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  • Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century
  • George S. Rousseau
Gloria Flaherty. Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xv + 320 pp. Ill. $35.00.

Most experienced physicians learn that medicine—theoretic and therapeutic—is suffused with magic, and that the healing process today remains as mysterious as ever, even if increasingly governed by computerized neuroanatomical and biochemical models of explanation. The extraordinary “magic” that physicians practice on their patients lies in murky realms of trust of the occult: patients’ remarkably irrational sense that through the healer they can somehow recover. It is a profound and primitive form of vulnerability, given that Nature (with the uppercase N ) heals more efficiently than any medical practitioner—an empathy between patient and healer exceeding most transferences between two human beings, given the often high stakes of life or death. Nevertheless, few contemporary physicians are aware of the history of this suffusion of medicine and magic, let alone aware of the retrievable histories of those “doctors” who practiced magic to heal: the Swedenborgs, Gassners, Mesmers, Schrepfers, Cagliostros. Gloria Flaherty, an immensely erudite professor of German and music who died shortly after this book was published, knew as much about the magic in medicine, and the medicine in magic, as any professional medical historian. As a scholar who was also versed in the history of music, she infused music into this holy triple-M-alliance—medicine, music, magic—and elevated the interdisciplinary constellation to something of a specialism. For years she concentrated her attention on the dispenser of the magic—the shaman—and she considered this book her enduring legacy in scholarship.

“Shaman” means “witch doctor” or “learned healer.” Every society exudes its shamans, its priests of the occult, no matter what their appellations. Our troubled postmodern world abounds with such high priests, often well-remunerated mandarins who usually practice under the guise of newfangled approaches to contemporary stress, the body’s alleged wear and tear. But shamans in all historical eras cure by radically alternative occult modes: electricity, magnetism, poetry, music, art, seduction, sex, electrified Beds of Aphrodite (as in Dr. James Graham’s preposterous erotic shamanism). Indeed, the border between shamans and quacks is often nebulous. Flaherty traces out their pre- and post-Enlightenment histories, particularly their global appearances during the eighteenth century when “hard” and “soft” primitivism competed for the savant’s attention; and when travels to remote parts of the globe, from Siberia to South America, as in Jonathan Swift’s utopian version, rendered their practices extraordinarily interesting to the urban shamans of cure in London and Paris.

There is much of medical-historical interest here. Flaherty’s research will entice practicing physicians and medical historians who actually read her book to reconsider the serious role of magic in healing—that is, verifiable, almost predictable healing, as distinct from fringe or alternative, crackpot versions. Her approach is particularly rich for the eighteenth century, the period from Boerhaave and Haller to Whytt and Cullen, when strictly rational approaches to medicine peaked and the shaman generally disguised himself by a repertoire of bodily, magical, and sexual tricks. The last was particularly noteworthy in the epoch of [End Page 154] greatest interest to Flaherty. As the so-called civilized world in Paris and London, Edinburgh and Rome, watched with amazement as savage societies revealed their secrets through travelers’ journals, and as heads swung in the Bastille’s guillotine and revolution threatened to rip apart every society, the shaman filled a cultural void more than before. The high priest at home also had to be more devious, if cleverer, than the Tartar priest on Caucasian steppes. Flaherty’s method reveals new information about Amerindians in relation to ancient Greeks, Scythians, Siberian Russians, and as self-sufficient tribes of “singing people” who chose their leaders based on musical ability.

Flaherty writes intelligently about the implications of shamanism for the arts in Europe, not merely in fiction and fantasy but also as assumed roles for the era’s great communicators: for Mozart as incantating Orpheus, for Goethe as bewitching Faust, and so forth. And she concludes with a modest afterword beckoning us “Toward a Shamanology” because “science itself threatens to become the new superstition...

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