shamanism” (1995: 91). For his part,
Tong makes extraordinary use of the “Chuyu, xia” as a historical record documenting the birth of
Chinese civilization: “The events described in this passage [from the “Chuyu, xia”] thus occurred
precisely on the eve of the emergence of civilization and state in North China. It is clear that wu
formed an important component in the dominant groups of that time” (2002: 44). He uses the
“Chuyu, xia” to construct an exhaustive picture of an original archaic shamanism that transformed
into a royal shamanism that, in turn, further transformed into the major cultural components of
Chinese culture, including writing, astronomy, calendrics, healing, music, law, the performing and
visual arts, and myth and legend, as well as the various key functionaries of religion and politics.
68
This is the view held by Puett and Pankenier. Puett writes: “I will follow David Keightley in
arguing that the passage [from ‘Chuyu, xia’] in fact has little to do with shamanism. Indeed, far from
referring to a mixing of humans and spirits, the text is explicitly oriented toward defining humans
and spirits as, normatively, separate. . . . Clearly, this is far removed from shamanism. The text is not
describing the descent of spirits into humans, and its only reference to humans ascending is a
negative one: it argues against any such attempt. Contrary to Chang’s interpretation, the text is
claiming that spirits and humans should be separated” (2002: 105–107). Pankenier writes: “I suggest
that the ‘Chuyu’ passage, rather than providing a clue to the central role of shamanism in ancient
Chinese politics, actually accounts for the co-optation and subsequent decline of actual shamanistic
practices among the ruling elite as a consequence of the development of a new kind of esoteric and
highly specialized knowledge of heaven perhaps more commensurate with centralized state
formation” (1995: 151).
69
Sukhu writes with Keightley at least partly in mind: “There are some sinologists, however, who
subscribe to a much narrower conception of shamanism, according to which shamans practice
intentional spirit possession. They object to translating wu as shaman on the grounds that wu were
not possessed by spirits. This opinion is based on a faulty understanding of ancient sources” (2012: 75).
70
Might we see in this a famous trait of shamanism, namely the selection of the future shaman by
the spirits? Keightley, however, reads this as describing their moral and bureaucratic excellence, and
their devotion to the court (1989: 8).
ritual event upon which the rest of the text is based. It is, therefore, easy
to see why its meaning has been contested, and I translate it as “the numi-
nous spirits descended into them.”71 The text continues: “They estab-
lished the sites and positions in hierarchical order for the spirits, and also
made for them appropriately colored vessels and seasonal garments.” If
the spirits descended into them, then the reason for the wu to prepare the
ritual arena and make these garments is obvious: they were individually
responsible for contacting and serving the spirits using their specific
means of calling each individual spirit down into them, during which
time they wore the sacred garments favored by that spirit.72 After de-
scending into them, the spirits, through the mouths and bodies of the wu,
then gave instructions about the way to prepare “the sites and positions”

of the ritual arena for the séance performances.
71
Bodde translates the phrase as “the spirits would descend into them” (1961: 390), marking the
spirits’ taking possession of the wu. Keightley translates it as “the spirits descended to them” (1989:
12), describing the arrival of the spirits to the ritual arena where “them” refers to the wu acting as
ritual specialists without being taken possession of. He finds a passage in the Zuo Zhuan that uses the
exact same phrase, in which the context makes it clear that the spirits descended to a certain state
only to witness its activities. About the passage at hand, he writes that the spirits “were descending in
order to receive sacrifices in the proper, unmixed-up way from the perspicacious practitioners [the
wu] who understood the importance of good order. There is no evidence of possession, ecstasy, or
flight” (1989: 13). Puett affirms this reading: “This is the passage that Bodde read as ‘the spirits would
descend into them’ and that Chang used to build his argument for shamanism. In fact, however, the
wording jiang zhi simply means ‘to descend and arrive’—which is exactly what spirits are supposed
to do when effective ritual specialists entice them with the proper blandishments” (2002: 107).
Keightley’s refusal to read possession or shamanism into the phrase was not without traditional
Chinese commentarial precedent, although Lin (2009: 397–399) argues that Zheng Xuan, the great
Han Dynasty commentator who did discuss this passage in his commentary to the Zhouli, clearly
read this phrase to mean possession. In his study of the Chuci, Sukhu demonstrates how the verb
jiang was reinterpreted by Wang Yi in his commentary to the “Lisao” to mean “descending (from the
body of my mother),” in other words to be born (2012: 36), and he attributes this reworking of the
meaning of jiang to the Confucian commentarial tradition’s distaste for possession. Citing several
instances of jiang referring to possession in early Chinese texts, he writes, “In classical Chinese, spirit
possession is usually indicated in sentences where a spirit is the subject of the verb ‘to descend’ ( jiang
or xia) and the object is a person. . . . Here [citing Hanshu 25] again the state of possession is
described with a verb meaning ‘to descend upon’ and a direct object, zhi, or ‘her.’ A similar formula is
used in the Guoyu [‘Chuyu, xia’] in the earliest extant, and most frequently cited, account of what
happens to people who become wu. That text tells us that ming shen jiang zhi ‘the bright spirits
descend on them,’ which is to say the spirits possess them” (2012: 76).
72
The “Chuyu, xia” nowhere mentions music, but it is not difficult to imagine that it too had a
central role in the séance; Rouget writes, “Let us say that, in possession, music is the condition sine
qua non of the trance experience. This is so for two reasons. First, because possession trance is a
change of identity, because that change of identity has no meaning for the subject unless his new
identity is recognized by everyone, and because it is the music that signals it. Second, because this
new identity must be manifested and because dance is (usually with costume, but not always) its
principal and frequently sole expression” (1985: 324). I am persuaded this is also the reason for the
special attention that the text gives to “the sacred garments” worn by the wu during the possession
period.
The text then posits a transitional phrase, er hou, meaning “subse-

quently” or “after that,” and it goes on to depict the original designations
of two other religious functionaries, the priests (zhu) and the temple offi-
cers (zong). The sentences in which they are designated do not clearly
specify by whom they are designated: “They ordered the descendants of
former sages . . . to be priests,” and “They ordered the descendants of
the famous clans . . . to be temple officers.”73 This “They” is ambiguous,
but if indeed “the numinous spirits descended into (the wu)” and pos-
sessed them, then in context (“after that”) it can only be the spirits speak-
ing through the mouths of the wu who are designating certain people as
priests and temple officers during that same séance event.74 In effect, the

text is attributing a divine origin to the structure and practice of Chinese
state religion by showing that it was instituted, not by ancient, all-too-
human shamans or sages, but by the will of the spirits (speaking through
the possessed wu) at a time before there were institutionalized priests and
temple officers able to perform the kind of rituals that could be sanc-
tioned by centralized authority and state religion.
The primary religious function of priests is the performance of rituals
for the ancestors and the spirits that require no face-to-face communica-
tion with them. These ritual performances (no longer séances) include
sacrifices, offerings, prayers, songs, devotions, and various other liturgical
activities. The primary religious function of the temple officers is the
management of the objects of the different rituals, including the fruits of
the harvest, the sacrificial animals, the ritual jades and vessels, and even
the placement of fans and screens, presumably within the ancestral halls
and temples to the spirits. With the institutionalization of these two func-
tionaries, we have a more or less comprehensive picture of the structures
of ancient Chinese state religion, as this is imagined by the text, and
the wu are no longer recognized: shamanic authority has given way to
centralized authority.
73
Although the grammar of these two sentences is identical, Keightley translates them somewhat
differently; for the first he writes: “After that, if there were descendants of those former sages . . . one
made them Invocators,” and for the second: “By employing the descendants of famous clans, those . . .
became Temple Officers” (1989: 36). In Keightley’s translation, it is unclear by whom or whose
authority the priests and temple officers were named to their positions, because they were the
descendants of the same wu, where he takes er hou to mean generations later.
74
Rouget writes, “During trance, the subject is thought to have acquired a different personality: that
of a god, spirit, genius, or ancestor . . . who has taken possession of the subject, substituted itself for
him, and is now acting in that subject’s place. . . . For a longer or shorter period the subject then
becomes the god. He is the god. We can call this possession in the strict sense of the word” (1985: 26).
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Shamanism Theory and the

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APPROACHES TO THE SHAMAN, SHAMANISM,

came into existence.1 Following a period of relative silence concerning the

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mountains, collecting magical medicinal herbs to treat illness and confer

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institution. Eschewing etymological analyses of the ancient origins of the

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Despite a formidable and still growing body of scholarship on the ap-

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representations of direct contact (possession) or face-to-face communica-

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shamanism anywhere to be found.18 The question is not how closely

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of a certain type of religiosity that have exerted a profound influence on

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to any of these developmental lines. Coming to an understanding of the

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usage has a concrete ethnographical reality which, however, should not in

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activities. In my opinion, the essential and defining feature of the shaman

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human civilization in which notions of the decline or displacement of a

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shamanism.37 It is an imaginary construct, but saying this is to take

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Judgments as to the presence or absence, fullness or decadence, or

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SHAMANIC AUTHORITY AND CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY

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Instead of the “Northern Bias” that Constance Cook (1999) finds in

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not a specifically archaic technique but rather the ongoing response of

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authority is both sporadic and charismatic; further, punitive or retributive

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Caroline Humphrey provides deeper insight into the debate between

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historical character that is deeply implicated with the history of early

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The distinction between the bureaucratic and independent shaman-

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APPROACHES TO SHAMANISM IN EARLY CHINA

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the spirits to become shamans initiate their career by being possessed by

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possible arguments to be made claiming that either one or both varieties

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SHAMANISM IN THE “CHUYU, XIA”

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in early China often rely on the two elements highlighted by Keightley,

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