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Mircea Eliade – Shamanism Archaic techniques of ecstasy

From ‘the Divine Election in Primitive Religion’ – the autobiography of a Goldi shaman

Once I was asleep on my sickbed, when a spirit approached me.  it was a very beautiful woman.  Her figure was very slight, she was no more than half an arshin (71 cms) tall.  Her face and attire were quite as those of one of our Goldi women.  Her hair fell down her shoulders in short black tresses.  Other shamans say they have had the vision of a woman with one half of her face black and the other half red.  She said,

‘I am the ayami of your ancestors, the shamans.  I taught them shamaning.  Now I am going to teach you.  The old shamans have died off and there is no one to heal people.  You are to become a shaman’.

Next she said

‘I love you, I have no husband now, you will be my husband and I shall be a wife unto you.  I shall give you assistant spirits.  You are to heal with their aid, and I shall teach and help you myself.  Food will come to us from the people’.

I felt dismayed and tried to resist.  Then she said

‘If you will not obey me, so much the worse for you.  I shall kill you’.

 She has been coming to me ever since, and I sleep with her as my own wife, but we have no children.  She lives quite by herself without any relatives in a hut on a mountain, but she often changes her abode.  Sometimes she comes under the aspect of an old woman, and sometimes under that of a wolf, so she is terrible to look at.

  Sometimes she comes as a winged tiger.  I mount it and she takes me to show me different countries.  I have seen mountains, where only old men and women live and villages where you see nothing but young people, men and women, they look like Goldis and speak Goldish sometimes those people are turned into tigers.