Sorcery, Satanism, and Shamanism

Abstract

According to demonological theory, witches returned from their dances with the knowledge and tools to work harmful magic, or sorcery. According to anthropological reconstructions, sorcery arose out of shamanism, the altering of consciousness in order to interact with spirits for the benefit of the community.¹ In general, shamans enter a trance state in which they experience their spirit or soul journeying to a world of spirits where they can gain information about or effect actions to influence the normal world of humans, although they can also summon spirits to aid them in both the spirit and the normal worlds, and some people consider mediumship, in which practitioners in a trance are possessed by spirits, to be a form of shamanism as well.² Shamans proper, though, undergo an initiation in which they travel to the spirit world to gain experience, and then conduct public performances while in a trance to accomplish some communal purpose through interaction with the spirits. Shamans are found in hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and simple agricultural societies around the world, and their practices are generally held to be continuations of the oldest form of magico-religious practice, dating back to Paleolithic times. Their general orientation is to accomplish positive social purposes like healing the sick, but the spirits they interact with are not always benign, and some shamans specialize in working with the destructive ones.³