Weighing the Evidence: Was There a Celtic Shamanism?

Our page on the integration gives the short answer: strictly, there was no Celtic shaman, and almost certainly there were Celtic people who did what shamans do. This page gives the long answer. It is worth having, because the question is asked constantly, by sceptical scholars on one side and by eager workshop leaders on the other, and both tend to answer it too quickly. Corby Ingold, writing for the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, notes that the recent fashion for courses in which students pass through a graded curriculum to be certified in “Celtic shamanism” has caused no end of controversy. Most of that controversy turns on a single prior question: what is a shaman?

What Would Count?

Mircea Eliade, whose 1951 study made shamanism a serious subject, drew the line narrowly. Magicians are found everywhere, he wrote, but the shaman has a particular speciality: “a trance in which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld.” Magical flight and mastery over fire are its marks. Michael Harner drew it more broadly: a shaman is a man or woman who enters an altered state of consciousness at will, to contact an ordinarily hidden reality, in order to acquire knowledge and power and to help other people, and who has at least one spirit in their service.

Some anthropologists go further than Eliade and insist that shamanism proper belongs only to Siberia and Central Asia, with its drum, its costume, its initiatory sickness and its spirit spouses. On that definition the answer for the Celts is simply no, and so is the answer for most of the peoples the word is now applied to. On Harner’s definition the answer is plainly yes, and the Celtic sources are full of examples. Most of the argument about Celtic shamanism is an argument about definitions conducted as if it were an argument about evidence. It helps to notice that before taking sides.

The Case For

• Incubated vision. Cormac’s Glossary, around the year 900, describes imbas forosnai: chanting, palms over the face, sleep in darkness under guard, and a vision on waking. The tarbfeis, the bull-sleep in which a seer dreamed the next king, is told in The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel. Martin Martin found the Hebridean bards still composing in darkened rooms with a stone on the belly in 1703.
• Trance prophets. Gerald of Wales, travelling through Wales in 1188, described the awenyddion: people who, “when consulted upon any doubtful event, roar out violently, are rendered beside themselves, and become, as it were, possessed by a spirit.” Their answers came in riddles, they had to be shaken awake, and they said their gift came to them in dreams.
• Flight and costume. In the Irish tale The Siege of Knocklong, the blind druid Mug Ruith puts on his bull-hide and his speckled bird-headdress and rises into the air to fight. It is as close to the feathered costume of the Siberian shaman as anything in European literature.
• Journeys to the Otherworld. The immrama and echtrai, the Welsh poem Preiddeu Annwn in which Arthur sails to the Otherworld for a cauldron, and the vision of Baile in Scáil, in which Conn of the Hundred Battles is led through a mist to the house of Lugh, all follow the shape of a journey: threshold, helpers, ordeal, return with a gift.
• Shapeshifting and many lives. Tuan mac Cairill, Fintan mac Bóchra and Taliesin remember lives as salmon, hawk and stag. Caesar says the druids taught that the soul passes from one body to another.
• Ordeal and dismemberment. In the bruidhean tales Fionn and his companions are trapped, cooked and threatened with being eaten in Otherworld hostels, and return restored and gifted. The folklorist Joseph Falaky Nagy has shown how closely these follow the initiatory ordeals described by shamans elsewhere.
• Living folk practitioners. The fairy doctors and wise women of Ireland and Scotland were chosen by the spirits, taught by them, set apart by the gift, and served their communities with knowledge brought back from the Otherworld, within living memory. Ingold, who trained for eleven years with a Northwest Coast teacher, writes of the fairy doctors: “I am almost tempted to say that we have something very close to the full shamanic complex.”

Scholars have noticed all of this for a long time. Nora Chadwick compared the Irish poetic trance with Siberian practice in her 1935 article “Imbas Forosnai” and her 1942 book Poetry and Prophecy. John Carey, Joseph Nagy and Daniel Melia have each traced shamanic themes in early Irish literature. In 2003 Geo Athena Trevarthen submitted a doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh, Brightness of Brightness: Seeing Celtic Shamanism, which argued that druids, and sometimes heroes and saints, “seem to function fully as shamans as described by Mircea Eliade,” and that the Otherworld in the literature is “always ready to break through into physical reality, transforming those who encounter it.” The title comes from Gile na Gile, Aogán Ó Rathaille’s vision of a radiant woman of the Otherworld met on a lonely road.

The Case Against

• There is no word. Nothing in any Celtic language corresponds to the Evenki šamán. The file is the usual candidate, but the file was also a lawyer, genealogist and court poet, and scholarly opinion on whether “shaman” fits is, as Ingold admits, far from unanimous.
• The sources are late and literary. Every early Irish and Welsh text was written down by Christian scribes, often centuries after the conversion. A tale is not an ethnography. Cormac may have been describing a practice he had heard of rather than one he had seen, and the storytellers delighted in marvels for their own sake.
• There is no drum. The frame drum, the shaman’s horse in Siberia, has no attested role in Celtic trance. The bodhrán was a skin tambourine of the wren-boys and mummers until Seán Ó Riada brought it into the concert hall in the 1960s.
• Possession is not flight. Harner distinguished the shaman, who masters spirits and travels to them, from the medium, who is possessed. Some reconstructionist critics argue that the awenyddion look more like oracles or mediums than shamans. Ingold, drawing on that training, replies that the line is clear on paper and blurred in practice: Northwest Coast elders tell of shamans who “go under the spirit” and remember nothing afterwards.
• The Celts were not hunter-gatherers. Shamanism in its fullest form belongs to small hunting and herding peoples. The Iron Age Celts were farmers with kings, a priesthood and a law code. A priestly and poetic class may simply be a different thing from a shaman, and calling it by a Siberian name may hide more than it shows. Ronald Hutton’s Shamans (2001) is a bracing account of how Western writers have stretched the word.
• The muddle is modern. MacEowen’s sharpest criticism is of the pan-Celtic mix in which Scots are given Welsh words like Abred and Ceugant, which are in any case the inventions of Iolo Morganwg, the brilliant forger of the late eighteenth century, and Bretons are given Irish gods. It is, MacEowen writes, no different from mixing Cherokee spirits with Navajo ceremonies and Lakota vocabulary.

The Evidence at a Glance

What We Can Honestly Say

Ingold’s own conclusion seems to us the right one. The shamanic elements in Celtic tradition, from the ancient sources to the fairy doctors, are “fairly easy to discern.” Whether they were ever part of a single, cohesive system of practice and belief is, for the ancient period, impossible to know, because what has come down to us is so fragmentary. We can say with confidence that there were shamanic elements in the Celtic world. We cannot say with confidence that there were Celtic shamans.

So we use the words carefully. Celtic shamanism is the name of a modern practice, about forty years old, that uses the methods of the worldwide revival within the Celtic tradition. Shamanic or shamanistic describes features of the old material that resemble shamanic practice elsewhere. Neither phrase claims that a druid would have recognised what we do, and neither needs to.

The Scottish writer Alastair McIntosh, reflecting on how the Iona Community rebuilt a living Celtic Christianity from fragmentary records, offered advice that applies just as well to us: draw what you can from historical, archaeological and folklore sources, but do not be limited by them or exaggerate their significance. The fragments are a foundation, not a blueprint. The rest has to be built in the present, in conversation with the land, and labelled honestly as new.