Soviet Researchers about Shamanic Initiatory Sickness and “Shamanic Madness”
The Bulletin of Irkutsk State University. Series Political Science and Religion Studies January 1, 2023 D. O. Furtsev
Soviet scientists held diverse opinions about the mental health of shamans, challenging the simplistic view that Soviet scholarship uniformly dismissed religion. The article reviews a wide range of Soviet sources on shamanism, from exiled revolutionaries to professional researchers of the 1980s, focusing on the debate over whether shamanic initiatory sickness and spirit communication result from psychological abnormalities or have other origins. The authors show that scientists' representations of shamans depended on the development of the Soviet state and science. Despite active antireligious propaganda, Soviet science aimed for objective knowledge of primitive beliefs, including shamanism, and lively debate existed on this topic.