Observations placeholder
Mircea Eliade - Describes Altaian shaman rebirth
Identifier
003857
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The person may feel they are being consumed by leopards, lions, or large birds such as eagles or vultures. The person may feel a sense of consumption by the huge creature that attacks them followed by a feeling that what is them has somehow been reconstituted into a new them.
A description of the experience
Mircea Eliade – Shamanism Archaic techniques of ecstasy
According to the traditions of the Altaian shamans, the spirits of their ancestors eat their flesh, drink their blood, open their bellies and so on. The Kazak Kirgiz baqca says ‘I have five spirits in heaven who cut me with forty knives, prick me with forty nails and so forth.
The ecstatic experience of dismemberment of the body followed by a renewal of the organs is also known to the Eskimo. They speak of an animal (bear, walrus etc) that wounds the candidate tears him to pieces or devours him; then new flesh grows around his bones. Sometimes the animal that tortures him becomes the future shaman’s helping spirit