20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

Shamanism in North Asia as a religious phenomenon.A brief note on Mircea Eliade’s morphologyDaniela DumbravaInstitut Oriental Pontifical – RomeLe chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase (1951) bythe Romanian Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) – one of the most importantexponents of History of Religions in the twentieth century – represents thefirst attempt to represent shamanism in Central and Northern Asia, almostas a religious phenomena from a historical-comparative point of view andin the general framework of the history of religions. This premise postulatesthat shamanism is a distinct religious phenomena among other universalreligions. The incipient phase of Eliade’s work on Chamanisme (1951)was considered by historiography 1 uncertain and complex. The followingquote from Ioan Petru Culianu shows that Eliade's shamanisticstudies were structured by and continued in the same archaic universewhich remains the core conception of Techniques du Yoga (1948): “…vanotato che gli studi sullo sciamanismo continuano e sviluppano l’interessedi Eliade per lo Yoga. In effetti, nello sciamanesimo si trovano le strutture,più evidenti, più facilmente rilevabili, di analoghe premesse esistenzialie del medesimo universo immaginario arcaico che troviamo alla base ditecniche yoga”. 2Considering the etymology of shaman, we have almost threelinguistic families from which this word derives, all of them culturallysimilar and geographically contiguous: Mongol-Buriat, Turkish-Tatarand Northern or Central-Asiatic populations from Ugro-Finnic stock.Shaman (or sorcerer) in Mongol is bügä or böge and in Buriat buge or bö;1I.P. Culianu 1978; E. Ciurtin 1999; J.Z. Smith 2000; G. Casadio 2010.2I.P. Culianu 1978: 77.