Strong Recommend: Shamanism, The Timeless Religion by Dr Manvir Singh

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Welcome again to Strong Message here.

Strong recommend our cultural recommendations for the summer and a look at their impact on language.

I'm Amanda Inuci.

And I'm Helen Lewis.

And Helen, you recommend a book you've brought along?

I have.

I've brought a book along called Shamanism: The Timeless Religion by the anthropologist Manvir Singh.

It's out this year.

I can honestly say I haven't read it.

Good.

Has it come to you in a dream?

Did a leopard tell you its contents in a dream?

So Manvir Singh, as I said, is an anthropologist who's worked in Indonesia and elsewhere.

And he's really interested in the fact that across lots and lots of cultures, not just traditional cultures, you find shaman-like figures.

So they are characterized by going into a trance state.

So things like speaking in tongues, if we're going to talk about language, dancing is another one.

You know, invocation of spirits.

He has this, but he coins this really good word, which is xenized, like with an X, like xenophobia.

So making foreign.

He talks about the fact they make themselves strange and alien.

So they might be, you know, they might have tattoos all over their body.

They might be abstinent in various ways.

They tend to live apart from the village.

And he's really interested in all the ways in which people invoke the supernatural by sort of making themselves other, essentially, which I think is really interesting.

Because I think politicians sometimes do that, right?

The best ones or the most popular ones attain a sort of mythic.

quality right which i'm always kind of interested in yes like what's the bit about you you know like margaret thatcher sleeping four hours a night right it becomes a kind of thing about, well, she's not like a normal

whiskey at the end of every night, apparently.

Should she?

She would have a double whiskey.

Double whiskey, four hours of sleep.

Bang.

That's what made this country great.

Yeah.

God.

It's not for me.

But he also talks to modern Western doctors who think that perhaps maybe casualness of authority figures has gone too far.

That actually what we want in a doctor is somebody to come in in a white coat and tell us it's all going to be okay.

As he talks to this doctor who calls that process putting on the bird head.

You know, like it's your sort of ceremonial costume.

because actually when you're particularly in hospital which is very disempowering or ill in some way what you want is to regain a sense of sort of agency and a sense that there are people who are experts who care about you and supporting you i suppose what's happened is we've gone the the other way it because we used to give too many people too powerful a role of authority you know the parish priest the doctor the lawyer and we had to do exactly what they said, which would give, you know, the Maverick ones an enormous amount of power that they could so we've slightly dismantled that and it's all about empowering ourselves, you know, being able to challenge the doctor or go for a second opinion, you know, encouraging you to not be afraid to argue back.

So, what this book is perhaps picking up on is in doing that, we've kind of lost that sense of magic, the special place.

Yeah, yeah, which I think, you know, it's really interesting.

Like, you'll know this as well as I do, but like the placebo effect is incredibly powerful and seems to work even when people know they're being given a fake drug.

Just in some cases, in some extent.

Yes, I was reading an article, someone was suggesting, in many cases, it would be a lot cheaper if we just issued placebols for certain things.

I mean, sometimes they don't come with terrible side effects, but you know, you can, and you can hypnotise people into incredibly suggestible states and lots of that.

The mind is very powerful, but he's really interested in that thing about...

Yeah, in some ways.

I would say he's got a very powerful mind, but he believes the mind can bring good fortune towards you, if you will it.

Is it cosmic ordering?

Yeah, it's a good thing.

But he's now in New Zealand at cosmically ordering.

New Zealand is about.

Anyway, I think that stuff is.

So this book is not about Noel Edmonds.

Not principally.

There's more.

There's about

10 years.

More serious than

Noel Edmonds.

But Man Bear Singh goes and spends time in these traditional communities in the Philippines, but he rejects what he calls the Pokémon theory of religious evolution, which is the idea that Western religions have moved beyond this.

Because he actually says that there are prophets in the Christian tradition who behave in very shamanic ways.

You know, you get the burning bush or people speaking speaking in tongues.

And I think that's really quite an interesting way of looking at it that, you know, that we've been used to this idea that you kind of evolve past shamans, but actually, well, actually in Silicon Valley, people are mad for neo-shamans.

Yes.

So they all go to Burning Man in the desert and take shrooms and then connect to the universal consciousness.

That's right.

And they build up this image of the genius who can then make everything work.

Right.

So Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, went on some insane fast, again, which is very shaman-like, you know, it's saying that I'm and you will know Harari goes on a silent retreat for like a month every year.

You're saying that by taking myself out of normal life and making xenizing myself, I am attaining greater kind of spiritual insights.

The other thing is, I don't know about you, but I've never been tempted to take ayahuasca.

Which is one of those hallucinogenic drugs where you notoriously puke yourself inside out and then encounter God, which doesn't sound like my idea of a fun night out.

But seeing.

That's when you really are literally examining your inner self.

Right, the bits of it, yeah.

But yeah, he talks about the fact that we have this idea that actually things like mushrooms and stuff like that are powerful kind of things from indigenous cultures that we've lost touch with.

And says, actually, the thing that's fascinating about the way that traditional shamans use those drugs is they take them.

Right?

The shaman takes the drugs.

They go into the trance state.

They chase out evil spirits that are haunting you.

The modern Western version of it now that has been then sort of re-exported back to some of these places for tourists is you take the drugs.

Right.

Because it is that classic thing about we are now incredibly individualistic.

I want to go on my mushroom journey.

I don't want to sit and watch some guy in a feather headdress go on a mushroom journey while I

be careful which mushrooms you take.

Yes.

LSCF, the very high-profile poisoning case with the Beef Wellington.

So I wonder who our shamans are.

Shamans?

Shamai?

Shamans.

Shamapodes.

I don't want to mention him, but I will mention people like Andrew Tate.

Are they kind of putting themselves out as shamans in that they claim to speak a kind of truth that other people are stopping them from speaking?

I think there is a lot of that.

When you look at those, like I made a series called The New Gurus for Radio 4, which looked at some of this stuff.

There are people who are essentially selling self-help, but to make that more potent, they make themselves seem weird, which is the xenizing process, right?

So it's like if you're Andrew Tate, you talk all the time about how you own all of these cars and you have 400 women on tap.

You can't just be a bloke from down the road.

No.

Otherwise, no one would buy your snake oil pills.

You know, it's what faith healers have known for centuries.

And then people want to be a member of that club, I suppose.

Yes, yeah.

And just going back to what you were saying about demystifying the mystic and then the need to replace.

I'm just watching what's happening with the new pope because the previous pope Francis did a lot to be ordinary.

Yeah.

And the new pope is starting to kind of wear the more ornamental cassocks and

paraphernalia, go to the papal apartments, which Francis didn't live in, not because he's mad on nice things, but is trying to redress that, give an air of mystique again to that role.

But that's what the queen did, didn't she?

She wore block colours and had a handbag in the same colour, so you could always see her in a crowd.

I would not comment on everyday news as if she was separate from that.

I mean, I'm sure she did.

privately, but yeah.

Yeah, well, not to go back to the Reformation, but this was a kind of big schism in Protestantism versus Catholicism, right?

Did people want the Virgin Mary and the icons and the beautiful chants and whatever it might be?

Or did they want a kind of plain encounter with God on their own terms?

And it turned out that lots of people still wanted what we even found in my family referred to as the smells and bells.

The smells and bells.

Yes.

But yeah, so I found this book completely fascinating because I think there is a real yearning.

I'm fascinated by a number of people who are interested in things like tarot and stuff like that.

There are obviously these deep desires within us for other people to tell us insights.

And what are the things about those other people and the way that they speak that make us more likely to listen to them totally applies to politics just as much as it does to your shamans.

Yeah.

Although people like Farage are both different and yet ordinary.

They play up the ordinariness in terms of you can imagine having a beer with him, but there's a difference in he's outside.

But he's okay with being a big character, isn't he?

I think when he's on, like the idea is you go and see him and he would give you the performance of Farage and you would never be disappointed by that, that he's on in.

The full Farage experience, yes.

Well, thank you very much for that recommendation.

That was Shamanism: The Timeless Religion by the anthropologist Manvir Singh.

Available whenever books are.

We'll be back next week with my recommendation, a fantastic documentary called The Contestant.

Until then, be sure to subscribe to us on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.