MYSTIC MAGICIAN SHAMAN
Mysticism, to use the felicitous definition from Wikipedia, is “the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity,spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight. Mysticism usually centers on a practice or practices intended to nurture those experiences or awareness. Mysticism may be dualistic, maintaining a distinction between the self and the divine, or may be nondualistic. Differing religious traditions have described this fundamental mystical experience in different ways.”
Mysticism is all about the divine, however the divine is defined. The this worldly concerns that characterize most people are deprecated in favor of an obsession with the really real world of the divine. The mystic seeks to know the divine and to be absorbed in the divine at the inevitable price of the normal or profane world. The demands of the world are viewed as a distraction from what really counts. Mysticism always, as Uffenheimer rightly argues, runs a risk of quietism.
I have defined what I mean by shaman in the last blog post in this series. I have defined what I mean by magician in the first post. I want to reiterate that magician is NOT a pejorative term to my way of thinking, though the term is often used this way.
The Besht happened to be both a magician as a baal shem and a shaman. The two roles are logically distinct. [1] A person could be one or the other or both. There were many Hasidic Tzaddikim who played shamanic roles within their communities, but were not baalei shem writing amulets and such.
There’s a famous story called “The Ocean of tears” about the Kotzker Rebbe searching for his deceased friend the Volker Rebbe on behalf of the son of the Volker Rebbe. The Kotzker Rebbe journeys through different palaces in heaven of the patriarchs and of Moses, but the Volker had been there, but left. The Kotzker finally finds him in front of a great ocean. The Volker ask the Kotzk if he knows what this is, and informs him that it is the ocean of tears that the Jews have shed because of the bitterness of exile. And why is the Volker standing in front of this ocean of tears, rather than reaping the heavenly reward of his righteous life? Because he made a vow not to move until all the Jewish tears had been wiped away. (You can see the commonality here with the theme of the Boddhisattva in Buddhism). Equally, as I’ve discussed, there were many baalei shem who were not shamans—they did not undertake ecstatic journeys and work with spirits to heal people.
Mystics and shamans within a given tradition often share the same cosmology but they do different things with that cosmology. Mystics, in Jewish tradition, undertake journeys through the heavens to gain wisdom and to cling to the divine. That’s a totally different project than journeying through the heavens looking for answers to heal a client.
The Heikhalot mystics, for instance, are sometimes described as shamans, but they are not. They undertook ecstatic journeys with the help of wise Jewish ancestors to solve the most intractable problems of Torah. But they had no interest in solving these problems to bring any kind of healing to their fellow Jews; rather they sought union with the divine. Mystics, not shamans.
I also think that we might well benefit from looking at theurigic Kabbalists such as Isaac Luria through the lens of shamanism rather than mysticism. Theurigic Kabbalists sought to repair the Godhead not because they wanted simply to dwell with the divine, but in order to make a difference for earthly Jews. Luria would read the soul history of his disciples by going on an ecstatic journey and prescribe unique practices based on what he saw in order to heal them. Isn’t that shamanism? Lawrence Fine even titles his book on Luria Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos. This is the job description of a shaman.
The world needs healing. Many, even most of us, need to find a way to take our proper place in our relationship with both the sacred and the profane. I have sought here to elucidate a perspective on Jewish magic, mysticism and shamanism that might open up some possibilities.
[1] This is the problem with Moshe Idel’s understanding of the Besht as magico-mystical practitioner. See Moshe Idel, Hasidism, Between Ecstasy and Magic.
