Revisiting the shaman’s ecstasy: The intense emotion that ignites the performance of song and dance

Abstract

‘Ecstasy’, long considered a primary experiential marker of shamanism, has been conflated with Mircea Eliade’s description of ‘cataleptic trance’ and the subsequent notion of an ‘altered state of consciousness’. More recent scholarship contests this fixation on the mental state of shamanism, whether in the Arctic or its presumed geographical migration elsewhere. We retrieve the more common etymology and definition of ecstasy as heightened emotional excitement, underscoring how it awakens the shaman’s song and dance performance. Highlighting ecstatic emotion brings back into focus early reports of the shaman’s trembling and shaking body, whose experiential plasticity, musical improvisation, rhythmic variability and movement spontaneity were later masked by an academic obsession with trance. With a performing arts orientation, shamanism’s wider spectrum of action and experience reappear onstage.