Thibault Lamadieu.

Shamanism, science and thing-knowledge

A comparative study between modern science and shamanism: their way of accessing or
creating knowledge.

Abstract: When talking about knowledge, precisely true, justified belief, we mainly think about
epistemological considerations. I propose to apply these considerations to shamanism and
shamanic knowledge in particular. I believe shamanism and science can not only be
compared, but that there are many common points which make us wonder about their
potential compatibility.

Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religion, defines shamanism as the practices in which:

"a spiritual leader traveled to an upper or lower world through a controlled state of ecstasy
(trance) and conversed with spirits in those other worlds for the benefit of the community (or
individuals within the community)"

The word shaman originates from the Turkic-Tungus word for healer, meaning literally “he or she
who knows”. In Australia aboriginal shaman are called Kadji (which means clever man or clever
woman). We could go on for hours and always see that in every shamanic society, the shaman
is mainly associated with knowledge (and secondly healing).

Many shaman in the Amazon use entheogens1 to induce an Altered State of Consciousness
(ASC), the most commonly used are Ayahuasca2 and tobacco syrup. The drug-induced ASC
allow shaman to gain knowledge by conversing with spirits; when asked about how they
discovered about the use of plants3, they usually answer that Ayahuasca spoke to them and
told them about the use and location of the plants.
Other ASC, not necessarily induced by drugs, have equivalent results in the end: shaman are
able to retrieve knowledge from their interaction with the spirit world. This retrieval is dual, it is
active in the sense that shaman do not contemplate the world from their altered point of view

1
An entheogen is a psychoactive substance used in a religious or shamanic context.
2
Ayahuasca is a brew made of Banisteriopsis vine and psychotria viridis, the first contains the main active ingredient and the
other contains an inhibitor preventing the breakdown of the active neurotransmitters thus allowing the brew to be effective.
3
Narby (1999)
1
but undertake a spiritual journey to gain knowledge. It is passive in the sense that shaman do not
create knowledge by an intellectual process but accept like true what they retrieve.

It is commonly believed that shamanic knowledge is closest to religion because it does not, like
modern science, put the world in question.
In order to clarify the way shamanism is seen in regard to science, we will try to establish some
common points between shamanism’s and science’s quest for knowledge, to be able to see, at
the end, if there can be any possible interaction between those two types of knowledge.
To do this we will first ask ourselves about what shamans and scientist need to do to create
Knowledge.
Secondly we will wonder about the nature of these two types of knowledge.
In a third part we will show the importance of the social context when talking about knowledge
and will bring about the concept of socially true and justified belief.
Finally, we will wonder about the possibility of transferring shamanic knowledge to science.

Let’s start off postulating that shaman and scientists must use a form of conceptual abstraction
in order to gain access to knowledge.

Michael Winkelman has an interesting theory about cave drawings made by shaman,
saying they represented “shamanic activities and altered states of consciousness”4. Nicholas
Humphrey5 contributes to this thesis, comparing those cave drawings to drawings made by
Nadia, a 3 year-old autistic girl6 and concluding that cave drawings could very well be a sign of
mental limits shown by shaman. Specifically the incapacity to use conceptual language, thus
conceptual thought. As he points out, Nadia loses her extraordinary talent after being taught
how to speak. Winkelman interprets it as a concrete example that shaman were seemingly able
to separate themselves from conceptual thought, thus showing a strange ability to see things
“as they truly are”. He adds that shaman would probably be consciously limiting themselves,
attaining an ASC where they do not see a horse but this horse. Thus allowing them to represent
essentially what they saw without any conceptual bias.

Another modern similarity we could find would be Picasso’s famous work “The Bull”7 where he
dissects (in the artistic sense) a drawing of a bull to discover its essential presence. He

4
Winkelman (2002)
5
Humphrey (1998)
6
See appendix for Illustration
7
See appendix for Illustration
2
consciously regressed intellectually to feel “la presence des choses”8. It is important to note the
effort made by Pablo Picasso to show the propinquity of Essence and Concept. According to
Bergson, the Concept, as an intellectual creation, comes from a desire to share ideas, feelings
and information without having to undertake an extensive description, so the essence is distilled
into a concept thus making it universal and also infinitely personal.

To seize the essence of things is also to have the capacity to separate oneself from concepts,
this is the ability shaman seemingly developed as we saw with the cave art example, it is an
ability that requires tremendous intellectual effort if not innate (if the shaman are not born
autistic).

Shamanism implies deconstruction; I strangely found the best and most adequate description of
this deconstruction in a letter that the French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote (when he was fifteen
years old) this is an extract from the letter9:

“Je dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant.

Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.
Toutes les formes d'amour, de souffrance, de folie ; il cherche lui-même, il épuise en lui tous les
poisons, pour n'en garder que les quintessences. Ineffable torture où il a besoin de toute la foi,
de toute la force surhumaine, où il devient entre tous le grand malade, le grand criminel, le
grand maudit, − et le suprême Savant ! − Car il arrive à l'inconnu ! »
Rimbaud expresses the objective of this deconstruction as being access to knowledge.

So basically shaman need deconstruction (or abstraction from certain concepts) to gain
knowledge.

This is similar, in a sense, to the way science evolves. By postulating new theories, demonstrating
them and having them accepted by the scientific community, scientists can create new
models, which have each time a better explanatory capacity. But to be able to postulate new
theories requires being aware of the current paradigms in place, their limits, and to extract
oneself from them and their implications. In order to shed a new look upon the field of study. So
it is a form of abstraction, much more limited and partial than the deconstruction operated by
shaman, but an abstraction nevertheless.

As Kuhn says:

8
French poet Yves Bonnefoy defines in « Les Planches courbes » a type of unstained, non-thought, pure reality
with this expression.
9
I could not find any appropriate translation of this text, and am not in any way bold enough to attempt a
translation.
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“Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have
been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.”10

To conclude our first part we can say that both shamanic and scientific approaches have to
proceed to a form of abstraction to gain knowledge, yet this abstraction is obtained through a
conscious deconstruction that leads to an altered state of consciousness in the case of
shamanism, and through a methodological reconsideration in the case of science.

In this second part we find a fundamental difference between both approaches:

When we speak of abstraction from concepts we actually mean abstraction from a set of
concepts or beliefs, we could say abstraction from a paradigm but then it could only be
applied to science and not shamanism: the fundament of shamanistic knowledge is it’s
cosmogony (as theory of creation). Eliade explains that it is a more or less rigid set of belief
completely integrated by shaman and their community. He adds that this cosmogony has
holistic pretentions (in the sense that those fundamental beliefs pretend to explain completely
the world’s creation).

Those beliefs are vital to the shaman, he needs to know what he’s communicating with, what he
is hearing and what he is learning. By knowing that the gods created ayahuasca as a teacher
and spiritual guide, the Shipibo shaman can interpret (some shaman prefer the term translate)
the enormous amount of information he gains during his journeys. Many shaman say that spirits
speak a specific language that any shaman has to learn before being able to perform 11. Their
cosmogony provides a common model that acts as a link between both spiritual and material
world.

The characteristic of this type of knowledge is precisely that it is a translation or an interpretation,

and is closely linked with the group’s cosmogony. If a Shipibo shaman of Peru says that tobacco
is what the spirits crave, an Aboriginal Kadji (a shaman from Australia) will answer that it is the
heat and fire the spirits wish to embrace, and a Haitian Ougan (voodoo priest) will say that Lwas
(spirits) like tobacco smoke because it allows them to have a material form and interact with the
material world. All three end up calling forth spirits by using tobacco smoke, but their way of
interpreting the phenomenon is different. These different beliefs are all carefully codified in
rituals; Mihály Hoppál, the director of the Ethnological institute of Budapest defines a shaman as:

10
Kuhn (1962)
11
Narby (1999)
4
“a person who is an expert in keeping together the multiple codes through which this complex
belief system appears, and has a comprehensive view of them in their mind with certainty of
knowledge. ”12

Eliade and Lévy-Strauss13 point out that the content of this set of belief (cosmogony) is not as
important as its explanatory capacity which prevents the shaman and eventually his patient
from suffering from what psychoanalysts call “suffering from unintelligibility”. In Freudian
psychoanalysis a patient’s understanding of his suffering is essential to “cure”.

Quoting Jerome Neu14, a philosopher who analyzed Lévy-Strauss’s work on shaman:

“What is essential to the effectiveness of shamanism is the provision of a theory or conceptual

scheme that enables the patient to reintegrate an otherwise alien experience”

Science, on the other hand, has a different approach to knowledge; it is in a sense blind, and
fumbles trying to separate true knowledge from false. It is then much more thorough and
effective if it is demonstrated. By fumbling in a methodic way science avoids getting lost.
Furthermore, scientific knowledge must follow a codified scientific method in order to have the
approval of the scientific community, so to be considered as true.

As there are many sciences, there are many fundamental paradigms, however, as Kuhn says,
they do not pretend to explain it all:

“… the puzzles that constitute normal science exist only because no paradigm that provides a
basis for scientific research ever completely resolves all its problems.” 7

So to conclude our second point, we may say that both shamanism and science use a set of
codified practices to create knowledge. Those codes reveal the presence of an underlying
complex belief system. A model that can codify their interactions with the world. Yet, we see
that shamanic knowledge is not meant to be universally applied and closely relies on the
society’s cosmogony. It is entirely subjective, and only evolves by accumulating knowledge or
by an external influence. Whereas scientific knowledge seems to tend towards objectivity, or at
least has codified its practices to avoid subjectivity as much as possible. Science evolves by
renewing its paradigms and by accumulation of knowledge.

12
Hoppál (2005)
13
Lévy-Strauss (1963)
14
Neu (1975)
5
 In this part we will try to show that both shamanism and science end up creating a similar
true justified belief. Yet we will not use the classical conception of true justified belief as it was
never meant to be applied to something else than scientific knowledge. Instead we will prefer a
sociologic point of view that implies a premise we will now explain and justify.

This premise is that scientific knowledge and shamanic knowledge can only be qualified as true
and justified belief when surrounded by a social context. In fact if we try to extract shamanic
knowledge from its context (exempli gratia shamanic knowledge is commonly seen in the
scientific community as a fraud) it loses its true and justified aspect. We consider that the true
and justified aspects of knowledge are granted by the social community, and that they can be
different depending on the nature of the community. If shamanic knowledge was to be
presented to a scientific society (our western society) it would be judged with our socially
accepted scientific criterions and then be discarded or accepted. So this knowledge’s validity
in its original context is not guaranteed to remain after being confronted to another.
We will now try to define what makes knowledge socially considered as justified and true in both
shamanic and scientific societies.

Mircea Eliade defines three ways of becoming a shaman; there is heredity, vocation and
choice. He adds that those who choose to become shaman are a minority. He explains it saying
that shamanism is a one way path to self-destruction.
As Rimbaud says it is a complete and permanent poisoning of the body, the shaman becomes
his own social role, by undertaking the initiation, by poisoning his body with lethal doses of drugs,
by fasting during months, by abstinence and by limiting all types of social interaction. He then
becomes unable to perform any other type of duty than his. He is trapped in his role. We
interpret Eliade’s observation as a social, self-preservation mechanism. As he points out,
knowledge is considered in all shamanic societies, to be a double edged sword. As shaman can
heal they can also wound. To prevent this, the path to shamanism was made to be a one way
trip. So that if the shaman were to harm rather than heal, they would lose their social status, thus
their sole purpose in life.

In the end the shaman’s purpose is to be immediately helpful to society. “Fundamental

research” is undertaken only during the initiation phase, the rest of his life being dedicated to
use this fundamental knowledge to serve his community. And his knowledge is socially justified
by its usefulness. So if the knowledge gained by shaman through their journey can be turned into
something useful, like thing-knowledge, then this knowledge is socially justified. The true aspect
of shamanic knowledge cannot be separated from its justified aspect, as both directly depend

6
on the community’s belief: Truth originates from the belief in the whole cosmogony and
Justification originates from the shaman’s legitimacy.

I believe this idea of socially justified knowledge can be applied to science: if scientific
knowledge can be applied to reality and in the end produce a socially useful knowledge then it
is justified.

A good example would be to look at the funds granted to fundamental research and compare
them to the funds granted to applied research. The second receives much more money than
the first. The image common people have of science is through electronics, medicine; basically
science is judged by its productivity. This shows that knowledge gained by science is socially
justified if it can be applied to serve a purpose. And if this knowledge is considered valid by the
scientific community, then it is also socially considered as true (in the classical sense of truth) until
another paradigm or theory proves it wrong.

Bringing an end to our third part, we can now say that both shamanic and scientific knowledge
are socially true and justified belief.

If those types of knowledge depend on their social context, could there be a way of
transferring knowledge between shaman and scientists?

In this fourth part we will try to answer this question using Davis Baird’s concept/definition of thing
knowledge15, and then try to apply it as faithfully as possible to curare, a complex preparation
discovered in Venezuela, that acts as a paralyzing muscle relaxant, and is only effective when
applied parenterally (by intravenous or by direct application on a wound). It was and still is
commonly used by hunter-gatherer tribes to kill animals by asphyxia without poisoning the meat.

Basically Baird says that knowledge can be embedded in an artifact if this artifact can
accomplish a function, and by function he means a crafted and controlled phenomenon.

It must be added that while Baird explains his theory, he abandons a few classical
epistemological ideas like the fact that knowledge is a true justified belief. Baird tries to expand
this definition of knowledge by removing the “belief”, as he finds there is knowledge that does
not contain or imply any belief. In the case of curare, it does not matter whether the creator (or

15
Baird (2002)
7
finders) believes it was a gift from god, a spirit in liquid form, or a really useful combination of
toxins, the important thing is that curare accomplishes its function.

He also expands the sense of the word true to comprise the idea of “working” truth: he uses the
example of a “true” wheel, which is simply a perfectly useful wheel. He adds:

“A public, regular, reliable phenomenon over which we have material mastery bears a kind of
working knowledge of the world and runs true in this material sense of truth.” 11

Baird formulates five criterions he believes to be the essential features of scientific truth:

First of all detachment: A scientific truth can be applied, used and depended upon even if
extracted from its initial context of discovery. Curare fulfills this criterion as it has been used in
surgery (amongst other fields) as an anesthetic.

The second and third feature are Efficacy and Longevity: A scientific truth has to be reliable (at
least during a predetermined period of time) to fulfill an objective.
Curare as prepared by shaman and then scientists has had many different applications, from
hunting to healing. The fact that curare works remains true throughout experimentation and
time.

The fourth feature is connection: Scientific knowledge has to link human though with the world
(we detail this feature later on).
As used by shaman, curare connected them with the world because it was concrete evidence
that they were in touch with the spirit world. As re-appropriated by doctors, it shows that their
beliefs on how the body works are connected with how curare actually works.

The fifth feature is objectivity: It is not enough to wish for the artifact to work, it has to be actually
working. Well curare’s effectiveness has already been demonstrated, and the fact that it is used
to lower one’s consciousness to anesthesia would be enough to show that as Baird says “The
world’s voice has priority on the relationship between the world and us”.

We could now qualify curare as thing-knowledge but we have yet to specify a little more this
concept of function: Baird defines two conceptions of function: thick function which he ties to a
subjective concept of knowledge (linked with intention-driven knowledge) and thin function,
tied with an objective concept of knowledge which he related to Popper’s minimal criterion of
knowledge, in very few words: “being capable of being grasped by somebody”.
As he points out, the idea of intention is problematic: he gives out the example of photo-
multiplier tube which were originally developed as part of a research program but ended up

8
being used in direct-reading spectrometers. They were detached from their original context and
thus abide by the first criteria yet the intention that led to their creation was not to be used as
reliable tool. This is why it does not carry out a clear connection between human thought and
the world: “Function connects how an artifact behaves with how we want it to behave”. So in a
sense they do not clearly fulfill the fourth feature. In the thick sense of function, this would imply
that photo-multiplier tubes are not true. We now understand why Baird chooses to stick to the
thin conception of function.
However, this choice underlines a few problems in this theory:
In the photo-multiplier tube example, Baird says that the tubes were not engineered to be
reliable as they were not meant to be used as a tool, and had to be manually and individually
tested to confirm their reliability of use in spectrometers. So in the end when extracted from their
context the tubes did not always respond to the second and third feature of thing knowledge.
And so were not, strictly speaking, proper thing-knowledge. So Baird’s both concept of function
are problematic in a sense. We could try to accommodate his wish to ignore intention by
emphasizing on the necessity to provide the technique used to create an artifact. This
technique would carry within, some implicit information about the artifact’s intended use
without raising all the epistemological problems that are inherent to the notion of intention.
However it seems very hard to embed an artifact’s crafting method inside the artifact itself.

So I decided to see as problematic Baird’s choice to ignore intention in his definition of thing-
knowledge. This is because in our case, curare has absolutely no worth if the method used to
create it is not provided with it.
We cannot separate the artifact from the technique used to craft it: curare’s effectiveness
depends on its method of preparation, thus on one’s intention: if it is for hunting it will be boiled
during two to four days depending on the strength and some snake venom or poisonous ants
will be added, if it is for warfare a more potent plant than the one used for hunting will be boiled,
if it is for traditional healing only the stem will be crushed and added to the pre heated but not
boiled brew (so that curare would be orally effective when normally it is not).
Finally, if intended for anesthesia (as it was used by doctors in the 1940’s) a calculated dose was
injected and an artificial lung was used to avoid the patient’s death by choking.
In order to create an anesthetic or a muscle relaxant from curare, doctors had to know it’s
different properties, this could be achieved by experimentation but in this case curare would not
be thing-knowledge in the strict sense of the word, but it could also have been done by simply
learning from the shaman or hunters who made curare about it’s different ways of use.

9
If we consider thing knowledge as the end result of an intellectual effort, we can see that there
are ways in which shamanic knowledge can be passed on to science.

-“Translating” the end thing-knowledge created by shaman into concepts understandable by

scientists. A poison for hunting becomes a non-depolarizing muscle relaxant. A gift of the gods
becomes an alkaloid blocking neuromuscular signals. This method of knowledge transfer may
seem obvious but it deserved to be mentioned as this knowledge remains socially considered as
true and justified thanks to this “Re-appropriation of knowledge”.
-The other way would be to “translate” completely the whole shamanic belief system, thus
allowing scientists to reproduce the progression that led to the creation of curare. Or to express
in scientific terms what shaman see during their trances and altered states of consciousness.
However there are still many blanks in the way science sees shamanism, and it still cannot
explain why shaman are able to retrieve useful knowledge from what an exterior observer would
call introspection.

To end our fourth part we could say that shamanism and science have few ways of transferring
their knowledge, the only point where they are comparable is concerning thing-knowledge.
And even there, we still note some discrepancies between a shamanic vision of thing
knowledge and a scientific one.
Today there are very few shamanic societies remain, and all are meant to disappear or to be
kept artificially alive. Among these remaining societies all have had some sort of contact with
our western society, sometimes this contact ended up in an exchange of knowledge, more
often knowledge was stolen and the creators never rewarded (the indigenous people of the
Amazon let their position be known on the subject by holding a conference a week before the
“Earth Summit” in Rio in 1992), or imposed (e.g. Christianization of north and south America and
Africa).

In this essay, I have made reference to many fields of knowledge: I believe epistemology
understood as theory of knowledge should not in any way be limited regarding its field of
application, therefore I have invoked disciplines as various as archeology, cognitive evolution,
psychology anthropology, poetry and painting… I have tried to avoid overuse of random
examples and to give this essay a structure. However, I am aware that I leave many questions
unanswered. The main goal behind this hubbub is to show that there are many paths to

10
knowledge, intertwined, and intersecting at certain key moments; modern science and
shamanism being only two examples among many others.
What conclusions can we establish?
Well, first of all that there are many similarities between scientific and shamanic knowledge and
it is epistemologically very hard to justify that shamanism is a fraud.
Secondly that one is not better than another, each of them accomplishes the function it has
given itself.

11
Appendix.

Above is a picture was drawn by Nadia when she was 3 years old.
Underneath is a detail of horses drawn in the Chauvet cave in Ardèche (France).

12
Here is a reproduction of Picasso’s work “The Bull” done between December 1945 and January 1946.
A description of this work can be found here.
The bulls are represented in chronological order, from left to right and top to bottom.

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References:

- Baird, Davis «Thing Knowledge – Function and Truth », Techné Vol.6, 2002, p.13-27.

- Eliade, Mircea «Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy», Princeton University Press, Princeton,
2004.

- Humphrey, Nicholas «Commentary on Michael Winkelman, ‘Shamanism and cognitive evolution’»,

Cambridge Archeological Journal, Vol. 12, 2002, p.91-93.

- Humphrey, Nicholas « Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind», Cambridge
Archeological Journal, Vol. 8, 1998, p.165-176.

- Hoppál, Mihály « Sámánok Eurázsiában », Academic press, Budapest, 2005.

- Kuhn, Thomas «The Structure of Scientific Revolutions », University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962.

-Laporte, Paul and Einstein Albert « Cubism and Relativity with a Letter of Albert Einstein », Art Journal,
Vol. 25, 1966, p. 246-248.

- Lévy-Strauss, Claude « The effectiveness of symbols », Structural Anthropology Vol.1, 1963, p.186-205.

- Narby, Jeremy « The Cosmic Serpent », Penguin/Putnam editions, New-York, 1999.

- Neu, Jerome « Lévy-Strauss on Shamanism », Man - New Series, Vol.10, June 1975 p.285-292.

- Winkelman, Michael « Shamanism and cognitive evolution », Cambridge Archeological Journal, Vol. 12,
2002, p.71-101.

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