Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History
of Religions.
http://www.jstor.org
John T. Hitchcock A NEPALESE
SHAMANISM AND THE
CLASSIC INNER
ASIAN TRADITION
15 A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (London: Sidgwick & Jackson,
1954), p. 491.
16 Eliade, op. cit., p. 410.
17 Ibid., pp. 111-15.
18 Ibid.,
pp. 119-20.
19 Ibid., pp. 200, 275.
152
motion-picture film. The recently deceased father of the Magar
family with whom I was living had been a shaman, and a boy from
his lineage who lived nearby had inherited his gift and was learning
the technique. This boy and the members of the deceased shaman's
family gave me much information, and, although shamanism was
not a focus of the research, I was able to interview at some length
two Metalworker shamans who were neighbors. On the basis of
data from these two castes, it is clear that their shamans work
within the same tradition.
Many features of the Bhuji shaman's costume parallel those
found in Inner Asia. Using the costume of a Metalworker shaman
as an example, there was an impressive headdress made of Monal
pheasant tail feathers, and fastened to the back of the jacket were
whole skins of both Monal and Kaleej pheasants-both of which
are birds of the high Himalaya. Another obvious ascensional
symbol on the back of the jacket was two flying squirrels' pelts.
Though not made of reindeer hide, the jacket was fashioned from
the skin of an equally swift animal, the Himalayan mountain goat
(ghoral). Two horns of this animal hung from the back of the
jacket, and the circular drumhead as well as the thongs securing it
also were made of mountain goat hide. These thongs were laced
using a horn of the goat as a punch, and the pattern the lacings
formed was said to represent both the horn itself and the feet of a
bird. Forming a fringe around the bottom of the jacket were
circular and lenticular iron plates, representing the sun and moon.
Although the horse did not figure in this shamanic tradition, the
animal seems to have been suggested, for bells were an important
part of the costume, being interspersed among the iron plates as
well as sewn around the jacket's neck. Riding or pack horses in
the region always wore bells, and the sound was associated with
their movement.
To achieve the trance state during which he acted as diviner and
healer, a Nepalese shaman drummed and sang and frequently, at
the outset, got up and danced. During the all-night course of a
seance, he performed a variety of rituals, depending on the needs
of his clients. Some of them were long and involved the singing of
songs that told of the First Shaman and happenings in the
Golden Age. One such ritual was done for a client who had to be
lifted up into the heavens so that he could remove an obstruction
(gaunda) that was adversely affecting his life. (This is a different
problem than an adverse state [dashd] of one's stars [graha]). While
the shaman drummed and sang a long narrative song about the
153
Nepalese Shamanism and Classic Inner Asian Tradition
First Shaman-a song he interrupted periodically with a shout of
Ho!-the patient's foot at each shout was moved from notch to
notch along a small piece of wood called a "climbing pole" (lisnu).
These poles are used for crossing a wall or for getting from one
level of a house or barn to another. The model used in this ritual
had nine notches cut into one side and seven cut into the opposite
side.20 During the shaman's song, he shouted sixteen times, and
the client's foot was moved up one side of the lisnu and down the
other. When this part of the ritual was complete, the shaman
entered a trance state. The client got onto a winnowing tray and
helpers, who were members of his family, lifted him up while the
shaman danced underneath, tossing the tray up and down on his
back. The ritual took place on the porch of a house, so that a rope
and an image could be suspended from the ceiling. The image was
a carved wooden model representing the sun and the moon. Sus-
pended a little beneath it, there was a lanceolate leaf of the
Sonchampa tree (Michelia champaca). While being bounced up and
down, the patient grasped the rope to steady himself and bit into
the leaf which hung near his head. When he had bitten it in two,
the shaman stepped out from beneath him, and he was lowered to
the ground. The shaman then questioned him:
Did you see the sun and moon?
Yes, I saw.
Did you see the stars in the sky?
I saw.
Did you climb the nine steps?
I climbed.
Did you climb over the obstruction?
I climbed.
As a part of his initiation, the Nepalese shaman climbs a tree
under the guidance of his teacher or guru. I was unable to observe
the ceremony, but obtained a Metalworker's account of his own
initiation. His guru was a Magar from an area two days' walk to
the northwest, an area regarded by the people of the Bhuji valley
as the home of the Original Shaman, and the guru was assisted by
his two sons, both of whom were shamans. The ceremony took
place on the full-moon day.
When the guru had induced a trance by singing and drumming,
he was able to see a particular pine tree growing in the forest, and
20 "The
Mangar, a Nepalese tribe, use a symbolic stairway by making nine
notches or steps in a stick, which they plant in the grave; by it the dead man's
soul goes up to heaven." Ibid., p. 487, noted in H. H. Risley, The Tribes and
Castes of Bengal, II (Calcutta, 1891-92), p. 75.
154
he sent his two sons to go and get it. After they had made ritual
offerings at the foot of the tree and had seen its top shake as they
did so, they chopped it down, stripped it of all branches except for
a tuft at the top, and took it back to the center of the village.
Here, they planted it upright in a hole. The guru blindfolded his
pupil, and his two sons dressed him in his shaman's regalia and
handed him his drum and drumstick. By drumming and singing,
the guru again entered a trance and transmitted his condition to
his pupil. After calling on the Snake of Hell and the Sun and the
Moon to be witnesses of what was about to happen, the guru,
who was shaking as the local shamans always do when they are in
a trance state, got up and leaned against the pine tree. His pupil
followed him, grasped the trunk and shinnied to the top, still
holding his drum and drumstick. The guru next asked him
questions he could answer only by divining the future. Among the
questions was how many years of life remained to the neophyte's
mother. When the pupil had shown that he had acquired powers of
divination, the guru and his sons danced and sang for a time at the
foot of the tree, and then the guru brought the neophyte down
gradually by shouting Ho! nine times. At each shout, the pupil
slid part-way down, until at the last he touched the ground.
During his return to earth, the guru prayed: "Make my pupil as
bright as the sun and as beautiful as the moon. Let this be my
fame." Following the rest of the ceremony, which involved the
sacrifice of a ram and goat, the tree was ceremonially returned to
the forest. A branch was given to the pupil, and he saved it so that
at the time of his burial-on the mountainside rather than by the
river like other people, and sitting up in a tumulus rather than
lying down below ground-it could be set upright between the
stones at the peak of his burial mound.
In classic Inner Asian shamanism, the practitioner controls
spirits and is not controlled by them. On superficial acquaintance,
it might seem that this is not true of the Nepalese shaman, for
during a trance he enacts the characteristics of whatever spirit is
inside his body. If it is an arthritic spirit, for example, his hands
and fingers become stiff and crooked. And sometimes the in-
carnate spirit temporarily overpowers him completely, so that he
falls groaning and twitching to the ground or sits tense and
quivering. But eventually he does regain control, sometimes with
the help of water sprinkled over him by some member of the
audience, and it is then he sings and chants, with drum accom-
paniment, whatever message the spirit has to deliver. We can be
155
Nepalese Shamanism and Classic Inner Asian Tradition
sure that his own soul, his own consciousness and personality, have
not been completely obliterated during the trance, no matter how
overpowering the experience may have seemed, because at the
conclusion of it he can answer questions from the audience about
what the spirit has said. He does not have to be told. Further con-
firmation appears in a shaman's description of what happens
during his trance:
The spirits come like birds, wind, an airplane. They enter my heart
and call as from a distance, the way Krishna (a villager) was calling
yesterday: "Have you seen my sickle?" At first, the spirit sits on my
shoulder, and the shoulder hurts for a bit. Then the spirit enters and
the pain leaves. They may also sit on my knees or over my heart. Most
spirits enter through my nose, some through my ears, eyes, knees,
shoulders. I can see them coming. I can tell whether they fell from a
cliff and died, or whether they died from eating inedible food. They
first come to my basket (the one in which shamanizing gear is carried),
then hop over onto me and then go inside. They wear what they were
wearing when they died. They are different sizes ...
When they enter my nose I get a little smell like excrement, or bad
meat, and it feels as if small insects were coming into my nose. When I
call them, they speak into my ear, and I listen. I say what they say.
They sing, and I sing. I repeat exactly.
The spirit gets the attention of the people by saying, "Listen, you
five people sitting there!"
The spirit will say, "You will say I have cheated and deceived you."
He means, you think I'm a liar, but you listen; I'm really telling the
truth. He calls the people donkeys because why should he honor them
if they don't know anything? If they knew anything, why call the
spirit?
The spirits speak by turns. The spirit sometimes says, "I'm such and
such a spirit; tell him (the client) such and such." When I act like the
Simpleton Spirit, it means it's that spirit's turn to talk. The others wait.
I don't decide what spirit will speak. They decide among themselves.
I don't call on any particular spirit to speak. I want different spirits for
different kinds of tasks. (The shaman explained that the spirits decide
among themselves which of their number has the needed knowledge and
power.)
When the spirits leave me, I feel as if I had been beaten by someone
all day long. I feel as if my soul had been lost. When they are inside, I
feel lively.