1. Introduction: An Unknown Text by a Half-Known Author

To the anglophone reader Henri Ey (1900–1977) is a name more often cited than read. The dominant theorist of twentieth-century French psychiatry — author of La conscience, architect of the organo-dynamic model that transplanted Hughlings Jackson into French clinical thought, convener of the Bonneval colloquia — remains almost entirely untranslated into English[1]. That this same author spent his last years writing a history of the origins of medicine itself; that the book appeared only after his death; and that it contains a sustained, systematic treatment of the shaman — this is known to almost no one, in any language. What this paper introduces is a continuous text of some twenty pages from the posthumous Naissance de la médecine (Masson, 1981): Section II, “The magico-animistic stereotype: the Shaman and the thaumaturgic trance,” and Section III, “Types and cultural areas of shamanism.” The edition used here is the augmented CREHEY edition of 2017, whose pagination (pp. 56–76) is followed throughout[2]; it differs from that of the Masson first edition[3].

There are three reasons for the introduction. First, the text is inaccessible: no English translation of any part of Naissance de la médecine exists, and even in French the book has scarcely been read[4]. Second, these two sections are, among twentieth-century discussions of shamanism, an exceptional thing: a long and systematic treatment written from the side of psychiatry — the “sick shaman” controversy of the 1860s to 1970 mapped whole, by one of the participants. Third — and for the present author decisively — the text is a rare junction at which Ey’s theory of consciousness actually crosses the shamanism literature of the historians of religion and the anthropologists. When Ey says that the shaman’s trance is “like a dream,” this is not a figure of speech: in his organo-dynamic theory, the dream is the very paradigm of the destructuration of the field of consciousness. On the reading of that one phrase turns the character of the whole: either “an ethnographic digest written by a psychiatrist as a sideline,” or “an extrapolation of a theory of consciousness into the religious history of the species.” This paper reads it as the latter.

The order of treatment: Section 2 establishes the bibliography and the circumstances of composition; Section 3 places the passage within the design of the book. Sections 4 through 7 are the body of the introduction — the central thesis (4), the description of the trance (5), the “sick shaman” controversy (6), the five cultural-area models (7). Section 8 assembles the criticisms that today’s scholarship must enter, and Section 9 states what the text means now: its convergence with the ICD-11 diagnostic guidelines, and its connection to the two companion studies of the shaman-queens of early Japan (Articles 13-I and 13-II of this Bulletin).

2. The Manuscript: Banyuls, Maurel, and the Blank Notes

2.1 The retreat at Banyuls and a work entrusted

Ey died in 1977. What he had undertaken in his last years was an “immense building-site” (l’immense chantier), to be titled Histoire de la psychiatrie dans l’histoire de la médecine — a history of psychiatry inside the history of medicine. The 230-page volume published by Masson in 1981 is the first part of that unfinished enterprise[3].

The circumstances are recorded by the book’s editor himself, Henri Maurel, in a later essay, “Henri Ey historien”[5]. Maurel was a psychiatrist and a Hellenist; lecturing on the history of psychiatry at Toulouse, he had lately returned to his Greek, and each summer he visited Ey as a neighbour. In 1976 and 1977 Ey sent him chapters of the “book under construction” — notably those on the Hippocratic corpus, the nature of man, the nature of disease — and on one of these occasions entrusted to him the task of seeing the work through the press should it remain unfinished. A prefatory inscription in the same volume, signed R.M.P., preserves the scene[T1]:

I remember him, in 1977, under the hundred-year-old Aleppo pine and in the library at Banyuls dels Aspres, receiving from Henri Ey — in the most perfect serenity — his “last wishes” concerning this History of Psychiatry within the History of Medicine which he feared he would not have time to complete. […] And thanks to him, to his goldsmith’s work, the Naissance de la Médecine was able to see the light of day in 1981.

Maurel adds, of the very title: “this last posthumous work, published in 1981, which we entitled Naissance de la médecine.” The title is not the author’s. That fact fixes the attitude in which the book must be read: what we have is not a finished work, but a building-site given the form of a book by its editor.

2.2 “Historian” in the strong sense

Maurel’s essay was to have been called “The history of medicine as Henri Ey saw it”; he changed the title to “Henri Ey historien,” and his reason is a key to the author[T2]:

For Henri Ey is not a historian of medicine in the usual sense of the term, but a historian in the strong and etymological sense — that is to say, a student and a researcher. It is certainly thus that he understood the word “history” when he announced the project of writing a Natural History of Madness.

Ey’s own formula is sharper still: no science, being an inscription in space and time, is “unhistorical”; but medicine is essentially historical, because it is inscribed in the discovery of the nature of the diseases — in a natural history of diseases which themselves have a history. Hence the doubled construction of the projected title, a history within a history: the enterprise of a “second-order study,” a history articulated dialectically inside the development of a science itself.

Nor was Ey a collector of anecdotes. In the classical histories of medicine adorned with photographs and engravings he saw a “danger of digression or blurring”; nothing, he held, must be allowed to violate the text. “History is a writing (une écriture),” he wrote, “binding author and reader in the necessity of a rigorous and severe mutual reflection — here I think with Michel Citeaux.” The “Michel Citeaux” is evidently a slip for Michel de Certeau, whose L’écriture de l’histoire had appeared in 1975 — a small proof that in his last retreat Ey was watching, out of the corner of his eye, the leading edge of French historiographical theory.

The interest in the history of medicine was no late whim. The first volume of the Études psychiatriques (1948) contains “The mechano-dynamist rhythm of the history of medicine,” which finds in Hippocratism “the first and capital dynamist movement in the history of medicine”; there followed the historical chapters of the Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale (1955) and the Manuel de psychiatrie (1960), and, in the year of his death, “Naissance de la psychiatrie” (1977)[6]. But — Maurel again — neither in 1948 nor in 1954 did Ey descend deeply to the Hellenic ancestors: “he would come to that much later, in the retreat at Banyuls, where the memories of his school years and the taste for Greek violently revived.” Naissance de la médecine is the product of that late return.

2.3 The editor, and the note left blank

That the book is a posthumous manuscript, the text itself discloses in a single place — note 13, at the end of Section III[T3]:

Henri Ey’s manuscript carries here the instruction: “Leave room for the drafting of a long note, about the size of a full page, on Buddhism and on magic among the Arabs.” H.M.

The “H.M.” is Henri Maurel, as the epigraph on the title page of the Masson edition confirms — Eo defuncto, recognovit, notas et indicem adjecit H. Maurel: after the author’s death, H. Maurel revised the text and added the notes and the index[3]. The augmented CREHEY edition of 2017 — which binds Naissance de la médecine together with Naissance de la psychiatrie and the essay on moral disease and treatment in early nineteenth-century French and German psychiatry, 405 pages in all — is likewise Maurel’s[2].

The epigraph has one practical consequence for the reader: since the notes were “added,” they are not uniformly the author’s. Note 13 is signed “H.M.”; unsigned notes — “the word efficace is here used substantively” (note 7); “to which we shall return in the second part of this work” (note 8) — speak, by their voice, as the author. This paper treats the signed notes as Maurel’s and the unsigned as Ey’s; note 4, on which Section 5.2 turns, is unsigned, and therefore Ey’s own.

And the blank itself signifies. On Buddhism, and on the magic of the Islamic world, Ey intended to write, and died without writing. The blank permits us to read a feature of the text that will appear below — the near-absence of the eastern half of Eurasia — not as a mere bias of interest but as a mark of incompletion. For readers in Japan, the point is worth holding on to.

3. The Shape of the Book and the Concept of Ante-Medicine

Maurel orients Ey’s historical vision along two axes — a meditation on the Hippocratic writings, and a broad reflection on nature (physis) — which converge at one point[T4]:

…the major achievement of Greek medicine consists, in his view, in a surpassing of the mythical and religious ante-medicines, and an invention of natural medicine.

This sentence fixes the position of our two sections. What Ey describes under the name of the “magico-animistic stereotype” is the whole of what is surpassed. Medicine begins with the constitution of the concept of natural disease (maladie naturelle). What existed before was not medicine but what stands before medicine — ante-medicine — and shamanism is its first and purest stratum. In Ey’s own formula: “The advent of Medicine is the double revolution of man transcending the mythical layer of his being, and of disease becoming a modality of his nature” (p. 78, as cited by Maurel).

The method is explicitly the construction of a “stereotype”: from a mass of ethnographic descriptions, a common skeleton is extracted and recomposed as one ideal scene. In Ey’s own words, the shaman and shamanism are “ideal types (types idéaux), exemplary entities of magico-animistic anthropology.” The methodological self-awareness deserves recording: Ey knows that what he is describing is not the ethnography of any real people but a constructed type. Yet — as Section 8.2 will argue — in constructing it he folded together two techniques of contrary structure, ecstasy and possession, into a single dramaturgy.

The order of his exposition is: (i) the thaumaturgic trance as stereotype; (ii) the person of the shaman — vocation, initiation, social function, secrecy; (iii) the answer to the question “is the shaman ill?”; (iv) the application to five cultural areas. This paper follows the same order. One caution on nomenclature: “ante-medicine” as a section heading is an editorial convenience; the term appears in the base text only in passing — “these magicians of ante-medicine” (p. 70), “the shamanic archetype of ante-medicine” (p. 76) — and in Maurel’s plural anté-médecines.

4. The Central Thesis: No “Disease” in the Magical World

4.1 Mal and maladie

One proposition runs through the whole of these two sections, restated again and again, always the same. In the magico-animistic world the category of “disease” does not exist. What exists is Mal — the Harm, the Ill: a single undivided name for every “bad state,” in which sickness, misfortune and the injuries of sorcery are all of one kind[7]. It follows that what the shaman performs is not treatment, and that the patient is not a patient[T5]:

What constitutes the phenomenological core of the magical manner of being-in-the-world, culminating in this thaumaturgic liturgy, is precisely this: the sick man exists only in the negation of sickness (le malade n’existe que dans la négation de la maladie). […] What is at stake in this “operation” is not the curing of a disease or of a patient, but the exchanging of the values of good and evil that circulate within the group, animated by the beneficent and the maleficent spirits.

The formula explains why Ey, throughout these pages, sets the words “patient,” “disease,” “treatment” inside quotation marks. In the passage on the Melano-African type he defends this terminological scruple explicitly: many sociologists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts and physicians say “patient,” “disease,” “cure” without hesitation — he, for his part, will not commit that imprudence (imprudence), or more exactly that misreading (contresens). For the describer must place himself at the level of the described — a world in which the category of disease is not there to be found.

4.2 Centripetal and centrifugal knowledge

The proposition is one face of a larger opposition — the one Ey himself calls the leitmotiv of the entire book[T6]:

We must therefore underline here the appearance of what will form the leitmotiv of this work: the fundamental divergence between the centripetal path of the knowledge of the sacred and the centrifugal path of objective knowledge. In this regard, the magico-animistic experience of “possession” and “dispossession,” which is the Shaman’s prerogative, stands at the antipodes of the experience of scientific knowing. It consecrates the moral and supernatural ill while excluding the physical and natural disease. By that very act it substitutes mythology for pathology — pathology as it will come to be established across the centuries, with such difficulty and yet such solidity, by the progress of medical knowledge.

“To substitute mythology for pathology” (substituer la mythologie à la pathologie) — the most condensed sentence of these two sections, and the blueprint of Ey’s entire history of medicine. The choice of metaphor deserves a moment’s attention. The knowledge of the sacred winds inward, drawing the subject into itself; objective knowledge moves outward, away from the subject. In Ey this opposition of directions is no mere epistemological diagram: it is continuous with his theory of the structure of consciousness itself, as Section 5.3 will show.

4.3 Ante-medicine and anti-medicine at once

From this Ey draws a sharply normative demand upon the history of medicine. The historians of medicine, he holds, have been far too free in issuing diplomas to the magicians — calling them “medicine-men,” narrating their sorcery as the infancy of medicine. But that is to call “patient” one whose own society denies that he is ill, and to call “physician” one who is no physician[T7]:

The history of Medicine cannot take these diseases, these therapies, these “medicine-men,” for real patients or real physicians. It is outside Medicine that they stand (C’est hors de la Médecine qu’ils se situent).

Shamanism, therefore, is at once what precedes medicine — ante-medicine (ante-médecine) — and what stands against it — anti-medicine (anti-médecine). Ey sets the two words side by side at the close of the passage. This doubleness is the real thesis that lay hidden beneath the apparently neutral signboard of the “magico-animistic stereotype.”

5. The Thaumaturgic Trance

5.1 The crepuscular universe

Ey announces that he will reconstruct the shaman’s ritual as “aesthetics, dramaturgy, theatricality, and perhaps poetry,” and then begins to describe. The tone of the whole is set by dream and half-light[T8]:

The archaic universe is crepuscular, and it is in a light barely at its dawn or already dying that there unfold the liturgy, the rites, the ceremonies, the miracles, the simulacra of this phantasmagoria.

The ritual’s antecedent stage is the “pre-ecstatic vision” (vision pré-extatique) — the stage at which the shaman’s mind begins to read the signs appearing on the side of nature and of men. The catalogue of signs Ey enumerates is characteristic of his prose: the wind, the murmur of the forest, a strange crossing of a flight of birds with a line of trees; an old man’s gaze resting on a newborn; the smell of a woman’s excrement or menses; the sudden hiccup of a dying man; a boy’s greeting repeated three times toward the rock of the dead; the chewing of a birch root; a tear in a red garment; the cries and songs, and then the tears and murmurs, of those returning from the river.

Then the drum enters — the drum the shaman has made himself from the birch. The accelerating beat opens the curtain; the description proceeds as one continuous stage-action, through collective trance, to the manifestation of the Harm — personified, and at last named: le Mal — and on to the sacrifice of the totem animal. The cure is completed in the expulsion of the evil spirit: the shaman extracts it by suction and spits it out as a blood-stained symbol — a crushed worm, a lizard’s tail, a squashed scorpion.

5.2 Ergriffenheit and Besessenheit

At the centre of the description of the trance itself stands the vocabulary of ecstasy: a “migration of the spirit,” a “disincarnation,” a prodigious levitation, a marvellous journey — the soul’s ascent, climbing the verticality of the supernatural world and traversing the infinite horizontality of sacred space. Thus far the description coincides with Eliade’s “archaic techniques of ecstasy.” And to the word for this state Ey attaches a footnote — within these twenty pages, the single passage most deserving of the reader’s attention[T9]:

Ergriffenheit, say the Germans, opposing this state of grace to Besessenheit, the state of possession (cf. Zutt, 1972, and particularly the contributions of W. R. Mühlmann and Helmut Hoffmann to this Homburg Symposium, May 1968).

The reference is to the collective volume edited by Jürg Zutt, Ergriffenheit und Besessenheit: Ein interdisziplinäres Gespräch über transkulturell-anthropologische und -psychiatrische Fragen (Bern/Munich: Francke, 1972) — the proceedings of a symposium held at Homburg in May 1968; Karl Jettmar’s report on western Pakistan and Kafiristan, which Ey cites elsewhere under “1968,” evidently derives from the same occasion[8].

What matters is the fact this footnote attests. The vocabulary that divides the two modes — ecstasy and possession — was coined independently of the history of religions (Eliade), in a joint workshop of German-language psychopathology and ethnology. Ergriffenheit, the state of grace, of being seized: the human being taken hold of by the spirit, yet still standing as a subject. Besessenheit, the state of being owned: the human being as the spirit’s vessel. The distinction cuts at the locus of agency — and thereby cuts the same joint as Eliade’s axis of technique, from a wholly different lineage. It shows that this axis is no speculation of a single school, but a line of section at which several disciplines arrived independently.

And yet — here lies a weakness to which Section 8.2 returns — Ey himself does not use the distinction as an axis. Within these same pages he redescribes the shaman’s prerogative as “the magico-animistic experience of possession and dispossession,” and writes that the shaman “is himself possessed by the power of the evil spirits.” Ey holds the vocabulary of the first axis in a footnote — and declines to erect it in the text.

5.3 The trance as dream: the junction with organo-dynamics

Passing from description to structural analysis, Ey lays down a verdict[T10]:

There is no doubt, of course and first of all, that the great shamanic trance, festival of the poetic art of magic, is like a dream. And only like a dream […]

One can read the phrase as a figure of speech and pass on. Ey’s readers will not. Two sentences of orientation for those who do not know his system: in Ey’s organo-dynamic theory — his lifelong reworking of Hughlings Jackson — consciousness is a structured field whose pathological states are successive levels of destructuration of that field; and the dream is the very paradigm of destructuration, the model on which the whole of his La conscience is built[1][9]. Whenever Ey describes a psychopathological phenomenon, the reference point is the dream. “Like a dream,” here, is therefore an operation: it sets the shamanic trance on the coordinates of his own theory of consciousness.

And the operation works as depathologization. “Like a dream” does not, in this system, mean “like an illness.” Everyone dreams; the dissolution of consciousness happens daily and reversibly. To place the trance on the side of the dream is to detach it from the disease process. In the same paragraph Ey observes that the phenomenon “excludes the natural forces that constitute objective reality” and belongs, therefore, to the order of the imaginary; and he continues at once: it is “the manifestation of the archaic, formal core of man’s ‘nature’” — belonging to the level at which “this nature ceases to be bodily and is reflected into the symbolic order, constituting the first psychical development of each person and of humanity as a whole.” The trance is neither pathology nor immature thought: it is positioned as the first scene in which the symbolic order lifts off from the body.

If this reading is right, the two sections are at once a piece of the history of medicine and an essay in the extrapolation of Ey’s theory of consciousness — the paradigm of destructuration set at the origin of the religion of the species. A bold operation, and a criticizable one (Section 8.3). But it forbids, at least, the dismissal of these pages as a specialist’s sideline.

5.4 Phenomenological core, ambiguity, myth, secrecy

In the structural analysis Ey counts, by his own count, four characters. The first is the dream-character just described. The second is the phenomenological core quoted in Section 4.1 — the sick man exists only in the negation of sickness — for which Ey leans on chapter IX of Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale, citing its formula that the inseparable elements of the shamanic complex are organized “around two poles, one formed by the intimate experience of the shaman himself, the other by collective consensus”[10]. This bipolarity is the anthropologists’ anticipation of the distinction between state and office — the quality of an individual’s experience and the seat a society designs — on which the companion papers turn (Article 13-I, Section 7).

What Ey expressly marks as “the third existential character” is the ambiguity of the great magician. The shaman is the incarnation of good and evil at once, standing “above the contradiction”: in the ecstasy of grace an angel of salvation; possessed by the evil spirits, able to lift the harm from another — or to impose it. The power that heals and the power that sickens are one power; hence the ambiguity common to white and black magic, extending to the ritual’s participants and to its object, who is at once an object of veneration and pity, and of terror and revulsion — in a word, a “taboo.”

And “finally” (Enfin) comes the fourth element: myth. Into the words, gestures and convulsions of the actors of this “high mass” of magic are introduced the cosmogonic fables — miraculous births, eternal return, descents into hell, victories over death — and the “unhistorical” stories of heroes and gods: metamorphoses, sacrileges, murders, incests. The cosmic dimension the trance borrows comes from the myth. Here again Ey cites Lévi-Strauss, and finds the common value of these “cures” in a poetics composed, sung and played like the score of a great orchestra.

Ey’s remarks on the shaman’s sex belong to the same chapter of ambiguity. “The shaman” is spoken of in the masculine, but there are women practitioners, and clans in which the office belongs to women exclusively (Ey cites Marcel Bouteiller). Among the “singularities” that mark the shamanic vocation he counts homosexuality and doubled or “counter-natural” sex — constituting “a kind of super-nature (surnature) suited to the shamanic aptitude”[11]; and in a further note he adds that in the erotic configuration of the ritual, sexual excitation is present precisely “by its absence and radical effacement,” under the value of the taboo that strikes it — as in the dream, where sexuality appears only in disguise.

Last, secrecy. In every cultural area the shaman belongs to a closed circle, a secret society; rite, technique and language are radically esoteric. Ey erects here the proposition that every society harbours secret societies within its latent structure, and points to the place where the word becomes “an explosive” — that which, to remain sacred, must not be said. It is the most Bataillean page of the text.

6. Is the Shaman Ill?

6.1 The map of the controversy

The highest historiographical value of the text lies in this section. Ey begins by dissecting the question itself. Within a social formation governed by magico-animistic belief, magic cannot be regarded as illness — because there the converse proposition is self-evident: the ill (le mal, as an anthropological field) is precisely the effect of magic. The question “is the shaman ill — ill, in particular, with a psychopathological disorder?” can therefore arise only “after the fact,” for the reflective consciousness of the physician or sociologist as scholar. The very conditions of the question depend on the position of the outside observer.

He then draws up the two camps. On the pathological side: the older generation of anthropologists cited by Eliade — Krivoshapkin (1861), Bogoraz (1910), Czaplicka (1914) — joined more recently by those cited by Devereux: Kroeber (1952), Ralph Linton (1956), La Barre (1967). Åke Ohlmarks (1939) took Arctic shamanism — in his view the original form — for a pathological consequence of extreme cold, with the hysterical trance of the meryak as its effect (the so-called Arctic hysteria), confirming Wilkens’s view (1887) of the pathological character of Indonesian shamanism. And Devereux (1970) — in Ey’s words, “after, or before, a rather embarrassed discussion” — made the thesis his own. On the opposite side stand M. E. Opler (1936), E. H. Ackerknecht (1941), M. Bouteiller (1950), M. Eliade (1951), and more recently H. Hoffmann (1968). Ey first registers the empirical rebuttal: the most serious observers of surviving shamanic institutions attest that most shamans, outside the ecstasy and the exercise of their sacred aptitude, behave normally.

6.2 The normative refutation

But Ey’s own force lies beyond the empirical rebuttal. He erects a stronger argument[T11]:

By definition, indeed, he is not ill — quite the contrary; for he is a member of a cultural group governed by a normative institution, and he conforms to that normativity.

This is neither a statistical argument nor a clinical one. It is an argument about normativity (normativité). Where a group possesses a structure saturated with rules, taboos and beliefs, and that structure distributes roles and offices to its members, one cannot call ill — by a criterion imported from outside the structure — the man who conforms to the distribution. That the choice of word calls up Canguilhem’s Le normal et le pathologique is hardly an accident[12]: Ey is wielding the central concept of French medical epistemology upon the material of anthropology.

And the argument has a sharp reverse face[T12]:

the sorcerers, the healers, the shamans — partaking at once of the god and of the priest — cannot be considered “ill” […] without being assimilated, at the same stroke, to the patients they “cure.”

Whoever calls the shaman ill must, by the same logic, call ill those he heals. But in this system of values every member of the group stands under one and the same moral condition — the condition not of disease but of the Harm and of sorcery. The cut between the ill and the well cannot be drawn inside this system at all. It becomes drawable only with the constitution of the concept of natural disease. Ey states the point positively: the concept of natural disease, instead of reducing all members to one level beneath the merciless moral combat of good and evil, delimits the natural boundaries of illness and thereby makes it possible — indeed obligatory — to diagnose who in the group is (naturally) ill and who is not.

This paragraph has the longest reach of anything in the text: it describes the constitution of the concept of disease not as a progress of knowledge but as the birth of a device that introduces a distinction into the interior of the group.

6.3 The shaman and the psychoanalyst

And then, in note 8 — announced by the words “the ‘Freudian thing,’ to which we shall return in the second part of this work, often and insatiably” — Ey permits himself a thrust entirely his own[T13]:

the piquancy is that the Shaman’s function, his “illness,” his own cure, his technique for curing the patient, refer us in “modern times” to the function of the mage-psychoanalyst, to his personal analysis as an unconscious patient, to the liberating analysis which alone confers on him the power to exorcise by the magical exercise of the word…

The analyst, qualified to heal by the word only by passing through his training analysis; the shaman, qualified to heal others only by healing his own vocation-illness. Ey leaves the correspondence as a suggestion, linked to Lévi-Strauss’s “symbolic efficacy”[10]. Whether it is homage or irony he does not say; but the compound le mage-psychanalyste — the mage-psychoanalyst — in the pen of an organo-dynamist who kept his distance from psychoanalysis all his life, carries no small charge.

7. The Five Cultural-Area Models

7.1 The five models

In Section III Ey tests the constructed stereotype against five cultural areas: the Tibeto-Siberian, the Babylonian-Semitic, the North American Indian, the Australo-Oceanian, and the Melano-African.

The Tibeto-Siberian type is the “matrix” on which the description of Section II was based — in Ey’s words, “as it were supra-temporal.” It arises at the crossing of Central Asia, Tibet, Siberia and Manchuria, of the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic languages. The historiographical apparatus is briskly ordered: the dispute over the etymology of “shaman” between Banzarov’s Turko-Mongolian derivation and the Sanskrit derivation of Rémusat and Max Müller; the word’s entry into the West through the Cossack reports of Peter the Great’s time; the references running from Nebesky-Wojkowitz and Diószegi to Hoffmann and Jettmar.

The Babylonian-Semitic type is treated briefly, as an announcement of the chapter to follow: the Assyro-Babylonian priests and magicians raised incantation, ritual and the formulas of exorcism to the level of “a true black magic” (Contenau); astrology, oracle, divination and hepatoscopy constituted the mythical ritualization of the expulsion of the ill and its demons; and, after Adolphe Lods, the fetishistic and totemic magic of the Canaanites given over to the cult of Baal.

For the North American type the principal reference is Marcel Bouteiller’s Sorbonne thesis (1950); “it is natural,” Ey remarks, “that Bouteiller, treating shamanism in general, refers chiefly to the North American type.” The enormous history of investigation from Tylor, Robertson Smith and Frazer through Boas and Kroeber is counted off, with special notice of the attention Lévi-Strauss paid to the Kwakiutl text collected by Boas — the record of a cure by a Koskimo shaman. It is here that Ey first lodges his objection to the “diplomas” that historians of medicine have conferred on the “medicine-man.”

The Australo-Oceanian type contains the most original argument of the text and is treated separately below (7.2). For the Melano-African type, Ey traverses the lineage of nineteenth-century travel and exploration literature and then shifts his weight to the modern field studies. What he singles out with “decisive interest” is Didier Michaux’s study of the therapeutic course of the ndöp (1972), on the foundation of A. Zempléni’s work on possession ritual among the Lebou and Wolof (1966)[13]. He follows the progress of the ndöp — the linguistic and bodily manifestations, the shamanic high flight, the naming of the spirit (the identification of the rab), the operations of transfer and expulsion, the shedding of blood in the sacrifice of the totem animal, the normalization of the “patient” and his rab — and finds the role, person and office of the presiding ndöpkat “entirely identical” with the stereotype constructed in Section II. On this identity he rests his claim of “the constancy of universality.” It is also here, as noted in Section 4.1, that he gives his clearest defence of the quotation marks around “patient.”

One fissure inside his own schema should be marked. In the Melano-African material Ey concedes that “the shamanic function may be entrusted to the whole group entering the same trance,” being “borne to the highest degree in certain participants or officiants.” The observation that the office need not be fixed in an individual but may be distributed across a collective loosens, from within, the stereotype of the solitary practitioner on which his construction rests.

At the chapter’s close stands the long record of Marcel, the patient treated by the Ivorian healer Albert Atcho, cited as the occasion for entering the problem-complex “disease, healing, magic”[14]; and note 12 supplies the two magico-ethnic areas excluded from the survey — Abyssinia (the zar possession; Griaule, Leiris) and North Africa (the Maghreb, the ʿIsawiyya of Morocco, the sorcery of the jinn).

7.2 Durkheim’s silence and the alatunja

What Ey performs in the Australian section is a rereading of Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. He begins with a fact[T14]:

It is remarkable indeed that not only does E. Durkheim never (it seems to us) cite the term shaman (or chaman), since then so widely employed, but it is difficult to find in his work a chapter or even a paragraph on the personage, the function, the rites and the myths corresponding to the power of healing or to the malefice of illness.

And he explains the silence. Durkheim’s clan is conceived as a purely animistic organization — as a magical effusion. There, every man, every event, every ritualized form of life is a manifestation of the magical law that governs the clan. In a system wholly subject to the categories of pure and impure, to the idolatry of the sacred, to the command of taboo, body, life, death and disease can appear only as “incidental manifestations of the combat with the ill.” Hence no distinct personage of the shaman can hold a seat there. Durkheim did not overlook the shaman; the construction of his theory, folding magic and society into a single level, left no room to erect within it the separate level of a healing office.

But Ey does not stop there. “Yet this silence is not empty,” he continues: read attentively, the Formes élémentaires contains on every page not only perpetual allusions to the magical power of healing the ill and to enchantment and possession by evil spirits, but an extensive and lucid account of the shamanic function and of the exorcistic rites of purification, reparation and salvation. On Ey’s reading, the alatunja — the head of the totemic group who presides over the Arunta’s intichiuma rites, in which the magical force animating the clan (Durkheim’s “substantified” force) is made manifest as each member goes out of himself to identify with the totemic spirit in the sacred festival — is precisely the figure to whom the shamanic office is entrusted: bearer of the emblem, incarnating the clan’s mana by disincarnation. And the course of the ritual, above all what Durkheim calls the piacular rites, is not only a liturgy of the exorcism of death, of rebirth and resurrection, but the totality of magical procedure for obtaining “healing” — a thaumaturgic therapeutics[15].

Whether this rereading survives the judgment of Australianists is a question for the specialists. But the form of the operation is exact — a great theory’s silence explained from the construction of the theory itself, the folding of levels diagnosed as the source of a blind spot; and the reader of the companion papers will recognize it (Section 9.2).

8. Criticism from Today’s Standpoint

8.1 The period style and the period vocabulary

These two sections cannot be quoted today as they stand. Ey’s manner is extravagantly expressionist — “the crepuscular universe,” “a surrealist bric-à-brac,” “a tragicomic carnival,” “an infantile jumble” — a rhetoric that installs its object as an item of aesthetic enjoyment. The graver problem is the vocabulary. “Primitive horde,” “savage,” “prehistoric,” “infantile” appear already in the general part, joined, in the African material, by “black magic” and the “images d’Épinal.” Ey frequently sets such words in quotation marks, and to that extent a consciousness of distance is present; but a sentence like “black Africa and black magic form, in the Épinal-print album of social anthropology, the image of what is perhaps the most violent, the most colourful, the hottest thing humanity contains” requires defence before a reader of the 2020s.

Nor is this merely a matter of decorum. The universality of Ey’s “stereotype” rests, in part, on the homogeneity of sources produced under determinate historical conditions — the reports of explorers, missionaries and colonial administrators. His verdict that the phenomena are “desperately the same beneath their diversity” (désespérément les mêmes sous leur diversité) may be less a proof of the identity of the object than a symptom of the identity of the observational frame.

8.2 Ecstasy and possession undifferentiated

The graver methodological defect is the one prepared in Section 5.2. Ey records the Ergriffenheit/Besessenheit distinction in a footnote — and does not use it as an axis in the text. In his stereotype the trance is described as migration, levitation, ascent of the soul (ecstasy); the same shaman’s experience is called “possession and dispossession”; and the shaman is said to be “himself possessed.” Two techniques of contrary structure are fused at the level of description.

The fusion means that Ey, citing Eliade, declined Eliade’s central distinction — for Eliade had granted that possession may belong to a very archaic stratum of religion, while insisting that its structure differs from the ecstatic experience of shamanism in the strict sense[16]. Ey’s stereotype sacrificed that structural distinction to dramaturgical unity: a case of literary achievement obstructing analytic achievement. There is, to be sure, another way to read the defect. If pure ecstasy and pure possession are ideal types only, and every real case a mixture, then Ey’s description can be read as a record of the real mixture taken neat, without passage through the types. The trouble is that he does not know it as a mixture.

8.3 The absence of Lewis, and the universalism

Ey wrote these pages in the mid-1970s — the most recent item he cites is a film record of 1975 — and yet I. M. Lewis’s Ecstatic Religion (1971) is nowhere cited[17]. The consequence is not small: the variable of the seat of authority is never erected in his description. Whether the bearer of the office occupies an established seat at the centre of the community, or activates, seatless, from occasion to occasion — this difference is not thematized. As we saw, Ey concedes in the ndöp material that the office can be distributed across a collective, and he insists on membership in the “closed circle” of the secret society; but neither observation is developed into a typology of the seat of authority.

So too with the universalism. Ey deploys the term “ideal type” with methodological self-awareness, and then advances into a universalism stronger than Eliade’s own: “archetype,” “constancy of pattern,” “constancy of universality” — the very claims that post-Eliadean Siberian ethnography has been dismantling empirically. Used as an ideal type, a type serves to measure how far, and in what direction, the real cases deviate from it; in Ey’s usage the moment of measurement is scanted, and the type slides toward an assertion of existence.

8.4 The reach of the boundary-line

Finally, the line itself. “The medicine-men are not physicians; they stand outside Medicine” is, within the history of medicine, a strong normative position — a declaration of rupture against the popular historiography that narrates magical healing as medicine’s infancy, and to that extent effective. But the line is orthogonal to the interests of the history of religions: mode of office, seat of authority, social position of ritual lie along another axis entirely.

And the centre of gravity of Ey’s theory of the office is unmistakably healing. He duly lists divination, rain-making, the settlement of intra-group conflicts (thefts, suspicions, sacrileges, attempted murders); he calls the ritual’s antecedent stage “divination,” and writes of the shaman’s “powers of divination and healing” as a pair. But, as he states in so many words, “his principal function is to heal.” Whoever would transplant Ey’s framework into another discipline must carry this centre of gravity with it: his interest lies in the shaman as healer, not in the shaman as ruler.

9. Reception: From ICD-11 Back to Ey

9.1 A precursor of the ICD-11 diagnostic guidelines

Ey’s argument of Section 6.2 — “by definition he is not ill; for he is a member of a group governed by a normative institution, and conforms to that normativity” — reappears, four decades later, as a rule in the diagnostic guidelines of the World Health Organization. The ICD-11 Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Requirements (CDDR, 2024) provide, for schizophrenia and other primary psychotic disorders, that culturally sanctioned expressions of ideas, beliefs and behaviour are not to be classified under these categories; for the dissociative disorders, that experiences forming part of accepted cultural, religious or spiritual practice are not to be counted as symptoms; and for trance and possession-trance states in particular, that they are to be considered features of a mental disorder only when involuntary and unwanted, not accepted as part of a collective cultural or religious practice, and productive of significant distress or functional impairment[18].

The logic is structurally the same: the criterion of judgment is placed not in the description of the phenomenon itself, but in the position the phenomenon occupies within the normative system of the group. What Ey stated as theory, the CDDR codifies as diagnostic rule. No claim of influence is intended — this posthumous text has scarcely been read even in the francophone world. The point is not a lineage but a convergence: two lines of thought, setting out independently from the clinic and from the history of medicine, arrive at the same conclusion. And the convergence is evidence of something: that the CDDR’s cultural-exception clauses are not a political concession to cultural relativism, but the consequence of an argument grounded in the concept of normativity.

9.2 Connections to the companion papers

The two companion studies (Articles 13-I and 13-II) locate the oracle of Empress Jingū and the kidō of Himiko on a coordinate plane spanned by the axis of technique (ecstasy/possession) and the axis of the seat of authority (central/peripheral). The present text connects to that undertaking at four points.

First, a third warrant for the first axis. The ecstasy/possession axis stands, in the companion papers, on Eliade (history of religions), with Pharo’s definitional study underwriting the ecstatic pole from the side of religious studies[19]. The Ergriffenheit/Besessenheit pair of the Zutt volume, to which Ey’s footnote points, adds a third and independent warrant — coined in a joint workshop of German psychopathology and ethnology, and naming both poles at once. At the same time, the fact that Ey himself did not use the vocabulary as an axis is citable as a methodological lesson: to possess the vocabulary of a distinction and to erect it as an axis of analysis are two different things.

Second, the controversy and the CDDR. Article 13-I introduces the “sick shaman” controversy through Eliade’s and Ackerknecht’s aphorisms and resolves it with the Jaspersian distinction of understanding and explanation; its conclusion cites the CDDR. The present text supplies the primary map of that controversy, 1861–1970, and the normative refutation — whereby the citation of the CDDR changes its status: from an appeal to authority into the record of a convergence of thought.

Third, the axis of social function, and healing as the centre of gravity. The function axis of Article 13-II opposes the oracular (legitimation of singular decisions) to the pacificatory (maintenance of cosmological order). Ey’s shaman holds both as subordinate functions, with the centre of gravity in healing: “his principal function is to heal.” The Japanese material possesses that function abundantly — the healer-ascetics, the yorigitō, the itako. But the two shaman-queens do not heal. Himiko and Jingū alike lack the very function Ey places at the centre of the office, and bear only the function he places at the periphery — the oracle. Ey’s criterion thereby yields the index by which the shaman-queen is cut out of the broader concept of the shaman: an oracular specialization without healing. It also explains why his framework cannot be imported wholesale: his boundary-line — magic against medicine — is orthogonal to the axes of technique and of the seat of authority.

Fourth, Durkheim’s silence and the folding of levels. Article 13-I dismantles Campbell’s dichotomy of hunting and planting religions by showing that it folds variables of different descriptive levels into a single pair of type-names. Ey’s operation upon Durkheim is of the same form: the silence of a great theory diagnosed as the symptom of its folding of levels. The materials differ — Campbell’s are Siberian and northern, Durkheim’s Australian — but the form of the diagnosis is one, and Ey supplies the precedent that shows the procedure to be no private quarrel of the companion papers.

9.3 Conclusion

The shaman essay of Naissance de la médecine is not a finished scholarly achievement. The style belongs to its period; the handling of sources is coarse by present standards; the distinction that should have been the methodological pivot lies abandoned in a footnote; the author died without completing the part, and the page reserved for Buddhism and Islam remains blank; even the title is not his.

The text deserves reading nonetheless, for two reasons. First, it is a rare record of the posture that French psychiatry of the 1970s could take toward the materials of anthropology; and its way of describing the constitution of the category “disease” — not as a progress of knowledge but as the birth of a device introducing a distinction into the interior of the group — has not aged. Second, it argued the impossibility of calling the shaman ill normatively, not merely empirically; and that argument coincides with the point at which the international diagnostic criteria arrived forty years later.

Maurel was right: Ey was not a historian of medicine in the usual sense, but a historian in the etymological sense — one who inquires. That this inquirer, tracing medicine to its origin in the retreat at Banyuls, should have found there first of all the discovery that there is no disease there — in that paradox the whole of the unfinished book is folded.

Texts

French originals of the passages quoted in translation. Base text: Ey, H. Naissance de la médecine, éd. augmentée, établie par H. Maurel, Perpignan: CREHEY, 2017, pp. 56–76; Maurel, H., “Henri Ey historien.”

Notes and References