Schizophrenia and Shamanism

From “Schizophrenia — the Inward Journey” by Joseph Campbell

Photo by Дмитрий Хрусталев-Григорьев on Unsplash

For all the mystical woo that surrounds the word, at its base a shaman is a person who in adolescence undergoes a crisis.

And regardless of its root, the crisis causes a schism, a break — it disrupts something axiomatic in the person’s psyche. Everything, or else something, on which so much unknowingly relied has been challenged…