Citing historic accounts recorded in the twelfth-century shamanic Chinese epic Wubuxiben Mama and the thirteenth-century Manchurian legend The Tale of the Nishan Shamaness, Tedlock argues that women shamans have long held high-ranking positions in North Asia.  Indeed, she points out that some of the oldest Neolithic graves excavated in Siberia have yielded skeletons of women shamans, who were buried with carved mammoth-bone figurines noticeably similar to the bird-headed figures depicted in nearby rock paintings and on drums used by Siberian shamans today.  As further evidence of the continuity of female shamans in Siberia, Tedlock notes that many contemporary Mongolian shamans—both males and females—trace their lineage back through their mothers’ clans for nine or more generations.  She reports that, while conducting field research in Mongolia, she observed a shamanic seance performed by a contemporary Siberian shaman woman, Bayar Odun, who is a tenth-generation shaman.  Significantly, Bayar hung a special bag—described as a “sacred childbirth bag”—on her wall for use during her healing rituals, highlighting her work as a midwife, and the bag reportedly contained the “deified souls of deceased shamans in Bayar’s lineage, who served as her protective spirits.”

Documenting available but often neglected evidence that women have been active in hunting since Paleolithic times, Tedlock dismisses what she calls “the myth of man the hunter-shaman.”  Based on images recorded in Paleolithic rock art, she argues that women clearly engaged in both hunting and shamanic ritual activities, and she specifically challenges the prevailing anthropological assumption that the origins of shamanisms were rooted in men’s hunting and meat-sharing customs.  She points out that a feminine figure engraved on the Pech-Merle cave appears to be shape-shifting into a bird, and that the famous Paleolithic figurine known as the Venus of Lespugue is decorated with “long dangling string ropes resembling those still worn today by many shamans in Siberia and Mongolia.”

Tedlock also challenges the denigratory theory proposed by some male archaeologists that Paleolithic female figurines—such as the Venus of Willendorf and the Venus of Lespugue—were “fertility symbols, erotic amulets, or sexual playthings” made and used by men.   Based on the fact that many of the Paleolithic female figurines are anatomically correct—“when considered from the perspective of a woman looking down upon her own naked body” —Tedlock proposes that it is more likely that they “might have belonged to women shamans whose specialized skills included midwifery.”  As she later explains, the habitual failure of many anthropologists to recognize the importance of women in shamanic vocations can be explained partly by the reality that “women shamans are almost always midwives,” and “midwifery has rarely been acknowledged as a shaman’s art.”  This misguided bias has effectively obscured a major portion of women’s shamanic work from the anthropological record. 

Is the omission of women shamans from the anthropological literature of the last forty years merely an accidental failure on the part of well-meaning male scholars and researchers who simply didn’t notice them?  No, not according to Tedlock.  Relying upon her experiential understanding as an initiated Mayan shaman and her scholarly training as a Western anthropologist-ethnographer, she offers piercing critiques of several biased male scholars, including religious historian Mircea Eliade, who “went out of his way to deny shamanic status to women,” even when his sources clearly named women as shamans, and ethnographer Norman Whitten, who translated the same Quichua word (yachaj) as “powerful shaman” when referring to males but as “master potter” when referring to females of the same status (not that being a potter should be considered less important). 

The widespread denial and trivialization of women in shamanism can be blamed in part on the erroneous Western stereotypical assumption that the gathering activities of women were less important than the hunting activities of men, and that, by extension, women couldn’t be powerful shamans.  In contrast, Tedlock asserts that the invention of pots and other containers was ultimately more crucial to the survival of Neolithic peoples than was the acquisition of hunting skills.  She proposes that “the technology that women in these societies developed to assist in their gathering activities—digging sticks, hand axes, grinding stones, shell knives, string bags, carrying baskets, and cooking pots—gave rise to science, medicine, and language.”  While championing the importance of women’s gathering activities, Tedlock also documents evidence indicating the widespread existence of skilled women hunters, past and present—a subject often ignored by male theorists.

Inspired by the example of her own grandmother, an Ojibwe midé initiate who first taught her about herbal medicines, Tedlock suggests that it is not by chance that women shamans in many cultures have been intimately associated with bears and plant medicines.  Tedlock notes that bears “give birth unaided during hibernation and use herbs to heal themselves” and that legends in various cultures relate how bears have revealed the usefulness of many medicinal plants. 

Significantly, women have played extremely prominent roles in shamanic cultures utilizing psychoactive plant medicines.  In Mesoamerica, stone figures of women and mushrooms, as well as Mixtec painted manuscripts, indicate that women have been connected to the ritual use of psilocybin mushrooms, a fact confirmed by the late Mazatec shamaness María Sabina and others.  Likewise, the sacred origin legend of the Native American peyote religion indicates that it was a woman who first discovered the healing power of the peyote plant and brought it back to her people.  In South America, prehistoric Andean ceramic sculptures show that women have been using the psychoactive San Pedro cactus ceremonially for more than a thousand years, while more recent anthropological reports indicate that “women shamans and herbalists today continue to gather and use the cactus for healing and sell it in open-air marketplaces.”

In The Woman in the Shaman’s Body, Tedlock goes far beyond arguing that women and men have held coequal roles in indigenous shamanisms; she devotes the second half of her book to documenting a vital concept that has been consistently ignored or downplayed by male anthropologists—the idea “that women’s bodies and minds are particularly suited to tap into the power of the transcendental.”  She proposes that “female hormones play a central role in women’s shamanic abilities” and that “within the dark fluids of menstrual and birthing blood resides the vital essence of the most feminine form of spiritual energy.”  She also suggests that women experience their strongest healing and oracular powers just before and during menstruation.   “Mood swings and heightened sensitivity at this time of the month—which in the West have been labeled premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and treated as an illness—are actually manifestations of an altered state of consciousness made possible by female biology.” 

As Tedlock ably shows, female shamanism is everywhere associated directly with menstruation, birthing, and sexuality.  Citing the initiation accounts of several generations of Yurok women healers—including Lucy Thompson, Fanny Flounder, and Tela Star Hawk Lake—Tedlock relates how Yurok accounts of shamanic “pains,” or powers, frequently speak of “blood-filled icicles, pieces of raw venison, bits of bloody salmon liver, and amulets enveloped in dripping blood—[and] all symbolically link these women’s shamanic powers to menstrual fluids.”  She also relates how, in the creation stories of some Native American cultures, it is said that Coyote—an ultramasculine shadow figure—created the first menses in order to punish a beautiful maiden for refusal of a sexual favor, but that women elders used their powers to turn “his menstrual taboos into puberty rituals and his hunting curse into a menstrual blessing.”  She mentions that curanderas in the Andes state that “the monthly flow of blood purifies and strengthens them, making them especially effective in curing reproductive problems such as sterility and infertility, as well as removing other misfortunes, including trouble with lovers.”   

Although midwifery has rarely been acknowledged as a central shamanic art, Tedlock examines various accounts of women shamans being taught about midwifing and healing in their initiatory dreams and visions, often by ancestral women shamans.  She considers it significant that Ix Chel, the Mayan goddess of childbirth and the midwife of creation, is also “the deity of the waning moon, water, weaving, sexual relations, and healing.”  Tedlock further suggests that female shamanisms in many cultures are often focused explicitly “on the capacity for multiple sexual orgasms, trembling, the ability to create new life, and the bliss of nurturing an infant.”  Examining numerous traditional parallels between the spinning and weaving of cloth and the knotting of umbilical cords in childbirth, Tedlock explains why women are viewed as weavers of the cosmos, and she describes how, in many parts of the world, “women’s rituals surrounding the weaving of cloth often evoke those performed during childbirth.” 

While acknowledging that patriarchal authorities—ranging from Western religious systems to Soviet materialist governments—have actively tried to repress traditional female shamanisms, Tedlock ends her book on a hopeful note.  She sees promise in the fact that women today are taking increasingly active roles in the revitalization and reconstruction of shamanic traditions in many parts of the world.   She proposes that it is time for all of us who study or practice healing and shamanism to “look with new insight at the archaeological and historical record, at groundbreaking physiological and psychological research, and at the practices of living shamans.”  She suggests that, if we do, we may be better able “to reclaim the areas of wisdom that were, until the spread of patriarchal world religions and the establishment of Western biomedicine, strongly feminine.”  Clearly, midwifery, women’s “blood magic,” and other feminine shamanisms deserve to come out of the closet and be recognized for the powerful healing forces they are, and Tedlock’s contribution goes a long way toward rectifying the last century of silence on these subjects. 

Vicki Noble is an independent scholar, healer, and writer who teaches female shamanism at New College.  She is author of numerous books, including Shakti Woman:  Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World and The Double Goddess, and she is co-creator of the Motherpeace cards.