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Concept
Soul flight
Summary
Originally, soul flight is a technique of ecstasy used by shamans with the purpose of entering into a state of trance. During the ecstatic trance it is believed that the shaman's soul has left the body and corporeal world, not unlike an out-of-body experience, which allows him or her to enter into a spiritual world and interact with its beings. As if going into another realm, shamans either descend into an underworld (cf. katabasis or nekyia) or ascend unto an upper world (cf. anabasis) and they are in sense flying through these other places.
By entering into the trance-like state, shamans profess to provide services for their tribesmen and one of the techniques they apply for this purpose is soul flight. They alter their consciousness to connect with the spirit world, which is considered to be the source of their knowledge and power. Among the many tasks that practitioners believe could be accomplished through soul flight are: healing, divination, protection, clairvoyance, dream interpretation, mediation between the divine and the humane, communicating with spirits of the dead (séance), and escorting deceased souls to the afterlife (psychopomp).
Soul flight, also known as shamanic journeying or magical flight, has been exercised from paleolithic times to the present day. As time went by, this shamanic practice evolved into a way for the individual to transcend themselves.
In 1951, Mircea Eliade's historical study of different manifestations of shamanism across the globe, titled Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, was published in France. He pointed out that shamanism wasn't just practiced in Siberia and Eurasia, but could be found in cultures all across the world. According to Eliade, the core principle of shamanism is the application of techniques of ecstasy which enable people to interact with the spiritual world on behalf of the community.
There are three ways of becoming a shaman: by spontaneous vocation (i.e. the "call" of "election), by hereditary transmission, or by personal quest.
Official source
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