Shamanism - Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

Mircea Eliade

Princeton University Press

1974

612 páginas

20h 24m

ISBN-10: 0691017794

Shamanism is pre-eminently a religious phenomenon of Siberia and Central Asia;throughout this vast area the magico-religious life of society centers on the figure of the shaman , at once magician and medicine man, healer and miracle-doer , psychopomp , priest , mystic and poet. The same phenomenon and techniques occurs elsewhere in Asia , Oceania ,in the Americas and among the ancient Indo-European peoples. Mircea Eliade , writing as a historian of religion , synthesizes the approaches of psychology , sociology and ethnology. He analyses the ideology of shamanism and discusses its techniques , its symbolisms , its mythologies. For Eliade shamanism is , precisely , a technique of ecstasy.