For discussions of various forms of healing practices in the ancient world, see Pedro Lain Entralgo's book THE THERAPY OF THE WORD IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY (1970), Robert E. Cushman's book THERAPEIA: PLATO'S CONCEPTION OF PHILOSOPHY (1958), and Martha C. Nussbaum's book THE THERAPY OF DESIRE: THEORY AND PRACTICE IN HELLENISTIC ETHICS (1994).
Today when clergy preside at scripted liturgical services, they are not playing the role of shamans if the liturgical service follows a prepared script, as the Mass in the Roman Catholic Church does. The clergy who preside at scripted liturgical services can be likened to shamans only by analogy.
Today when spiritual directors and psychotherapists and medical doctors and parents and other caregivers interact one-to-one with a person in the context of counseling and healing, they are playing the role of shamans.
Today when political candidates for elective office interact extemporaneously with voters in town-hall meetings, those candidates are playing the role of shamans.
However, when political candidates today deliver prepared speeches to a live audience, they are not speaking extemporaneously. As a result, they can be likened to shamans only by analogy. For example, Senator Barack Obama's high-flying speeches during the 2008 presidential campaign were delivered from prepared texts, which he famously read from a teleprompter.
Dr. Jung himself characterized Adolf Hitler as a medicine-man type of leader -- compared to Mussolini and Stalin. Hitler was a powerful orator. Jung characterized Hitler's speeches as engendering a participation mystique in the live audience. (Jung borrowed the term participation mystique from Levy-Bruhl.)
I myself would characterize the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a powerful orator. Oftentimes, his speeches galvanized people in the live audience to take action.
In his famous treatise on civic oratory, Aristotle does not happen to use Levy-Bruhl's term participation mystique. Nevertheless, I would argue that Aristotle understood the psychodynamic involved in the participation mystique. He characterized the civic orator as using three ways to appeal to the live audience: (1) logos, (2) pathos, and (3) ethos. In Aristotle's day, civic orators did not deliver speeches from prepared texts in front of them -- or from teleprompters. To be sure, they may have prepared their speeches beforehand, but they relied on their memories instead of written texts in front of them. For an excellent discussion of Aristotle's thought about ethos, see William M. A. Grimaldi's essay "The Auditors' Role in Aristotelian Rhetoric" in the book ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATION: HISTORICAL APPROACHES, edited by Richard Leo Enos (1990, pages 65-81).
By analogy, teachers at all levels of formal education can be likened to shamans in their classroom interactions with students, in which the teachers typically follow a lesson plan or at least a prepared plan.
In Shakespeare's play THE TEMPEST, Prospero is a magician -- practicing white magic, not black magic. As a playwright, Shakespeare himself can be likened to a magician practicing word-magic by constructing dialogue and using imagery and rhythm. Arguably all literary artists can be likened to magicians practicing word-magic, irrespective of the quality of their art.
Aristotle famously suggests that tragedies can evoke pity and fear in the audience -- at live performances. As a result, the people in the audience may experience catharsis (healing). Thus a certain efficacious magic may be evoked at live performances because of the way people in a highly oral culture participate in the performance.
But did live oral performances of the Homeric epics engender and facilitate the experience of catharsis in the highly oral people in the audience? Aristotle does not suggest that they did -- and Plato famously wanted to exclude oral poets from the optimal civic unit. As the classicist Eric A. Havelock claims in his book PREFACE TO PLATO (1963), oral poets did indeed teach information about customs and even certain lessons. But they did not teach people how to engage in the kind of detached examination of things that Plato favored.
When we engaged in the detached kind of examination of our words and claims that Plato favored, we will engage what the Jungian theorist Robert L. Moore of the Chicago Theological Seminary (born 1942; Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1975) refers to as the Magician/Shaman archetypes in the human psyche.
For a discussion of the masculine Magician/Shaman archetype in the male psyche, see Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's book THE MAGICIAN WITHIN: ACCESSING THE SHAMAN [ARCHETYPE] IN THE MALE PSYCHE (1993). (Moore and Gillette claim that the masculine Magician/Shaman archetype in also in the female psyche and that there is a feminine Magician/Shaman archetype in the female psyche and in the male psyche as well.)
In certain infomercials on television, the narrator talks fast, sounds very enthusiastic, and repeats mantra-like statements. Evidently, these practices can help sell products.
In a book, will immoderate enthusiasm and repetition of certain mantra-like statements help sell the ideas that the author is advancing in the book? Evidently, Steven B. Herrmann thinks they will.
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