Some fifteen years ago, at a lecture I gave on new Indigenous identities in Australia, I was asked to elaborate a bit on ‘Aboriginal shamanism’. The question did not come as a surprise – for scholarship has indeed ascribed the category of shamanism to a number of phenomena in Indigenous Australian religions and more broadly hierophanics – but it did give me the chance to clarify some things that more often than not get confused.
Shamanism is a religious phenomenon that involves wise people, male or female, in a range of capacities within their pre-modern or, to put it perhaps better, tribal social settings who ‘visit’ places beyond the world, either by ascending to heaven or by descending to the underworld; places where they receive from the dead or from other ‘supernatural’ beings the power to perform their duties.
There are manifestations of Indigenous Australian life-worlds that resemble or even come quite close to shamanism, but there has never been such a thing that one might call Indigenous Australian shamanism – despite the emergence of self-declared Indigenous ‘shamans’ since the 1960s. To put it simply, Australia has only produced mabans!
Who Are the Mabans?
In Indigenous Australia, for several reasons pertaining to the peculiar worldview of Indigenous peoples throughout the millennia, the above shamanistic tripartite division of reality – heaven, earth, underworld – or, for that matter, even a dual division into sky and earth is, if anything, quite redundant. What dominates the experience of Indigenous peoples is place as an integral unity, where everything and everyone occurs and recurs rhythmically and where knowledge or the wisdom of life is realised through a series of initiations. Everyone holds a unique place within the whole and everyone is equally needed for the whole to function properly. There is no need for specialists of the shamanic type. Nevertheless, such specialists did emerge, but they did so for a reason and for a purpose, transforming precolonial practices and the traditional order substantially…
Anthropologist A. P. Elkin noted that mabans are men of high degree, that is, men who not only have gone through all stages of initiation but also have gone through some special and extraordinary rituals that enable them to fulfil unique roles for the sake of their respective communities. To be sure, mabans constituted a precolonial Indigenous reality, but it is very hard to ascertain the exact role and features of their traditional function. Most likely, they represented the most senior members of the initiated male population, but not some kind of specialised functionaries. It is only in the colonial period and context that these top initiated men became specialised shamanic functionaries climbing up towards the sky in order to obtain the means that would sustain the universe of their Indigenous places.
But why, in the first place, would the mabans need to turn to the sky in order to sustain the earth? This question is basically a question of hermeneutic suspicion: it deconstructs the elements that make up the question by problematising them. The sky would be needed and would find its way into the Indigenous picture, so to speak, only if and when the earth, the land or the place of Indigenous peoples was undermined, jeopardised or destroyed as such. This entails that the sky-climbing mabans are but a product of colonial times, when the traditional mabans confronted the violation of place or topos by the claims and prospects of the advancement of history or utopia. So, it is in the wake of the ‘terror of history’, to recall the famous Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade, that Indigenous Australia witnessed the transformation of its mabans into an equivalent of shamans.
To be sure, post/colonial mabans do not visit or sojourn the underworld as is so often the case with the typical shaman – basically, they do so only occasionally – but otherwise they exhibit a number of shamanic traits. They are in a direct connection with what is regarded as the Sacred, namely, the Dreaming; they utilise this connection for the benefit of their people; they mediate between their place and the displaced Sacred, which is now to be found either in the sky (predominantly) or somewhere far away; they are liminal figures that inhabit a cosmic threshold, a space where reality partakes a bit of the ordinary and a bit of the otherworldly – what Indigenous writer Mudrooroo dubbed ‘maban reality’. But here a question arises: if Indigenous mabans have been accommodated within the conditions of Christian utopia, could they be further accommodated therein, so as to take on and transform Christian expressions of charismatic experience?
What Would Orthodox Mabans Look Like?
In the Orthodox tradition, especially in the hagiographical and ascetic strands of it, one comes across a multitude of shamanic equivalents: visitations and/or visions of the underworld/hell and the sky/heaven; confrontation with evil otherworldly entities, that is, the demonic forces; the disclosure of secrets and messages for the salvation of humankind in terms of warning; the acquisition of healing or more broadly reconciliatory powers; the blending of the everyday present with the future eschaton, and so forth. In this respect, what we see in the case of Indigenous mabans and Christian charismatics – clairvoyance, spiritual discernment, predictions, and other similar faculties – are aspects which are not in principle incompatible to one another; quite the opposite. The only clear-cut differences are the Christological point or reference for Christians and the gender inclusivity that their charismatics represent.
The challenge of inclusivity is a more or less easy thing to deal with, since Indigenous Australian peoples themselves are in a position to present nowadays their own female mabans. Where the whole prospect of an Orthodox Indigenous Australian shamanism becomes rather confronting is the lack of a Christological orientation in the whole Indigenous experience. But even this is not regarded as daunting, since the creation of an Indigenous Christology has already started on the part of Indigenous Christians. The Orthodox twist to all this depends on the extent to which the equation of the Dreaming-Christ with the Land will incorporate the latter as the reservoir of logoi-beings into the former as the Great Logos of their constitution.
In this context, the Orthodox mabans of the future will have nothing to do with the magical or hocus-pocus qualities involved in so much of postmodern postcolonial Indigenous shamanism. On the contrary, they will embody the best possible qualities of Indigenous knowledge traditions/dreamings.
In particular, Orthodox mabans will become a version of Orthodox charismatics insofar as the latter are seen as the bearers of spiritual envisioning (theoria) with regards to the particular parts of the environment (logoi of beings). Moreover, Orthodox anthropology can only expect to be enriched in this process, whereas in turn it will transform and at the same time augment Indigenous modes of being human.
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"Insights into Global Orthodoxy" is a weekly column that features opinion articles that on the one hand capture the pulse of global Orthodoxy from the perspective of local sensitivities, needs and/or limitations, and on the other hand delve into the local pragmatics and significance of Orthodoxy in light of global trends and prerogatives.
Dr Vassilis Adrahtas holds a PhD in Studies in Religion (USyd) and a PhD in the Sociology of Religion (Panteion). He has taught at several universities in Australia and overseas. Since 2015 he has been teaching ancient Greek Religion and Myth at the University of New South Wales and Islamic Studies at Western Sydney University. He has published ten books. He has extensive experience in the print media as editor-in-chief, and columnist, and for a while he worked as a radio producer. He lives in Sydney, Australia, his birthplace.
