Having finished reading Mircea Eliade’s Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, I cannot shake it out of my mind.[1] It will take me a while to digest it, to be sure, but I am quite irked by his treatment of shamanism and yoga. “Yoga cannot be classed among the countless varieties of primitive mysticism to which the term shamanism is commonly applied,” he claims.[2] According to him, the former is about enstasy or enstasis, or the state of being absorbed into one’s own self, whereas the latter is about ecstasy or ekstasis, the state of being rapt out of one’s self.[3] Fair enough, but it is meaningless to compare yoga and shamanism in this straightforward manner. Originally, shamanism was part and parcel of tribal life. Its forms that have survived the formation of large and complex societies, such as those of India some four to five millennia ago, have little to do with its original tribal functions. Similarly, yoga is part and parcel of a fully developed social life, whence its strong asocial—and perhaps even antisocial—orientation. As such, it can be understood as a vestige of shamanism under conditions inimical to shamanism proper. It can thus be understood as a ceaseless yearning for tribal life of yesteryear. Unfortunately, Eliade missed entirely this vital connection between shamanism and yoga. For better or worse, it is not subject to empirical investigation, for the first appearance of large and complex societies reaches into prehistory. Conjecture is our best bet at this juncture.

Footnotes

1. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009 (first published in 1954).

2. Op. cit., p. 361.

3. Loc. cit.