DeConick A.D

41
THE MATRIX OF ANCIENT SPIRITUALITY
suggest that he was a shaman from Mongolia who journeyed around
Greece healing people and chasing away epidemics. His nickname was
Aethrobates (Airwalker).
As an ambassador of the Mongols, Abaris followed an ancient custom,
leaving his arrow in someone else’s care as a gesture of mutual trust
and deputation. Legend says that he left his arrow with Pythagoras, and
deputized him. Pythagoras and others, such as Aristeas, Empedocles, Parmenides,
and Epimenides, developed careers as shamanic figures within
their local communities. They were considered wise men who regularly
journeyed to the otherworld, where they met deceased ancestors and gods
to learn the mysteries of life and death. These stories suggest that some
kind of blending of Eurasian shamanic practices and traditional ecstatic
Greek religious practices took place (Ruck 2004, 478b–484d; cf. Burkett
1972, 162–165).
Shamans who lived north and east of the Mediterranean in the regions
of Western and Central Asia were traditional religious specialists known
for their ability to access the spirit world during induced moments of ecstasy.
The shaman’s soul was practiced at flight through the underworld
and the multilayered heavens as it sought from the spirits knowledge of
therapeutic remedies for individuals within the community. The centrality
of ecstasy and knowledge to the shaman’s profession is discernible in the
Tungus word for shaman, which some have argued means both “knower”
and “raver” (Edson 2009). Because of their ability to cross the threshold
between our world and the otherworld, some shamans were believed to
be psychopomps, or guides, escorting newly deceased souls to their final
resting place in the afterlife. The shaman gained his status as an ecstatic
healer through complicated initiatory ceremonies that allowed the shaman
to commune with the spirits, even to shape-shift into their animal
forms (Winkelman 1992, 2011).
It was not long before people across the Mediterranean had developed
their own plans for invading, before death, the realm where humans do
not belong. Religious rituals, often elaborate, were set in place. These
premortem rituals were meant to break down the human body and reconstitute
the person in a form viable in the otherworld. They were meant to
traumatize and raze the body so that a different, suitable body could be
formed as a replacement and the initiate could be reborn a transfigured
creature.