Trance as a daily-life phenomenon is widespread among the world’s traditional cultures, and is a consistent object of anthropological investigation. Anthropologists speak of trance in a widely inclusive context, where the idea of trance induction encompasses a diverse set of phenomena not commonly associated with hypnosis therapy. The anthropologist Arnold Ludwig described five types of trance induction, for instance the reduction of outside stimuli and bodily movements (Ludwig, 1968 1)). This is a form of trance induction that exists, for example, among the Lakota peoples of the northern US. Part of the ritual observance of the passage to manhood involves a fasting and waiting period for young men of the tribe; for the first time totally alone, a young man waits naked, sometimes inside a hole, for the appearance of a totem animal or spirit that will guide him throughout the rest of his life (Lame Deer & Erdoes, 1972 2)).


Trance can also be induced by the elevation of outside sensations and by active movement, for example dancing. Such an approach exists among Voodoo practitioners, where mediums dance until they are taken over by external spirits.

Another important medium for the induction of trance in traditional cultures is the experience generated by certain drugs. Drug-related trance is a widespread phenomenon throughout the Amazon region. The Amahuaca Indians, for example, imbibe tea made from Ayahuasca bark (banisteriopsis caapi) to enter a trance and take up contact with a spirit (“yoshi”) who is consulted about the future or other matters (Carneiro, 1964 3)). Alongside reduction or augmentation of outside stimuli, or the use of drugs, Ludwig refers to a parallel reduction or augmentation of mental activity as the actual induction of a trance state. His five different modes of trance induction have in the end some commonalities: namely a principal change in thoughts, an alteration of awareness of time or body identity, distortion of reality, and changes in the experience of emotions. Importantly, these changes are the same as those observed in the induction of trance via hypnosis.

Erika Bourguignon (1973) executed an exhaustive study on the use of trance throughout the world, including surveys from 488 separate traditions spread across the world. She determined that in ninety percent of these cultural constellations, trance rituals had an integral place in the social life of the community. Her research concluded that trance practices worldwide fall mainly into two distinct categories. The first includes “possession trance”, where the medium is taken over by an outside spirit and loses his or her personality entirely for a span of time. This type of trance in commonly experienced with an attendant audience and accompanied by full amnesia. The second category of trance practice is characterized by an experience where the identity of the practitioner is maintained, and he or she uses the experience to gain contact to a spiritual plain where ghosts, gods, or demons reside.

It’s truly remarkable that trance practices are found to be so similar across the world, and are shared by cultures that, due to total geographic isolation from one another, have never had any contact. While it’s not entirely clear how trance phenomena can play such a universal role across cultural borders, we can begin to understand the common framework within which traditional cultures evolve. There seems to be a pattern regarding the relationship of three factors: social structure (hunter-gatherer or agricultural/herder), the gender of participants in trance rituals, and the type of trance experience. In hunter-gatherer communities, typically only men participate in trance rituals, and the second type of trance (discussed above) appears. That is, practitioners maintain their identity and experience no amnesia after the event. This relationship between social structure and trance practice holds true across continents and cultural boundaries, whether among the Kalahari Bushmen, the people of the Amazon basin, North American Indians, or fishing societies of the south Pacific.

In contrast, women are the usual trance practitioners in agricultural/livestock herding communities, and their experience involves a possession by outside spirits and loss of memory during trance. The distinction between practices of hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural societies may come from psychological factors that differ between the groups. Bourguignon explains that during the course of human development, trance emerged as a method of coping with mental stresses and preventing psychological illness – that is, a psycho-hygienic prophylactic. In hunter-gatherer constellations, the men arguably bear the psychic burden of the community, hunting alone with their demons in the primeval forest or leading parties in war. The natural result could be a search for a guide or escort, a form of protection to assist against the insecurity and fear of a demanding lifestyle. Such a totem animal or guardian spirit brings calm and security in situations where fear is overwhelming.

Likewise, women in agricultural groups tend to suffer the greatest psychological stress. Trance rituals may be an opportunity to mitigate the tension of daily life through the abandonment of possession. In traditional agricultural communities, women commonly have a very low status. Their life path is entirely determined by the husband, who perhaps bought the wife in exchange for livestock, placing value primarily on obedience and cooperation. She must advocate for herself in an environment of plural wives, and perhaps fight to be accepted by a step-mother, and extreme jealousy or hatred can develop. To free herself of these strong emotions, which could likely lead to illness if un-treated somehow, she perhaps seeks a forum for living out her emotions, but without resultant punishment. That is, it’s fully accepted that a possessing spirit would be hateful and vitriolic, spurting curses and epitaphs, while the woman simply harbors this spirit. For all intents and purposes, the medium is supposed to not be present at all, because her conscious is taken over by the ghost, which is proved by the woman’s amnesia for the actual experience under trance.

Source:

1) Ludwig, A. (1968). Altered states of consciousness. In: R. Prince (Hrsg.): Trance and possession states. Montreal: R.M. Bucke Memorial Society.

2) Lame Deer, J. & Erdoes, R. (1972). Lame deer, speaker of visions. New York: Simon & Schuster.

3) Carneiro, R.L. (1964). The Ayahuasca and the spirit world. Ethology, 3, 6-11.

4) Bourguignon, E. (1973). Introduction: A framework for the comparative study of altered states of consciousness. In: E. Bourguignon (Hrsg.), Religion, altered states of consciousness and social change. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

During a long trip to Sarawak, a Malaysian state in Borneo, we had the chance to observe the Iban’s trance rituals. The Iban, formerly head-hunters, are the biggest population group in Sarawak. But in areas accessible by outside transport they are losing more and more of their traditional lifeways (there are actually very few roads, but boat access is common in some places). In these places the majority are catholic and no longer live in longhouses. Where before an entire village community (about 250 people) would live under one roof, most now live in individual houses. In the more remote areas the Iban still reside in longhouses, and raise rice using their traditional method of preparing dry fields by burning sections of forest. These groups also still practice the ancient animistic religion inherited from their ancestors.

After a multi-day journey in Iban longboats, and also some very demanding marches by foot, we came to a community whose inhabitants could not remember ever having seen a white person. Nevertheless, according to a description of the “Tuai Rumah” (longhouse chief), his longhouse was visited ten years ago by a (likely) scientist; this man wanted to observe orangutans in an uninhabited area of ancient forest two-days travel beyond the village. While in this area, we met a 70 year-old shaman from Rumah Jayan’s longhouse who we visited many times. With the help of an Iban interpreter whom we had brought from Sarikei, we found out about his methods and practices, which frequently relied on trance. The shaman (“Manang” in Iban) used three different ceremonies to treat illness. In one ceremony (“Begama”), used for common recurring pains and lasting about five minutes, pain in drawn out like an imaginary blow-gun dart. In this case, trance is not necessary. However, for the “Belian” ceremony and the “Belian-Beburah-Bugu” ceremony, the Manang personally enters trance to free the patient’s soul from the influence of an evil spirit and then retrieves the soul. Consequently, the word for trance in Iban also means, “catch-soul” (“nyanka semengat”). While in trance, the shaman loses all connection with his direct surroundings (and according to reports of one witness, “both eyes become entirely white”). In trance he is able to see the demon that is either threatening, or has taken over, the patient’s soul. According to descriptions, the souls of family members can usually be found together on flowers in the spirit world. The Manang’s task is to recover the soul from the demon and bring it back to the appropriate flower. In this endeavor, he has help from his good spirit guide Yang and also other shamans who are attendant in the trance. If this is not successful, then they deduce that not only is the patient ill, but the whole family is weakened. During the pursuit of the demon (Belian Ceremony), the Manang and the other Shamans remain always behind the mighty spirit guide Yang, who hails the demon with spears until it lets the soul of the patient fall, so the shaman can grasp it and bring it back. It was quite impressive for us to hear our friend, Tubam ak Usop, a very serene and self-composed man, tell about the great fear he had when pursuing demons. He would be threatened by multiple dangers at the hand of evil spirits; but he owes his success to being braver than the other shamans and denying his fear. His greatest had been the liberation of an entire longhouse from an evil spirit, a ceremony which spanned two days and two nights. Supposedly he had only one failure, the death of a young girl. His great success as a shaman was also confirmed by other Iban people. Tubam ak Usop does not treat every patient who comes to him. In general, he dreams each night of the patient or patients who will visit him the next day, and then consults the good spirit Yang if he should accept them for treatment. Yang then assesses whether he is strong enough to battle the offending demons, and then communicates his decisions to the Manang. The Manang at this point has no personal choice and must either accept or reject the patients who come the next day, in accord with Yang’s wish. Therefore if a patient is accepted, he can be sure of being healed. Tubam ak Osup sends patients with injuries like broken arms, etc., to the clinic located upstream. It also frequently happens that the leader of the clinic, whom we visited and who confirmed our Manang’s reputation, sends the shaman patients he is not yet finished with.

The shaman’s patients comprise two different categories. The first group includes those that suffer from fear, are plagued by agonizing thoughts, or complain of paralysis. The afflictions of this group stem from the fact that a demon is around them and “cuts through their body” – but has not yet taken possession of them. For these patients, who usually come alone, the Manang works through the Belian Ceremony to dispel the demon from the zone around their soul.

The second group of patients is made up mostly of women, who do not come alone but are brought by their families. They are characterized by apathy and neglect of their household and children, and frequently lost in deep thinking or unapproachable in conversation. Also, the sufferers may display differing behavior from morning to night, or suddenly change over from a torpid state to one of anger and rage. The age of the patients usually ranges from 12-30. The shaman in this case chooses to work through the Belian-Bebunah-Buyu Ceremony. Unlike the patients in the first category, the women’s illness is the result of true possession by a demon; the shaman must then kill the demon in order to free the woman. He therefore goes by night, when all others are sleeping, to the longhouse’s veranda (tanju), while the patient remains with the shaman’s “bilek” (a family living-unit of the longhouse). The shaman makes an offering to the demon upon the veranda and waits in trance. The demon comes, with friends, and laughs over the shaman, who is waiting with a “parang” (a kind of machete) nearby. The moment comes when the demon turns around to invite his friends to the offering. As soon as his back is turned, the shaman cuts the head of the demon off with the parang. This ceremony demands great courage and can only be accomplished by a shaman who has help from a mighty guardian spirit.

When the therapist, the shaman, goes into trance, the patient is relatively unaffected. We were present at a Belian ceremony where the patient was held fast by the hands by women of the longhouse, but made jokes and laughed aloud during the ceremony. The shaman pulls a special carpet over his head and brings himself into trance using swinging body movements (the Melanau shamans on Borneo’s northern coast have a special swing for the purpose). The shaman remains for most of the ceremony in a calm sitting position on the floor of the bilek. The room is sparsely lit from the open fireplace. Only sometimes are there occasional twitches from under the carpet. During the ceremony some patients sit in solitude with the eyes closed. Other may converse in turn with those present for the treatment.

Tubam ak Usop is a “late-chosen” who felt a real calling (betapa) to his practice; that is, he passed through a dangerous encounter with the supernatural (for instance, one may wait alone in the jungle for a demon, while vulnerable to attack from dangerous animals). In Tubam ak Usop’s case, he returned from fishing one day twelve years ago to find the giant spirit Yang standing before his bilek. Yang at first besieged and challenged him, but later brought him to the calling of the shaman.
Overall, it seems Tubam ak Usop treats psychological illnesses which divide mostly either into depressive states or agitated/fearful states. This demarcation of two distinct illnesses comes from the shaman’s own description of his patients. However, Tubam ak Usop has also described symptoms that don’t fit into this schema. For him, though, the factors that determine the patient’s diagnosis are more related to the influence of the demon rather than the particular psychological symptoms. The most important consideration is whether the demon has fully possessed a patient or is simply harassing her soul.

His healing ritual reflects to a certain degree the exorcism ritual of the Catholic Church. The similarities include an appointed agent (priest) who tries with the help of a mighty spirit (God) to free a patient’s soul from a mighty demon (Satan). But in the Iban ceremony a shaman is more actively engaged, whereas the priest only reads ritual formulas. The shaman must lose perception of the ‘real’ environment, in order to gain cognitive abilities (imagination, focus of attention). The special abilities the shaman seeks to possess are notably also – in the view of modern hypnosis research – the characteristics of those who are able to experience hypnosis for clinical treatment.
It would be unacceptable to characterize the healing practices of the shaman or his patients as hallucinogenic events. In the animistic worldview, all objects are endowed with life and inhabited by spirits and demons, whether the old tree behind the longhouse, the rice field downriver, or the turtle below the water’s surface. With this in mind we can begin to understand the reasons for the shaman’s success (also bearing in mind his impressive personality), something that is likely only possible within a socio-cultural context. Perhaps the objects and materials of the spiritual world mirror in some way the patterns of the tangible world, and so the results of the shaman’s work on the other side can be explained as essentially conforming to the results achieved overall. That is, the spiritual results have an object in common with the results observed in common reality. When the shaman informs the patient he has ‘really’ freed her soul from a demon in the spiritual world, it is essentially comparable to the statement of a doctor in our culture that his x-ray shows a newly-healed rib bone.
Incidentally, we also became married while living with the Iban. Because it is hard to imagine a wedding ceremony without family members present, we were adopted by a family. Before the ceremony, the groom dances with the men and drinks rice wine. The bride goes with the women to get dressed. Afterwards, the two are brought separately to the longhouse where the wedding will take place. The ceremony is performed by a Lamang responsible for weddings, who waves a chicken around the heads of the bride couple three times. Afterwards the chicken is killed and all the guests (we had about 200) receive a dab of blood on the forehead. Next is a massive feast, with plenty of rice wine, and dancing deep into the night.

We know that the phenomenon of hypnosis, practiced by humans all over the world, dates back essentially as far as the Stone Age. With this in mind, we could expect the different manifestations of hypnotic states which we observe in patients today to be representational of the experiences of stone-age trance practitioners. While we cannot transport ourselves into the past to verify this belief, we can perhaps use observations of modern traditional cultures to approximate the lifestyle and practices of ancient traditional cultures.

To that end, we found an opportunity in 1989 to visit the Yanomami Indians of Venezuela. We began our journey from Puerto Ayacucho in the south of Venezuela to the upper Orinoco region on the border with Brazil. It was relatively difficult to gain permission from the proper authorities for a visit to the Yanomami, since not only did we want to visit an area closed to tourism, but also applied during a malaria epidemic in the Yanomami area. In addition, Yanomamis had recently killed two Venezuelan soldiers using curare-tipped arrows. There are no road connections through the rainforest, so we hired a dugout canoe (a so-called ‘Bongo’), with a boat master, a Yekuana Indian (Tameyni), and Venezuelan Cruz Sanchez as captain. After some difficulties (for instance, after two days we had a motor breakdown and were forced to wait another day and a half for a replacement motor to be flown in) and some very long days we reached the Yanomami territory – one day travel past the last military outpost.

Yanomami shaman in trance

In one Yanomami village, where we were only allowed to sleep outside the village in hammocks (who knew, what manner of demons we carried in our luggage?), we had the occasion to observe a shamanistic ritual. The treatment took place in a hut with children, adults, and dogs, with light provided by several fires. The patient was treated by a shaman pupil who “sucked” the illness out of the body and spit it on the floor (in the form of splinters of wood). This is a very old form of understanding illness, which effectively can be considered a stone-age practice. Before the treatment, the shaman snorted a short-term hallucinogen (yopo) through the nose, in order to perform the treatment in a drug-induced trance.

Yanomami village (Shabono)

We tried to use this opportunity to experiment with the three layers of trance experience, namely the constriction of attention, alteration of body-awareness, and activation of the faculty for imagination. First we tried to focus the shaman’s eye movements on the corresponding movements of hands moving over the eyes of a person seated opposite. This attempt was a failure, however. The shaman only followed the movements of the hands rather than looking into the eyes that the hands passed over. After this we tried to influence the body awareness of the shaman. One of us sat behind him and massaged the shoulder, while the other sat in front and massaged the temples. He responded to this with a certain surprise, but without any observable change like we had hoped. In the end we didn’t attempt the third phase – activating the faculties of imagination. But we know from the literature that the shaman changes into a jaguar several times each day under a yopo-induced trance.

Shortly after the ritual the shaman chief emerged from the background of the hut talking of lower back pains. At first we thought to give him some pain pills, but then remembered our experience trying to pass out malaria pills in another Yanomami village.

Most of the residents simply didn’t take them, but others spat them out – perhaps because their perception of healing treatment involves something coming ‘out’ rather than going ‘in’. So we decided against aspirin and for hypnosis. We thought if hypnosis is such an ancient phenomenon, we should be able to employ it for the help of our ‘prehistoric’ colleague. We hoped to take advantage of this shaman’s frequent experience of trance by asking him to imagine himself as a jaguar moving through the ancient forest (which we communicated over several languages junctions: English to Spanish to Yekuana to Yanomami). Directly after the instruction was received he developed a very distant stare and then independently closed his eyes. He then received suggestions for relaxation directly in German, spoken with extended, lilting vowels. The trance was completed after ten minutes, at which point we raised his eyelids. He reported that the pain was gone.

When we made a follow-up examination the next morning with the elders – wearing ceremonial jewels for official occasions – we got the impression that the shaman chief might be suffering from kidney stones. Therefore it seems we succeeded the prior day in using hypnosis to relieve a painful muscular cramp, at least temporarily. It was very impressive for us that it was possible to induce a therapeutic trance despite the cultural and linguistic barriers, by using a resource like the common ‘jaguar transmutation.’

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