Shamanism in Europe

See Sami shamanism for shamanism in northern Scandinavia, which is in Europe, but culturally part of the Finno-Ugric traditions of Northern Asia.

The first historian to posit the existence of European shamanic ideas within popular beliefs of otherwise Christian Europeans was Carlo Ginzburg, who examined the Benandanti, an agrarian cult found in Friuli, Italy, whose members underwent shamanic trances in which they believed they battled witches in order to save their crops.^[1][2]

Historians following Ginzburg identified what they saw as shamanic elements in the accusations of the witch trials of the Early Modern period. These included Éva Pócs^[3] and Emma Wilby.^[4][5] This group of authors proposes what is known as the "witch-cult hypothesis", arguing that there was a religious cult with continuity reaching into the pre-Christian period behind what became identified as "witchcraft" in the Early Modern period.

The idea of shamanism's existence in Ancient Greece was advanced by E. R. Dodds^[6] and criticized by Michael J. Puett.^[7]

See also

• Shamanistic remnants in Hungarian folklore

References

1. Ginzburg, Carlo (1983). The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
2. Ginzburg, Carlo (1991). Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. London: Penguin.
3. Pocs, Eva (1999). Between the Living and the Dead. Budapest: Central European University Press.
4. Wilby, Emma (2005). Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.
5. Wilby, Emma (2010). The Visions of Isabel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.
6. Eric R. Dodds (1951). The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1951.
7. Michael J. Puett (2002). To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-divinization in Early China, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, pp. 83-86.